BOSTON — Boston Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla couldn’t have known the chaos headed the Celtics’ way Friday night but inadvertently set the stage for the madness about an hour and a half before tipoff. No matter who the Celtics put on the court, Mazzulla said, winning would be their priority.
“We have an opportunity to win tonight,” Mazzulla said. “That’s the most important thing. We talked about that at shootaround today, so nothing else matters except taking advantage of every opportunity to win. You should always want to win in everything you do, any time going through the process of winning.”
Boston’s 101-100 win over the Sacramento Kings would end with a Xavier Tillman go-ahead basket and a desperate Boston stop, all while the team’s starters watched from the bench. With the top seed in the Eastern Conference, the best record in the NBA and home-court advantage throughout the playoffs already wrapped up, the Celtics rested some of their key players entirely and gave others limited minutes. Despite the strategy, intended to leave the team as fresh as possible for the playoffs, Mazzulla didn’t want Boston’s players on the court to take it easy. The remaining games will not matter in the standings, but they will matter to Mazzulla.
That the Celtics prevailed in such a dramatic fashion, with Tillman hitting his first game-winning bucket since his junior season of college, only seemed to invigorate the coach further.
our guy got it done 👏🏾 pic.twitter.com/23BJY5t5Oa
— Boston Celtics (@celtics) April 6, 2024
“This is fun,” Mazzulla said afterward. “This is awesome. Couldn’t simulate a better environment of stress, pressure, chaos. It’s a perfect environment to execute. That’s why when those guys are in, you hold them to the same standard you hold everybody else to. I thought they did a great job just making plays.”
After the Celtics’ bench gave up all of a 19-point fourth-quarter lead, Tillman capitalized on a hectic sequence to push his team back ahead on a floater with 8.4 seconds left. The jumbled mess started with Sam Hauser driving to the hoop on the right side of the floor. The Celtics wanted a foul on his shot attempt, which was blocked, but the referees held off on the whistle. That sent Hauser, near the end of a hideous 1-for-18 shooting performance, scrambling to save possession with his team trailing by a single point. Keegan Murray secured the ball first, but Hauser poked it away.
“You couldn’t tell by his effort defensively that he wasn’t shooting the ball well on offense,” Mazzulla said. “He probably got pissed at himself that he missed, but that’s a huge component, is to be able to not be affected by it to where you can’t execute other parts of your job. So, I think that was really fun to see that in him.”
The ball made its way to Tillman, one of the least likely Celtics players to hit a game-winning shot. He entered Friday with a 9.6 usage rate since joining Boston at the trade deadline, the lowest mark of anyone who has played for the team this season. Over limited playing time, he has scored just 8.8 points per 36 minutes with the Celtics; that paltry number highlights his minimal offensive role. But when good fortune set him up with an opportunity to rescue Boston on Friday, he picked up the loose ball, dribbled past Murray’s closeout and drained a floater over a Harrison Barnes shot contest.
“I knew it was good as soon as it left my hand,” Tillman said.
tough 😤 pic.twitter.com/3tG41SWZM8
— Boston Celtics (@celtics) April 6, 2024
Mazzulla could be seen signaling for a timeout before Tillman’s shot, but the referees missed it. That was fortunate for the Celtics, as Tillman went on to drill a 13-footer.
“It was kind of chaotic at the end,” Kristaps Porziņģis said. “I don’t remember exactly, but the ball bounced around, he got it … a little floater, cash, clean and then got a stop at the end. So beautiful. Came out with a win.”
After Tillman’s bucket, the Celtics needed one more stop. Mazzulla was surprised to see the Kings use a timeout when they could have given the speedy De’Aaron Fox the ball against a retreating Boston defense.
“I didn’t think they were going to call a timeout,” Mazzulla said. “Not that you could tell — I thought Fox had the ball on the run with the ability to go score a layup, so I was screaming at our team to try to get into our late-game defense, full-court defense, because I thought Fox was wide open, and we were in the same situation defensively that they were in when they scored (earlier in the final minute). And so I was fully anticipating them just getting the ball and going down and running, and so I thought that would have been the worst-case scenario. So then when they called it, we were just able to execute, figure out what we wanted to do defensively.”
The Celtics survived three go-ahead Kings shot attempts in the final seconds. After Fox missed a pull-up jumper, Murray and Colby Jones missed consecutive putback attempts.
The Boston lineup at the end of the game — Hauser, Tillman, Payton Pritchard, Oshae Brissett and Svi Mykhailiuk — would not usually play together in crunchtime, but with his team having clinched already, Mazzulla went away from his usual rotation. Far away from it. Jaylen Brown and Derrick White sat out the win with minor injuries. Porziņģis, Jrue Holiday and Al Horford played only during the first three quarters. Jayson Tatum checked out for good with 9:24 left in a 90-76 game. Rookie Jordan Walsh, who had appeared in only six games, subbed in at that time with the game still in the balance. The Celtics went with nothing but bench players from that point. It set up a strange dynamic against the Kings, who were fighting for playoff positioning. They entered Friday in eighth place, in a cluster of teams between sixth and 10th in the Western Conference. They badly needed the win.
The Celtics didn’t need it at all. Still, Mazzulla wanted it.
“He’s the ultimate competitor,” Tillman said. “For us, it makes it easy for us to know that there’s only one job when we go out there, and that’s to win. However you can impact the game, that’s your job. So it makes it easy when you have a coach who, no matter what, just wants to win. You’ve just got to find your role within that in how you can help your team.”
The Celtics still nearly fell to an urgent Kings team. Before Tillman’s game-winning basket, a Brissett free throw counted as Boston’s only point in the final six minutes of the game. Fox’s banked 3-pointer with 25.9 seconds left completed a 22-1 run for his team and gave Sacramento its first lead of the second half.
As wobbly as things got for the Celtics, they were able to regroup.
“It was pretty cool,” Tillman said, “especially for us to really battle with them coming back and have the mental fortitude to not kind of give into it and to stay solid mentally and everybody keeps their composure. Shout out to Payton; he was holding us down with that and talking to us and keeping us cool, calm and relaxed.”
As unusual as the closing lineup was, Mazzulla said he trusted it.
“All those guys have played a significant role in winning games the entire season,” Mazzulla said. “When guys have been injured, they stepped up. Everybody on that floor has started a game for us this year, I think, or played significant, significant minutes. So it’s just a testament to them. And whoever is on the floor, I always feel like we have a chance to win.”
Even with nothing to play for, the Celtics found a way. Mazzulla called the tense ending “a perfect environment for practice” for the bench players. Tillman agreed.
“It was great practice as far as what we’re going to go through, as far as having that mental fortitude where you’re up 9 or maybe at the time up 12 to 14, feeling comfortable, and then they’re knocking the lead down,” Tillman said. “Like, can you do what you can to stop the run? So that’s what it’s about, and we were able to get it done.”
(Photo of Xavier Tillman putting up the winning shot: Winslow Townson / Getty Images)
