The Celtics were on top of the world. Then, the season ended in heartbreak.
BOSTON – Sunday night, the Celtics were on top of the world, with a 3-1 lead over their rival Philadelphia 76ers, equipped with a healthy roster and on the heels of a spectacular 56-win regular season.
Fresh off a 32-point offensive masterpiece, Payton Pritchard sat at the podium and reflected on the biggest game of his playoff career.
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Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown had just finished their 119th playoff game as teammates.
Jordan Walsh was emerging as one of the best defensive stoppers in the playoffs.
In the locker room after the game, Brown randomly nicknamed Baylor Scheierman “Big Shot Bob” with a smile.
The vibes, as the kids say, were high. And the Celtics appeared to be at the beginning of what seemed like an inevitably long playoff journey.
Instead they never won a match again. Six days later, the season is over.
In the Celtics’ locker room at TD Garden, Brown looks straight ahead. The players are silent. Tatum is in civilian clothes. Derrick White is fighting tears.
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How did everything go up in flames in the blink of an eye?
The general, non-technical answer is: it’s just sport. The unpredictability of basketball is what makes it great. It’s what keeps us watching. It’s also what makes heartbreak so sudden, so painful.
The same Orlando Magic team that lost to the Celtics bench went out and took a 3-1 lead over the Detroit Pistons a few weeks later.
And, just a few days later, the same Magic team scored a whopping 19 points in the entire second half of their Game 6. How can you make sense of it?
The Celtics were, and are, aware of the ridiculous unpredictability of the sport.
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After taking a 1-0 series lead in Philly, Joe Mazzulla’s media availability was filled with questions about the good work he’s done this season, about his upcoming Coach of the Year award.
He, as he has all year, deflected the praise.
“All of that could change in 24 hours when we have different conversations,” Mazzulla said. “So it’s just part of the perspective of being grounded in something, regardless of your surroundings in a 24-hour cycle.”
Unfortunately for him, those words have aged well: the Celtics’ season, a season as special as it was unexpected, is over.
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The bleeding began Tuesday night, when the Celtics were crushed in the second half of Game 5 and missed 14 straight field goals to lose the game. A 13-point lead in the third quarter turned into a blowout defeat.
In Game 6, they were overwhelmed in front of a raucous 76ers crowd that brought back “We Got Boston” chants.
And by Game 7, all the mileage had started to catch up to Tatum. After missing the final 15 minutes of Game 6, he was a late addition to the injury report Saturday with left knee discomfort.
Two hours before tip-off, he was barred.
“He came in today with knee discomfort,” Mazzulla said. “We made the decision for him.”
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That meant the Celtics had to show up to Saturday’s game looking completely different.
Making sense of the Game 7
Mazzulla decided to bench two starters – Neemias Queta and Sam Hauser – in favor of Ron Harper Jr. and Luka Garza. Neither ended up playing significant minutes — Harper Jr. played 4 minutes and Garza played 9 — but that stunning decision set the tone for what ultimately became a wild Game 7.
Pritchard said he wasn’t surprised by the new look of the starting five. The Celtics, after all,
The Celtics trailed by as many as 15 in the first quarter and as many as 18 in the fourth, but each time they managed to get back into the game, eventually cutting the deficit to one with two minutes to spare.
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But, just like they did in Game 5, they cooled down. In the final 5 minutes of the game, they missed 10 consecutive field goals, including an open 3-pointer by Pritchard and several halfbacks by Jaylen Brown.
Game 7, however, was in many ways different from the collapse of Game 5. The Celtics went 10 guys deep, relying on Hugo Gonzalez’s 13 first-half minutes. For the first time since Game 1, they recorded fewer turnovers than their opponents. Without a doubt they were the hardest playing team. Neemias Queta, who struggled in the first six games of the series, put together a masterful performance, tallying 17 points on 7-8 shooting.
Perhaps in turn the TD Garden crowd was the loudest all year.
Brown wished the Celtics had played at that frenetic pace throughout the series leading up to Game 7.
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“Tonight, I wish we played that style and trusted that style more even during the playoffs,” he said. “Even through wins and losses. Obviously, it’s not always the easiest decision, but I wish this style for our team was how we empowered the rest of our group, and you saw tonight how everyone came out and played their best. I wish we trusted it more.”
Hindsight is 20-20, but dozens of fans at TD Garden echoed that sentiment.
“I’m just happy to watch This team,” one fan told me at halftime, noting how much he appreciated the fact that the Stay Ready players had a chance.
“I’m so grateful to be with this group,” Brown said. “This group is great. I had a fun year. This is probably one of my funnest years playing basketball. It wasn’t always perfect. It wasn’t always analytically or aesthetically pleasing. But we won a lot of basketball games and people could see the grit and the fight that we played with every single night. Tonight was an example of that. We left everything out there, we played against a rookie, we played everything and we fought until the end. Just a couple of short plays.”
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Payton Pritchard’s perspective was about the big picture, about how the 2025-2026 season could be used as a building block for the future, just as the pre-2024 seasons culminated in a championship.
“Just because you don’t win a championship one year, doesn’t mean it’s not built for the next championship,” Pritchard said. “So when we won Banner 18, four years before, we lost four in a row: lost to Miami, lost in the finals. So those might have been disappointing years, but maybe those led to the championship. So, that’s how I look at it.”
It’s a beautiful mentality. However, it’s hard to immediately make sense of the fact that a season that had so many beautiful highs ended in sudden devastation.
As White walked off the TD Garden hardwood with a towel over his head, it was hard to believe that less than a week ago, the Celtics were returning to Boston with a 3-1 lead, seemingly on top of the world, with an entire playoff run ahead of them, a healthy Jayson Tatum and title aspirations.
This is the cruelest part of sport.