Losing home-court advantage before hitting the road against the Philadelphia 76ers prompted a sense of urgency for the Boston Celtics. To them, Game 3 might as well have been a win-or-go-home contest.
There were no thoughts of returning to Boston with another split. No feeling of settling. The locker room had made up its mind well before the Celtics took the floor at Xfinity Mobile Arena.
“This was like a Game 7 for us,” Jaylen Brown told reporters after Boston’s 108-100 Game 3 win on Friday night,
per CLNS Media. “Even though it’s a long series, we wanted to come back and respond after dropping one in our home floor. We can’t lose two games in a row in the playoffs. That’s tough. So this was a big win for us.”
Boston faced a far-too-familiar postseason scenario — this time against a Joel Embiid-less Sixers team, with the seven-time All-Star recovering from emergency appendectomy surgery. During their championship run in 2024, the Celtics dropped Game 2 in both the first and second rounds against the Miami Heat and Cleveland Cavaliers, forcing mid-series responses.
Going from sarcastic “We want Boston” chants echoing across TD Garden in Game 1 to early exits and silence in Game 2, the Celtics found themselves in a spot they had seen before. So before heading out to face Philadelphia’s notoriously hostile environment, the team had a conversation.
Understanding that not everyone on the roster had lived through a Game 3 road test of this magnitude, Brown felt it was important to communicate with everyone.
“It’s something you definitely talk about, but something you gotta experience for sure,” Brown said. “And I think our team is still a young team, so this experience was great. It’s great to get these experiences and win. But when you get hit, you just gotta respond.”
Brown added: “Most importantly, just stay together through the adversity. But when you get hit, you gotta hit back.”
In the third quarter, with less than six minutes, Tyrese Maxey buried a step-back 3-pointer over the reach of Jayson Tatum to give Philadelphia a 67-64 lead. Less than two minutes later, Brown backed down Justin Edwards to sink an 11-foot fadeaway jumper and give Boston back its lead at 69-67.
It was all about staying the course.
Yet, to Brown’s point, even though several members of the roster — like Neemias Queta and Jordan Walsh — were part of the 2024 run, it’s a different challenge when you’re playing meaningful minutes. Watching from the bench offers valuable experience, but nothing compares to being thrust into the moment and truly learning what it takes to secure a 2-1 series lead.
The last time the Celtics were in that position, Queta and Walsh were spectating. Kristaps Porziņģis, Al Horford, and Luke Kornet were ahead of Queta on the depth chart at center, and Walsh was a 19-year-old rookie with just nine NBA games to his name. Now, Queta is Boston’s starting center, while Walsh — though not in the lineup — has been leaned on throughout the season to take on challenging defensive assignments against some of the league’s elite offensive stars.
There’s a clear discrepancy between what it takes for the 2025-26 Celtics to win and what it took for the 2023-24 Celtics to win, and the locker room has embraced that reality.
Brown and Tatum, both scoring 25 points apiece, combined for 50 in Game 3. But it took more than Boston’s dynamic duo to outlast the Sixers. Derrick White added three blocks, Payton Pritchard scored 15 off the bench, and Baylor Scheierman chipped in with two momentum-swinging steals that helped shift control back toward the Celtics.
The in-sync engagement from Boston’s bench said it all.
When Tatum pulled up and hit a clutch 3-pointer over Adem Bona to push Boston’s lead to 106-100 with 25.3 seconds left in regulation, the entire Celtics bench matched his energy. Everyone rose to their feet — fired up, re-energized, and looking as if they were ready to play Game 4 on the spot.
“This is what you sign up for,” Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla told reporters, per CLNS Media. “They’re all pushing us. We have to push them. Usually, competition brings out the best of people, and you’re also in two great environments. TD Garden’s a great environment, here is a great environment, and you’re just throwing haymakers at each other. I think you relish that in the moment.”
Figuring out the puzzle of winning is nothing new to a Mazzulla-led group, especially this season.
“It’s what we’ve done, it’s what we do when we’re at our best,” Mazzulla said. “So the goal is to just try to be at our best as much as we can. So we do that in training camp, preseason, regular season, playoffs, we do it. It’s just the trust that we’ll — more times than not — try to be the best version of ourselves. So like I said, there were big-time plays tonight by multiple people in both halves, and we just have to be able to do that.”
More impressive than the win itself were the paths the Celtics took to get there. Maxey and Paul George combined for 49 points, and while the Sixers didn’t replicate their 3-point explosion in Game 2, their intensity never dipped. Philadelphia pushed Boston to the wire on Friday night, forcing the Celtics to earn every basket and every stop before crossing the finish line.
That included Brown’s off-balance, one-legged floater with 6:10 remaining, Pritchard’s buzzer-beating step-back three with 1:17 left, and White’s two offensive rebounds in the fourth quarter — the second of which led to Tatum’s dagger.
For the Celtics — and especially Tatum — it was the same old challenge, just on a different night.
“As you probably could imagine, we’ve been in this scenario time and time again,” Tatum told reporters, per CLNS Media. “Times we’ve fallen short, and times we’ve succeeded. It’s all about learning from past experiences. Whether it’s the first play of the game or crunch time, it’s about making the right read and making the right play.”
Treating Game 3 like Game 7 wasn’t just the right call; it was the perfect reprogramming of the team’s mindset in what many view as a low-pressure contest. The stakes obviously aren’t perceived as drastic, considering a 2-1 lead means the job is only halfway done, but that’s a simplistic approach. Mazzulla’s locker room isn’t built like that. So, with Embiid progressing and inching closer to a return, the Celtics needed to put Tuesday night’s Game 2 defeat way back in the rearview mirror.
That was priority number one for everyone in a Celtics uniform.
“It’s just about responding,” Tatum said. “Responding from Game 2 and how we played in that one, and wanted to play better. We still had 17 turnovers and a lot of ugly possessions. Obviously, there were some possessions where we figured it out and made plays to win the game. But just on both sides of the ball, there’s a lot of things that we can learn from.”
It wasn’t perfect, but it was enough. And in the playoffs, that’s all that matters.
