Celtics top Knicks in thrilling win: 7 takeaways

The third quarter was no different. Brown played the entire period and followed his 18-point quarter with 15 more as the Celtics built their lead to 18. On the penultimate possession, Brown waved off all screens so he could tie Mitchell Robinson’s long legs into a knot with a crossover. On the final possession, the Knicks finally sent a double team to him, and Brown simply dished a pass to Derrick White, who buried a 3-pointer.

Brown sat down to start the fourth, as he generally does, and the Celtics held on for dear life. When he returned, the Knicks doubled him to get the ball out of his hands, but Brown still made his free throws and helped propel them the rest of the way.

After his massive dunk in the second quarter, Brown walked around the court waving his arms at the TD Garden crowd, calling for more noise. He wanted this one badly, and he delivered perhaps his best performance in a year full of sparkling performances—a 42-point masterpiece on 16-for-24 shooting to go with four rebounds and four assists.

“It’s a great win for us, man,” Brown said afterward. “That was a great win. I’ll take every one we can get. Obviously, the team that knocked you out in the playoffs, it’s even sweeter to come back, but it’s just one game, so we’ve just got to focus on the next one now and that’s most important.”

Hugo González changed the game twice.

González entered the game at the start of the second quarter with the Celtics down by 11, and while the energy might have been about to shift anyway given a predictable regression to the mean on both sides, González popped the clutch and jammed it into gear with a defensive performance that reminded Celtics fans why the sometimes little-used rookie has drawn such rave reviews at times.

González immediately scored a put-back bucket, and he then proceeded to spend the next few minutes infuriating Karl-Anthony Towns with his hyper-physical defense. González baited Towns into trying to play inefficient bully ball, as an emotional Towns tried to impose his will against González rather than playing in the flow of the game, which favored the Knicks in the first quarter.

Towns turned the ball over, missed tough shots, and ultimately committed one of the sillier fouls you will see from a superstar for his third, which sent him to the bench for the rest of the half. González also ripped Jalen Brunson and grabbed four rebounds in the quarter, and while he finished the quarter with just two points, he had an outsized impact on the game’s flow.

In the second half, however, González changed the game the other direction with the worst play of the game from a Celtics perspective.

In the fourth quarter, with the Celtics desperately trying to hold on to a double-digit lead in Brown’s absence, González closed out recklessly on a Mikal Bridges 3-pointer. Bridges—who was by far the Knicks’ best player with eight made 3-pointers and 35 points—made all three of his free throws to cut the lead to nine, and the Knicks got the ball back due to a flagrant foul.

On the ensuing possession, Josh Minott fouled Towns for an and-one. The Knicks were suddenly back in the game, and Celtics fans collectively began experiencing PTSD from their blown 20-point leads in the playoffs. When Mazzulla finally pulled González, the lead had been trimmed to three, and it felt like the 19-year-old played at least two or three possessions too long.

Still, in the aggregate, González—who finished with four points, five rebounds and a steal —had a positively impactful game.

“He’s just been well coached and has played high-level basketball for a long time,” Mazzulla said. “I think that just gives him his defensive instincts, and he pays attention to detail and has an understanding of tendencies.”

Jordan Walsh helped put the game away.

The Knicks weren’t going to die easily.

After White pushed the Celtics’ lead to 18, they opened the fourth with a seemingly instant 9-0 run, and Joe Mazzulla was forced to call a timeout.

Sam Hauser hit a 3-pointer on the next possession, and Anfernee Simons—who had a quietly solid game on both ends—converted a 3-point play to push the lead back up to 15. The Celtics went small, and four Brown-less minutes passed without major incident.

Then González committed his game-changing foul, and the game was on. Bridges’ 3-pointer with 6:29 left trimmed the lead to three, Jalen Brunson answered a Josh Minott 3-pointer with a layup, and the Celtics appeared to be reeling.

But after Minott missed a 3-pointer, Jordan Walsh muscled his way in for a huge put-back tip. After a big defensive stop, Walsh grabbed another offensive rebound when Brown missed a twisting jumper and scored that put back as well. He picked off a pass on the next possession, and while the Celtics didn’t score, he later finished off another layup that pushed the advantage back to five. Six of his eight points came in the fourth quarter, as did three of his four offensive rebounds.
Defensively, Walsh was excellent—he was a not-significant part of the reason Jalen Brunson finished 6-for-21 from the field, and his versatility allowed the Celtics to take a lot of risks from a lineup perspective.

“I’m starting to see Jordan playing like a grown man, and it’s amazing to see,” Brown said. “Just from him coming out of his shell, being aggressive, he’s learning every day. So I’m loving it.”

A good Derrick White game.

With Payton Pritchard struggling, Brown needed one of the other quasi-stars on the team to have a nice performance, and White obliged. He was excellent defensively—another of the reasons behind Brunson’s struggles—and while he was just 4-for-12 from three, his triples were well-timed as the Celtics fended off the Knicks down the stretch.

White also dove on a loose ball with the Celtics leading by four and 12.6 seconds remaining. Joe Mazzulla got a timeout called, and then on the ensuing possession, White sprang free at the rim and gave the Celtics a six-point lead that more or less iced the game.

White finished with 22 points, two rebounds, five assists, a block and a steal.

Sam Hauser pitched in.

Hauser made a pair of 3-pointers, including an important one with Brown on the bench in the fourth, but maybe most notably, he was surprisingly steadfast defensively against Brunson late. Brunson intentionally isolated and targeted the Celtics wing repeatedly, but Hauser held his ground and gave up nothing easy to the Knicks guard, keeping him off-kilter and out of rhythm during a clutch stretch in which Brunson is known for his heroics.

“The best is yet to come”

The Celtics are just 21 games into the season, slightly over a quarter of the way through, and a lot of things will happen. Their schedule doesn’t really ease up over the next two weeks, and they have—knock on wood—had good injury luck so far (with the one very glaring and obvious exception).

Still, on a night when the Celtics beat the team that knocked them out of the playoffs and handed them a dispiriting loss as part of their 0-3 start to the season, perhaps it’s okay to take a step back and look at things from a 10,000-foot view, especially when the vista is so unexpectedly friendly for the Celtics.

They are cruising through one of the most difficult parts of their schedule. They are now just 1.5 games behind the Knicks for fourth place in the East. They are three games over .500, have won eight of their last 11 games and are now 12-6 since their difficult start to the season.

“It’s easy to focus on what you see now, but if you go back to preseason, before the season, we’re in a much different space now,” Brown said. “You can see the difference if you go back and look at some of those early games in the season.

It’s only been 20 games, and there’s been a huge amount of growth from a lot of guys—Neemi[as Queta], Jordan, Josh, even Baylor [Scheierman], Payton.

“We’re continuing to take it just one step at a time, but the best is yet to come, so we’ve still got a lot of work to do.”

What’s next

On Thursday, the Celtics get a rare respite against a below-.500 team when they visit the Wizards in Washington. The next day, they wrap up a three-games-in-four-nights stretch, returning to TD Garden to take on the Lakers. The Raptors visit TD Garden on Sunday evening.