NEW YORK — What’s going through your head right now? How do you digest this? What did you guys say to each other after the game? How do you focus on Game 5 with this going on? Did you say something to the team after it happened? How do you emerge from this? Have you gotten a chance to talk to Jayson yet? What will this mean for the franchise?
Jaylen Brown sat in a hush as the questions came pouring in. The entire room was engulfed in indescribable sorrow as the Boston Celtics star replied to each with brief, quiet responses.
“It’s tough,” he said. “There’s not really a lot to say.”
Early in the fourth quarter of Boston’s Game 4 loss to the New York Knicks, Jayson Tatum went down in a heap. A fumbled pass left him, Brown, and OG Anunoby scrambling for the ball. As he lunged to grab it, his leg gave out from underneath him, and he fell to the floor.
Anunoby’s transition dunk sent Madison Square Garden into a frenzy, but even those in attendance wearing blue and orange fell into silence once they realized what had transpired.
Trainers rushed onto the court as Tatum kept a hand over his face. He limped off the court with the aid of two Celtics staffers, abstaining from putting any pressure on his right leg. A camera captured Tatum in a wheelchair in the back halls of the arena. Again, his hands covered his face.
From the time he entered the league, Tatum has never been the one to stay on the ground. A sprained ankle at the end of March only kept him out for one game. “Get up,” Joe Mazzulla yelled at him as he recovered from a hard fall in the first round against the Orlando Magic.
But Tatum didn’t get up on Monday night.
“Obviously, you're always worried about someone's health, so the fact that he carried off—like you said, he's the type of guy that gets right up. So, he didn't,” Joe Mazzulla said. “We'll know tomorrow exactly what it is, but yeah, I mean, it's tough to watch a guy like him get carried off.”
The Celtics only cared about Jayson Tatum
The Celtics finished the game in a state of paralysis. The final outcome had virtually been decided when Tatum went down, New York putting the finishing touches on yet another comeback victory.
From the players to the media to the staff to the cameramen, once the post-game press conferences began, it felt as though the air had been sucked from the building.
On the one hand, there was no escaping the Celtics’ meltdown. Rebounding woes, poor transition defense, and an immaculate run of shot-making by the Knicks had put the defending champions into a 3-1 series hole.
Yet while everyone in the room expected to be talking about basketball and the disastrous condition of Boston’s chances at a title defense, it now seemed irrelevant.
“The loss is the loss,” Al Horford told reporters in the locker room after the game. “More importantly, it’s Jayson I’m worried about.”
Every single person in the room was there for one reason—basketball. To play, to coach, to write about, to cover. It didn’t matter. And everyone knew it didn’t matter.
There will be an entire offseason to digest the eventual end to the Celtics’ season. Barring a miraculous comeback, a second-round exit seems to be inevitable. But the immeasurable pain of watching Tatum go down the way he did was more impactful than any turnover, rebound, or mistake that could have ever unfolded on the floor of Madison Square Garden in Game 4.
“That's our brother, and you hate to see him go down,” said Derrick White. “We just know the type of guy he is, and it's tough to see him go down.. Obviously, right now, it's pretty low because of the game, and we just got to find a way to win Game 5.”
That. Game 5. A now-season-deciding affair that the Celtics will have to play. A position nobody in the basketball world expected them to be in, come to light. A 4-0 regular-season sweep of the Knicks in danger of being reversed in just five playoff contests.
“You take the night and get back up tomorrow,” Brown said. “Tomorrow's a new day. And we go from there.”
But what does tomorrow look like for the Celtics? There is no separating the emotion of Monday night from the job they have in front of them. A job they’ll have to endure without the leadership of the very man the team was built around.
“I think everybody's concerned with Jayson,” Brown said “I'm not sure how bad it is. Didn't look great. But I think everybody is kind of more concerned with that. Obviously, the loss is huge, but we got to get ready for Game 5, so we'll take the night and pick our heads up tomorrow and put together a game plan to come out on our home floor to keep the series alive.”
Times like this are when basketball is put into perspective
By the time Wednesday night comes to an end, there’s a very real chance New York will be heading back to its first Eastern Conference finals since Latrell Sprewell, Allan Houston, Patrick Ewing, and Rick Brunson were on the team.
And if that comes to fruition, it will be the seventh straight season where the defending champs have been eliminated before the conference finals.
But in an instant, the entire City of Boston shifted from frustrated to heartsick. It wasn’t a panic, but a deep sense of despair. And even that feeling was incomparable to what the Celtics locker room was going through. To what Tatum is going through.
There are times when basketball takes center stage. When the actions on the court speak louder than any words, excuses, reasons, or messages. When, for those in the space, it rushes to the forefront of all else.
As soon as Tatum hit the floor on Monday night, it couldn’t possibly have mattered any less.