DALLAS – As soon as the final buzzer of Game 3 sounded Wednesday night, Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum converged on the Dallas Mavericks’ center-court logo and shared a long embrace.
In the seven years of their partnership, this moment marked the closest they’d ever come to reaching their goal of winning a championship, and they wanted to soak in all of the emotions that came with it.
Both were exhausted and prideful in how they held off a late Dallas rally to hang on for a 106-99 win. They were exhilarated to be up 3-0 in the NBA Finals. And they are hopeful that they will finally get the job done after all they’ve been through together.
“Just showing the emotions of the game,” Jayson Tatum later described of that moment. “Two guys that were excited, tired, that after the game, we just – we were not necessarily saying ‘one more’ or anything like that. We were just saying, ‘however long it takes.’ Nobody is relaxed. Nobody is satisfied. Just at that moment, I just told him I was proud of him. And he said the same thing; that we’ve got to keep fighting. We can’t relax.”
“Keep fighting” was the mantra of the night. The Celtics saw a 21-point fourth-quarter lead dwindle to one thanks to a 21-2 rally by Dallas. But Boston never allowed the Mavs to get over the hump, closing out on a 13-7 run.
“You never want to give up a 20-point lead,” said Tatum. “Obviously we wish we would have got some better shots, took care of the ball. But things happen. It’s never going to go how you expect it, and we talk about that all the time. But if you want to be a champion, you have to be resilient in those moments, and we showed that tonight.”
Both Tatum and Brown were resilient in those late-game moments, hitting big shots and coming up with big stops. Brown began Boston’s closing run with a tip-in off an offensive rebound. Then Tatum hammered the nail in the coffin with a driving dunk that sucked the life out of American Airlines Center.
Tatum (31 points, six rebounds, five assists) led the team in scoring while Brown (30 points, eight rebounds, eight assists) led the team in both rebounds and assists.
They became just the second Celtics tandem to score at least 30 points in the same game, joining John Havlicek (40 points) and Bailey Howell (30 points), who accomplished the feat in the 1968 championship-clinching game over the Los Angeles Lakers.
They also became the sixth duo in Finals history to record at least 30 points, five rebounds, and five assists apiece, joining Denver’s Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray (2023 Finals), Golden State’s Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant (twice in the 2017 Finals), Orlando’s Penny Hardaway and Shaquille O’Neal (1995 Finals), Los Angeles’ Elgin Baylor and Jerry West (1968 Finals), and Philadelphia’s Hal Greer and Wali Jones (1967 Finals).
Holding off Dallas’ comeback attempt was the most important Finals moment of Brown and Tatum’s partnership to date. Had the Mavericks come back to win, this series would have had an entirely different feel heading into Game 4.
Instead, the Celtics are just one step from reaching their ultimate goal. And their superstar tandem deserved a chance to stop and embrace the position that they now find themselves in.
“Those are the moments which you have to just live for,” said Brown. “We’ve been in those moments a lot. We just needed to be patient, to be poised.
“We were able to make plays and find a way to win. And we’ve been in those positions, and we’ve lost. It was great to overcome that with my brother, Jayson, and with our team. That was special.”
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