It seems like only yesterday that fans were gearing up to see the highly polarizing first-round matchup between the Boston Celtics and Brooklyn Nets take place, a series in which many were sure would be a competitive one throughout and that had all the potential of going the distance.
As fate would have it, however, after just over a week of action in the 2022 postseason we find that the quarterfinals bout between these two divisional rivals has officially come to an end, with the C’s taking down the star-studded Nets in four games, thus having them exact revenge on the very team that sent them packing early on in the playoffs a year ago.
Like every contest that came before it, Game 4 was a truly exhilarating affair that saw the outcome hanging in the balance until the final seconds of regulation.
For the first time all series, both Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving found their scoring grooves on the same night, putting up 39 and 20, respectively, equating to a combined total that was worth more than half of Brooklyn’s 112 points accumulated.
Unfortunately for them, these efforts simply weren’t enough to push things back to Boston for a Game 5, for a stupendous drive to the rim from Jaylen Brown and an incredibly clutch put-back by Al Horford within the final 1:02 in the fourth ultimately sealed their disappointing demise, giving the shamrocks the 116-112 victory and, in turn, the incredibly satisfying sweep over a team several people believed had a rather high chance of winning it all.
As it has been during this first-round bout, the Jays proved to be the main driving forces for the C’s, with Jayson Tatum dropping 29 points and Brown logging 22 whilst combining for 11 boards and eight assists on 50 percent shooting from the field.
However, in this final outing, we saw many other players surrounding them step up and provide high-end contributions that, in turn, played a major role in how this game wound up playing out (another theme from this series).
In fact, we feel Ime Udoka’s squad played so well as a whole, that it’s rather hard for us to convince ourselves to write up a “1 stud and 1 dud” piece so, instead, we’ll be putting a positive spin on our game-related content by pinpointing 2 unsung studs from Boston’s series-clinching win over the Brooklyn Nets: