Celtics showed how to handle and answer a run, instead of letting it get away from them

Joe Mazzulla has said over and over again that a priority for his team is diagnosing in real time why the other team is making a run, stopping it, and answering it. 

“There’s natural runs, there’s natural variance within a game, so having an awareness to why the run has been made, having an awareness to how to stop that and how to control the momentum of either side of the ball,” he said, again, after their win over the Oklahoma City Thunder. It might have been the 15th time this season he’s said something similar to this.

But that's always easier said than done, and to be fair, Mazzulla has said some variation of this in different circumstances. Sometimes his team has done it and won and other times they haven't done it and lost. 

Against the Thunder Wednesday night, we saw maybe the best example of what Mazzulla has been talking about, in very distinct segments. 

It started with an 11-4 run that forced the Celtics to call a timeout. In fact, let’s just start there for a second. 

Can we just acknowledge that, in a situation where Boston is treating the game like a playoff clincher, Mazzulla did call the timeout at 11-4, after a blocked Jaylen Brown layup and transition 3-pointer? I don't want that moment to pass without it being noted. 

The Thunder had cut Boston’s halftime lead in half in just over three minutes. They got two turnovers and that blocked shot, all of which got the Thunder running without Boston putting points on the board. This is where some people reached for some Tums, which is understandable. But the Celtics then went into stabilizing mode. 

“It's just an understanding of how teams stay in the game and how teams cut into leads,” Mazzulla said “It's live ball turnovers, it's offensive rebounds, and it's fouling. We didn't do a great job on the fouling, but we did a great job on the offensive rebounding. If you keep that team out of live ball turnovers, it's hard for them to get you crossed match and that's one of the things they're best at.”

The Celtics only committed one turnover after that timeout, which was Brown dribbling the ball off his feet with a minute to go. So they cleaned up one big element of allowing the run. At the same time, they spent nearly four minutes answering every point the Thunder scored. So even though OKC was getting hot and drawing fouls, they stopped cutting into the lead. 

The Payton Pritchard flipped things by getting a steal, and, for the first time in the entire quarter, Boston scored on consecutive possessions. It triggered a 12-4 run and a 13-point lead. Boston had almost recouped all it had lost. 

“I think it was key, Payton coming in, in the third quarter,” Al Horford said. “He came in and I feel like just kind of changed the momentum of the game with his energy, and that was the start of it. We went out there, we made some runs, we made some stops, he went after the ball with his ball pressure.”

The Thunder shaved a couple of points off that lead to end the quarter, but the Celtics got through the worst of it with minimal damage. Oklahoma City threw everything they had at the Celtics, shooting 59% overall, going to the line 15 times and hitting 13, and dropping 36 points overall in the third. And their reward was four measly points. 

If you’re going to throw a haymaker at a heavyweight like Boston, it had better land. Boston’s problem in the past was dropping their guard low enough to let too many of those shots connect. This time, they were able to shrug it off and return fire. 

“I thought it was key for us to come out (to start the fourth quarter) and not play games, and really take it to another level,” Horford said. “We made them call a timeout and then at that point, we were like, we have to take it to another level. So for those next three, four minutes, we were able to win those minutes and I think that’s what separated us. It was the mindset. … we were all locked in and trying to put the team away.”

The locked-in Celtics are a pretty devastating group. When they keep their heads in the game and decide they want to play their best, few teams can withstand what comes next. In this case, it was a 25-7 run to turn a close game into garbage time.

“We want to feel like, in those moments, when we turn it up, we want to feel invincible – like nobody can mess with us,” Kristaps Porzingis said. “And we have that level that we can go to. And we did it today again. And I think that’s something that Joe has done a good job of developing for us and kind of putting that in our minds and in our toolboxes. And then opening it when we need it.”