New York – Boston Celtic coach Joe Mazzulla said on Saturday that the days preceding match 3 of their first round series against the New York Knicks were not difficult. Yes, the Celtics were down 2-0 after blowing two 20-point tracks at home, but “it’s the funny part,” said Mazzulla. “You don’t go on the trip to make it easy. It is dark, but in the right direction.”
In this situation, “you just have to draw on your darkness, and that’s it,” said Mazzulla.
Of course, Mazzulla, who showed the clips of the Celtics of hyenas and killers hunting their prey, would say that. To hear goalkeeper Payton Pritchard, however, Boston remained simple after match 2. Light, even.
“We looked at areas where we could clean a little, but it was really more confident and let it fly,” said Pritchard. “Do not guess a good blow. You get out of a ball screen, this is where the outside world says?” We shoot too many 3S “- Everyone says it all, but if you believe in your shot and you can hit it, then take it with confidence.”
Boston did not lack confidence in the match 3. Three days after shooting 10 for 40 on a 3 -point beach at TD Garden, he pulled 20 for 40 from the 3 -point beach at the Madison Square Garden. No one embodied the team’s approach better than Pritchard, who finished with 23 points on the shooting of 8 for 16 (5-one of Deep) in 35 minutes in the 115-93 victory. This is exactly the type of performance that earned him the sixth prize of the man of the year this season.
Pritchard missed his first long bomb, a traction in transition on Jalen Brunson. A few possessions later, he found himself open after leaving a pair of screens. He was well behind the 3-point line, but he let him fly and gave Boston an advance of 32-16 at the end of the first quarter.
After match 2, Mazzulla had stressed the Celtics the importance of finishing the neighborhoods and taking care of the ball.
“He only controls the momentum,” said Pritchard.
They needed to keep the Knicks out of transition and prevent the breakdowns that gave New York life at the end of games 1 and 2. Boston was not perfect in match 3, but it took care of this kind of thing. Jaylen Brown committed a live turnover, Jrue Holiday hired two and … that was all. During the last possession of the first quarter, Pritchard dribbled almost the duration of the courtyard and calmly overthrew a basic jumper to prolong the head and keep the momentum via the Celtics.
Neither Jayson Tatum nor Brown had a particularly effective or prolific score game, but that did not matter, largely because of Pritchard. At the end of the second quarter, he attacked Brunson, drew a help defender and created a 3 for Brown. At the end of the third, Pritchard isolated against the center of Knicks Mitchell Robinson on a switch, shook him and nailed a 3. Some goods after that, Pritchard went down against Miles McBride, stopped on a cent and made a fairly inverted lay-up.
“Payton was huge, Payton was great,” said Brown. “(The Knicks) are physical, they have obtained large guards, wings that like to take care of the ball. The level of physics is higher, so you must be able to do these passes and do these games, and Payton did a great job this evening.”
Pritchard said he was trying to maintain his aggressiveness.
“All luck I get, attack painting,” he said, “but always drive 3-ball, of course.”
His game creation – and the excellent defense of Boston – relieved the pressure on Tatum and Brown in match 3. Retrospectively, should he have been on the ground during the time of crisis in match 2? Perhaps, but the most important question is now whether Pritchard will continue to play major minutes in the future. If Mazzulla focuses on the rhythm, space and limitation of turnover, it is worth it to be considered.
After match 3, the “easy thing to watch,” said Mazzulla, these are the Celtics shooting numbers. They took advantage of their open appearance much better than in the first two games, but that was not the whole story: Boston played a cleaner and smarter game. Regarding the process, however, the Celtics still had problems of attacking switches, and there were possessions that stagnated in stagnation iso-ball, ending with Tatum or Brown taking a jumper contested in isolation.
The empty half-time view of the Saturday match: Pritchard’s shooting, the terrible shooting of New York and the protection of the Al Horford rim and Kristaps Porzingis masked the fact that, for three games, the Boston stars do not seem as comfortable as expected in attack.
Apart from the two collapses, however, the Celtics completely surpassed the Knicks, and he left with a 22 -point victory on the road despite the fact that neither Tatum nor Brown are unclogged. They had inexplicable defeats at home in the regular season, and they also had victories that looked very much like this. The victories were much more frequent.
