BLOODY GOOD WIN SENDS C’S ON TO LONDON
Now on to London
NEW YORK — With a boisterous band of Celtics fans providing musical accompaniment and generally disturbing the Nets’ followers with their chants, the Bostonians completed the first North American leg of their 2017-18 tour with an 87-85 victory last night.
Playing without Al Horford (sore left knee), the Celts got 21 points from Kyrie Irving and seven of Jayson Tatum’s 14 in the last quarter — in addition to his six blocks — to secure their sixth straight win. They pack a 33-10 record for their Thursday game in London against Philadelphia.
“Well, it would have been a, excuse my language, a (expletive) plane ride to London if we didn’t get out of here with a win,” said Irving. “I’m telling you that right now. We probably would have had practice (today).
“But for us as a young, developing group to really will ourselves to that win, we’ll always give ourselves a chance to win if we’re playing at a high level on the defensive end.”
The Celts had their own issues with the ball, but they held Brooklyn to 33 percent shooting and forced 18 turnovers while committing just five themselves. Because the hosts made 19-of-22 free throws while the C’s hit just 8-of-15 from the line, though, this one came down to the last split-second.
The Nets had a 83-82 lead on a Spencer Dinwiddie drive with 91 seconds left when the Celts saw the clear and present danger and dug in.
Tatum rocked the rim with the third of his dunks and, after squeezing a miss out of Dinwiddie at the other end, Irving rose for a jumper. He missed, but followed the ball in and ripped it away from the larger DeMarre Carroll.
He then fed Tatum in the left corner for a 3-pointer that made it 87-83 with 45 seconds left, and had Barclays Center sounding like a certain gym on Causeway Street.
“The play warranted it,” said Irving — 1-of-5 in the fourth — of his hustle move. “I wasn’t making too many shots down the stretch, which I’ll probably hit my head over a little bit later, but just keeping the play going, understanding that you can affect the game in other ways.
“Jayson was wide open in the corner, and he’s made that shot a few times this season, so all credit goes to the confidence he had to take that shot and the big plays that he made down the stretch.”
Told that he looked as if he believed Tatum would make it when he made the pass, Irving cracked, “He’s supposed to. He better make it. He’s wide open in the corner. Rookie or not, you better make the shot.”
“He’s not scared of the moment,” Brad Stevens said of Tatum. “Never has been.”
Joe Harris converted a Dinwiddie miss, and Irving couldn’t get a jumper from the lane to go down with 21 seconds left, but the Nets couldn’t get one of four chances to tie to go down.
Dinwiddie missed on his drive, and Irving got a hand on Harris’ follow-up try before Brooklyn called time with 6.2 seconds left. Then Rondae Hollis-Jefferson failed twice inside, with the ball batted around between his attempts, and the Celts rolled off the floor with the “W.”
“It felt like the buzzer was never going to go off,” said Marcus Smart.
“It was like throw-up in football,” said Irving. “That’s what it really was, when you have one person gathering the ball and everybody just trying to tackle that one person. I felt like that’s what we were playing down the stretch. At one point, there were just so many bodies on the floor.”
After shooting just 40.4 percent in beating Minne- sota on Friday, the Celtics did the limbo and lived to tell about it. They shot just 37.8 percent against the Nets in a game that became so physical it seemed part of NFL wild card weekend.
Aron Baynes leveled Hollis-Jefferson with a pick in the third quarter, and Quincy Acy got a technical for throwing a shoulder into Daniel Theis after he’d been fouled by Tatum on a drive.
“It was real physical out there,” said Smart, who generally thrives in such environments. “The game was getting out of hand to a certain extent. The officials let it go. They were letting us play and, especially on a back-to-back, that’s hard.”
The Celts can rest on their flight to London tomorrow.