The Celtics have a knack for staging late-game comebacks, and Monday night in Minnesota was no exception . . . though they couldn't complete it in the end.
Down 10 points with under 1:30 remaining in the game, the C’s clawed their way back into a one-possession game, thanks in part to four missed free throws by the young Wolves in the final 22.8 seconds of the game.
This isn’t new for the Celtics. One of their calling cards is the effort they give regardless of the score. Brad Stevens has plenty of plays ready to go for quick baskets out of timeouts, and the C’s can play some tenacious defense to force turnovers and misses.
“I knew. I was telling guys and we all knew we were going to have a chance,” Jae Crowder told reporters. “I think we were down 10, I looked up there was like 3:55 on the clock, and I felt like we were going to have a chance at the end, it was just up to us to capitalize on it.”
The C’s were actually down 14 points with 3:55 on the clock. But roughly two-and-a-half minutes later, it was an eight-point game on an Isaiah Thomas layup. Another Thomas layup made it a six-point game. A pair of Ricky Rubio free throws put it back to eight before Jae Crowder’s three-pointer out of a timeout.
Andrew Wiggins then went 1-for-2 from the free throw line and Thomas’ reverse layup with 16.3 seconds remaining cut the lead to four points. Rubio would then go to the line . . . and miss both free throws. That’s when the Celtics called their last timeout and drew up a play for Avery Bradley. He drained a three-pointer to bring the Celtics within one point.
Zach LaVine went 1-for-2 from the free throw line, hitting his second shot. With 5.3 seconds left on the clock and no timeouts remaining, Crowder inbounded the ball to Marcus Smart, who then raced down the court and put up a three-pointer with about 2.5 seconds remaining. Clang. It was short - and so was the C’s comeback attempt.
Thomas was double-teamed on the inbounds play, but snuck out of it once Smart received the ball. Smart, though, didn’t look for him. And a wide open Thomas could only watch with his hands up calling for the ball.
Of course it’s easy to look back on the play and criticize Smart for not passing the ball to Thomas, but in the heat of the moment Smart took matters into his own hands.
Nobody on the team was blaming Smart for taking the shot. And certainly nobody was blaming him for the loss. He did a lot of things right earlier in the game to give the C’s a chance, and finished with the second-highest plus-minus, a plus-11.
“We could have drove it to the rack since we were down two and try to win it in overtime. Isaiah was open,” Evan Turner told reporters after the game when he was asked what they could have done differently on the final play. “Smart had a great game the whole game. A centimeter further and you guys would be saying he’s the greatest thing walking. That’s not what got us there, it was a lot of other things and our competitive nature got us back in order to talk about the last play. But it’s a lot of things that occurred prior to that so that last play obviously wasn’t the end all be all.”
The comeback was nice, and does speak to how the group cares about winning. But they’re still going to leave Minnesota with a sour taste in their mouth.
“You can never count us out,” Thomas said. “We’re always going to give it our all and keep fighting, and we did that. We gave ourselves a chance to win but we came up short.”