Rotation motion. Layup. Game. Hellhouse. “Honestly, I think we all thought Smart would shoot it,” Tatum said. “Well, last minute shot, just drop the glass. If it doesn’t come in, try to play. But when he got that dribble, we just had eye contact. And he made a great pass. I just had to do a lay-up.” The winner of the game at TD Garden gave Tatum 31 points in a 9-18 shot, Smart his sixth assist and the Celtics won 115-114 in Game 1. He also gave Boston a huge sigh of relief. “These are the best games,” Tatum said. “The games that are the most rewarding, the most fun, just as a competitor. We’ve reached 15 and we’re five and … all you have to do is try to figure it out.” Brooklyn started the fourth quarter with a drop of 11 points. He had made 14 rounds, and they had hit him on the window. The Nets took the lead with a 15-2 streak, led mainly by Irving, who scored 18 of the game’s 39 points in the final frame. Irving damaged 12-before-20 shots, with six assists, four steals and five rebounds. Kevin Durand finished with 23 points in 9-24 shots, with four rebounds, three assists and six rebounds, a characteristically ineffective performance. Nicholas Claxton and Goran Dragic combined for 27 points and 13 rebounds from the Brooklyn bench and Claxton blocked three shots. The Celtics had a 56-32 advantage in points in color. Smart finished with 20 points in an 8-to-17 shot, plus seven rebounds and two steals in the win. Select the checkbox to confirm that you want to sign up.

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Here are three elements from the Boston thriller:

1. The last stop

The last game of the match was the most memorable, but the last 46 seconds had to be executed perfectly for the Celtics to escape with a victory. In a time-out after Irving’s three-pointer, Boston coach Ime Udoka designed a set-up game that required Horford to control Tatum well outside the 3-point line. The Nets had Tatum at the top, which meant that Durand and Claxton, their best crown defenders, were nowhere near the basket, allowing Brown to go head-to-head without worrying about auxiliary defense. He got a quick 2, and then the Celtics needed a stop. Boston took a risk by sending a double team to Irving with 10 seconds on the clock, and instead of getting off the ball, Irving tried to dribble away. He finally passed Durant four seconds away, leading to a deep, desperate 3-point effort over Tatum’s outstretched arm. “At both ends, we got what we wanted,” Udoka said. Durand is one of the few players on the planet who can make this shot, but the fact that he had to do it meant that Boston had done its job. Horford grabbed the rebound and the Celtics left, in a transitional phase, with a built-in advantage of size and athleticism. He did not need to ask for a timeout and allow Brooklyn to put his best defensive line on the floor. “We talk about it all the time,” Udoka said. “If I do not like what I see, I can still request a timeout and plan something with a few seconds left.” In these crucial possessions, all the best features of the Celtics were displayed. They put in a dozen without weak links defensively – Smart, White, Brown, Tatum and Horford – and they all had to communicate, improvise, stay ready and be selfless. Horford said he was proud of the team’s composure and Smart described the result as “fulfilled” because they had shown resilience. “Especially because of the way we started this year,” Smart said. “These types of games, we would have lost. We probably would have collapsed. And for a moment it seemed to be the direction it was going.” Smart said Boston “had a lot of games to learn about such incidents, so we just wanted to make sure we didn’t go out like that. And everyone did their job.”

2. The big game of Big Al

Boston is asking a lot of Horford. The 35-year-old played 41 minutes and spent significant time as a roaming defense assistant, as Robert Williams III did before his injury. Horford also spent some time defending superstars on the perimeter and, unlike the last time these teams met, when he switched to Durand or Irving, he did not have Williams behind him, who served as a security blanket. Horford finished with 20 points in 8-to-13 shots and 15 rebounds, six of which were in the attacking glass. As a team, the Celtics scored a staggering 41.7 percent of their failures, making Brooklyn pay for playing two – and sometimes three – small guards at a time and putting Seth Curry in Daniel Theis. Some of Horford’s comments: He also lost a boot in a quick break in the fourth quarter… Or he redeemed himself in the end. Horford is the guy who doubled Irving in the final attack of the Nets and is the guy who grabbed the defensive rebound that led to the winner of the Tatum match.

3. Irving, out of his mind

Irving went crazy and that was almost enough. His outburst at the end of the game included four 3-pointers, three of them out of dribbling, all difficult, the last against Smart, a finalist for the Defensive Player of the Year.
Tatum is the same type of All-Defense and refers to the 6-foot-8 with 6-11 wingspan. Three times in the fourth quarter, Irving went right over him and picked up a bucket:
“He obviously made some incredible shots,” said Nets coach Steve Nas. “We expect that from him. But in this environment and atmosphere, we needed him to shoot. He was great. [in terms of] shot tonight “. The 2nd race is on Wednesday in Boston.