BOSTON — Jaylen Brown had used his public platform ahead of Sunday afternoon’s game to deliver a clear message to Celtics fans: Get loud. The energy at TD Garden was just about right for the team’s home games during the NBA Eastern Conference Semifinals series against the Philadelphia 76ers, he said.
On Sunday, Brown got what he wanted for Game 7. It was loud early in the morning and loud late in the evening. The audience cheered every dunk and 3-pointer, every defensive stop and every offensive rebound.
When Boston’s Jayson Tatum stood near the center circle late in the fourth quarter in the dying moments of a brilliant performance and the best game of his career, he lured the fans into even more noise. They were more than willing to oblige.
The crowd still cheered as the Celtics left the court with a 112-88 win that decided the best-of-seven series and assured Boston that his championship dream would live on.
Tatum, a first-team All-NBA selection who hadn’t exactly played flawless basketball during the series, was exceptional on Sunday, scoring 51 points — an NBA record for a Game 7. Brown added 25 points to the win. The Celtics led by up to 30 players.
“Then I’m at my best and having fun,” Tatum said, adding that he was trying to express his childhood love for the game. “If you go out and relax and kind of think about the days you were at the YMCA or whatever, that’s when the game opens up.”
A glaring loss will surely result in an uncertain off-season for the third-seeded 76ers, who had their own title hopes. But Philadelphia’s Joel Embiid, who recently received his first NBA Most Valuable Player award, struggled in Game 7 and finished the game with just 15 points while shooting 5 of 18 from the field. Sixers guard James Harden only scored 9 points.
“They’re the best team in the league,” Embiid said of the Celtics. “They are so talented and have a lot of guys who are great at basketball. After losing seven games to them, I thought we played hard for the most part.”
The Celtics, No. 2 in the East, put the game out of reach with a sizzling run in the third quarter that included back-to-back 3-pointers from Brown and Tatum. The fourth quarter was a party masquerading as the closing stages of an otherwise hard-fought playoff series.
“If JT plays like that, we’re going to be extremely hard to beat,” Brown said of Tatum.
The Celtics met the eighth-seeded Miami Heat in the Eastern Conference Finals, which begins Wednesday in Boston. After progressing through the play-in round, the Heat edged out the top-seeded Milwaukee Bucks in the first round and then eliminated the Knicks in six games of their conference semifinals series. Boston defeated the seventh-seeded Atlanta Hawks in six games in the first round.
The Heat have a star in Jimmy Butler, who seems to be increasing his level of play year after year in the postseason – a fearsome two-way player who rarely has a night off.
The Celtics obviously have an explosive star in Tatum, but he struggled against the 76ers. On Sunday he was the best player in the building. He shot 17 of 28 from the field and 6 of 10 from 3-point range, finishing the game with 13 rebounds and five assists.
“We just got through the ups and downs of the series,” said Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla. “We were never too emotionally high or too emotionally low. We were able to maintain our emotional togetherness.”
Missed chances will haunt the 76ers, who led 3-2 at home on Thursday and had a chance to end the game. In that game, Tatum missed 13 of his first 14 field goal attempts. But the Celtics were solid defensively and Tatum got going late and extended the streak with a 95-86 win.
“To be honest, they had us in a bind,” Tatum said, adding, “And I was relieved because our season could have been over.”
Game 7 is inherently important, but so much seemed to depend on it for both teams. For the Celtics, a loss would have been a significant step backwards from all they achieved last season when they advanced to the NBA Finals before losing to the Golden State Warriors in six games.
But progress is seldom linear, and the Celtics have faced an unusually rocky road this season: an unexpected coaching change before the start of training camp, a season-ending injury to Danilo Gallinari before he even played a game, and a defense , who lacked notoriety Pep.
For the 76ers, Sunday’s game was, fair or not, a sort of referendum on the process, the team-building exercise that earned them the 2014 NBA draft as one of its cornerstones. But now the time had come for a deep playoff run.
Aware of the pregame pressure, Sixers coach Doc Rivers knew the importance of his key players working “to the point of exhaustion.”
Embiid spent his last quiet moments in front of the front dribble near the half-court circle. He even threw a few fake pitches before passing the ball to teammate Tyrese Maxey.
The rest of Embiid’s afternoon passed bleakly. Hardens was somehow worse. The 76ers have now made six straight playoff appearances without reaching the conference finals.
“I thought James came to play, I really did,” Rivers said, referring to Harden. “I thought he wanted to watch the game and I thought he played downhill a lot. It was the right decision to keep playing the ball tonight and we didn’t make anything of it.”
The series was fraught with uneven performances. At the top of that list was Harden, who scored 45 points in Game 1 before immediately disappearing, firing a total of 5 from 28 from the field in two losses. He reappeared for Game 4 and scored 42 points but was passive again in Games 5 and 6. So the question was: which version of Harden would appear in Game 7?
He struggled early in the second quarter when he seemed to lose control of the ball on the layup. Caught in mid-air, Harden swung an elbow that caught Brown in the face.
“There’s nothing quite like a shot in the face to wake you up instantly,” Brown said.
Harden was booed for a blatant foul. Brown made both free throws, and then Tatum lobbed to Robert Williams for a dunk. Rivers called the apparent foul a turning point.
“We never played properly after that,” Rivers said.
The Celtics were continuing their run when Brown, who was playing with a cotton swab up his left nostril to stop bleeding after his clash with Harden, fell in front of the opposing bench. As Brown rallied and turned to run upstairs, the 76ers’ Georges Niang reached out from his folding chair to grab Brown’s left leg.
Brown yelled at Niang and both players were hit with technical fouls. At this point, Boston was actually behind. But the fans were loud and the Celtics made sure to keep it that way.