BOSTON — Kristaps Porziņģis entered the second half on the Celtics’ bench again as the biggest foul trouble concern on either side to start the third quarter. After picking up his third personal, Payton Pritchard replaced him with Boston down 49-47 and failing to hit a three through an 0-for-6 first half. They appeared in danger of returning to Orlando. Then, Paolo Banchero committed an offensive foul, Jaylen Brown lined him up twice in isolation across three possessions and hit him with five fouls. Orlando challenged unsuccessfully.
“Oh it definitely swung the series,” Magic head coach Jamahl Mosley said. “It definitely swung the game. I have no idea what the explanation was. He came into (Banchero’s) path. All I saw was Paolo getting an elbow to the face … and (Brown) gets the foul. That was a game-changer right there.”
In-between, Jayson Tatum hit the Celtics’ first three, unleashing an 8-for-11 monsoon that ended the Magic. Another Tatum three over Goga Bitadze, who checked in an drew Tatum isolations, along with a pair of free throws put Orlando behind by 10 points at the TV timeout. Jamahl Mosley didn’t put Banchero back into the game, and Boston added 11 points to its lead with threes from Tatum, Sam Hauser and Al Horford, who also bounced in a baseline two at the buzzer. Game over. Series over.
In the aftermath of Banchero’s exit, almost everything that the Magic held down through one of the most impressive defensive feats by any team against the Celtics in the Joe Mazzulla era unleashed. Hauser, who didn’t score until Game 4, broke free for his second two-pointer of the series. Luke Kornet, benched to begin the third quarter in favor of Pritchard in place of Porziņģis, pulled the Magic off Horford in the corner for his three.
“Once we saw (Banchero) get in foul trouble, and then hang his head, we were ready to go,” Brown said. “So we just took advantage of that from there.”
Pritchard, who entered the second half with two points after combining for three points in Games 3-4, broke free on the weak side after Bitadze caught Tatum up in the corner and scored. He drained a three into the fourth, missed a two after dropping Anthony Black late in the shot clock, then broke to the wing where he hit another three after Kornet’s offensive rebounds.
“They’re a really good team, very physical,” Pritchard told CLNS Media after the game. “It was a physical challenge. I thought, they’re probably the best team, defensively, we’ve seen at guarding the ball. So it was definitely a good, challenge, very physical.”
Brown, the catalyst after a rough first half, dropped off a pass to Kornet behind the defense for a dunk and hit a transition three. Banchero started the fourth quarter and hit a pair of jump shots, then a free throw — behind by 25 points.
Tatum entered halftime, flexing his wrist, as the only Celtic in double-figures after the worst offensive showing all year by Boston. They mostly limited Banchero, who shot 3-for-10 after talking about the exhaustion of carrying the weight for the Magic’s offense on Tuesday morning at shootaround. Franz Wagner picked up the offensive weight with his rim-runs, while Kentavious Caldwell-Pope hit a pair of Orlando’s four threes in 18 tries. But Orlando could only build a nine-point lead with everything going wrong for the Celtics.
“We had to make plays, that’s just what it came down to,” Brown said. “They were daring me and JT, to beat (them) one-on-one, and JT accepted it and I accepted it, and we just made plays. Just being efficient, getting to our spots … I think it was just a good overall learning experience from this series … much respect to those guys over there.”
Brown started 1-for-4, mostly playing in the paint and grimacing after a miss. A running two-handed dunk provided some hope for a turnaround, but the Celtics turned the ball over nine times to the Magic’s four. The bench proved ineffective again. After Mosley’s call for more balance in the free throw shooting department, Banchero and Wagner drove the Magic there 14 times to the Celtics’ eight. All signs pointed toward a Game 6.
But Tatum thrived even as his teammates stumbled, scoring 35 points with 10 assists after his 37-point masterpiece saved the Celtics from playing a Game 6 in the previous night. His personal 8-0 run to close the first quarter kept Boston within four point. He cut a six-point deficit midway through the second down to one possession finding Derrick White for an and-one, then after fouling Banchero on the break to go behind by five with one minute left in the half, he put his head down and drove for four straight points in 30 seconds.
Tatum finished the series averaging 36 points in three games since ending his wrist, shooting 12.3 free throws per game. The hostilities ended on Tuesday. The Celtics exploded into a 34-point lead in the fourth, and after their empty first half from deep, looked like themselves again, pulling up and splashing 13-of-18 through the finish line.
“It was challenging in many ways, they played really hard, competed and it forced us to play in a different style than we’re used to,” Horford said. “But I thought it was great for us to figure out a different way to win games and be efficient … you guy saw it. We want to shoot 60 threes, we want to get out there, run-and-gun, play fast and we couldn’t do that. So sometimes you have to get it done different ways.”
