The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Big fourth quarter lifts Celtics to Game 1 win over Warriors
The Boston Celtics and Golden State Warriors arrived at the NBA Finals with the league’s two best defenses — and good reasons to believe they might need some time to get up to full speed. Boston’s core group would inevitably face some nerves during its first time on the championship stage, and rust lingered as a concern for Golden State, which hadn’t played in a full week.
Instead, Thursday’s Game 1 opened with a bang and never slowed down. Both teams started hot from outside in a free-flowing, back-and-forth contest that was the aesthetic opposite of Boston’s grinding Eastern Conference finals against the Miami Heat. If the game was an exchange of haymakers, the Celtics’ 120-108 comeback victory at Chase Center included a devastating final blow — a 40-16 advantage in the fourth quarter that dealt the Warriors their first home loss in 10 games this postseason. Remarkably, Boston’s 24-point margin in the final period tied the record for the most lopsided quarter in Finals history.
“The message at the start of the fourth was that we’ve been here before,” Celtics forward Jayson Tatum said. “We know what it takes to overcome a deficit like that. It wasn’t time to hang your head or be done. It was time to figure it out.”
Golden State’s Stephen Curry set the pace early by making an NBA Finals-record six 3-pointers in the first quarter, but nine different players combined to hit 20 3-pointers in the first half. This was a good old-fashioned shootout: By night’s end, the two teams had combined to hit 40 3-pointers, with Boston shooting a blistering 21 for 41 from beyond the arc.
“You never go in conceding (outside) shots,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said. “You have a scouting report on each player. It felt to me like we didn’t close out very well in the first half, and that let (the Celtics) get going.”
While Boston hadn’t conceded more than 15 3-pointers in a game during this run to the Finals, it didn’t flinch when Golden State made 19. No matter how hard Curry, who finished with a gamehigh 34 points and seven 3-pointers, tried to put away the Celtics, they responded with answers of their own from beyond the arc. Boston’s nine 3-pointers in the final period tied the Finals record for any quarter.
“It was the way we were moving the ball,” Al Horford said. “We were just setting them up and knocking them down.”
In the key momentum-swinging stretch of the fourth, Derrick White and Horford combined to hit 3-pointers on three consecutive possessions to put Boston in front. Horford, who helped keep Boston’s postseason alive with 30 points in a Game 4 win over the Milwaukee Bucks in the second round, was sensational in the first Finals game of his NBA career.
He finished with a team-high 26 points and six 3-pointers, helping overcome a quiet night for Tatum, who finished with 12 points on 3-for-17 shooting but added 13 assists, including four in the decisive fourth quarter.