ORLANDO — Physicality dominated the discourse after Game 3. The Orlando Magic bullied the Boston Celtics all night, sending multiple guys crashing to the ground and completely thwarting their usually dominant offensive attack. Post-game, there were even talks of fights.
“There might be a fight break out or something because it is starting to feel like it is not even basketball, and the refs are not controlling the environment,” Jaylen Brown said after Game 3 in Orlando. “So, it is what it is. You want to fight it out? We can do that. Fight to see who goes to the second round."
None of that matters to Joe Mazzulla.
Joe Mazzulla doesn't care about Magic's physicality (but two things can be true)
The Magic’s bully-ball took its toll on the Celtics. Brown dislocated a finger, Derrick White went diving head-first into the Boston bench, and Jayson Tatum got elbowed in the stomach on a three-pointer. Yet while all of that was going on, the Celtics were deteriorating elsewhere.
"Out of the 95 points, 46 came off turnovers, offensive rebounds, and free throws,” Mazzulla told reporters on Saturday morning. “So, you just can't be blinded by the details…You have to fight like hell to win those [the margins]"
Orlando’s offense has been one of the worst in the NBA all season. Through the first three games of the first round, they’ve only scraped together one 100-point performance, and that was in their Game 2 loss in Boston. So, they upped their aggressiveness.
Their pick-and-roll coverage threw Tatum and Brown off their games, as those two alone combined for 13 of the Celtics’ 19 turnovers. Wendell Carter Jr. threw his weight around in the paint, bodying Kristaps Porzingis and throwing Luke Kornet to the ground—but it worked. He snagged six offensive rebounds.
The Celtics were forced to up their own physicality to keep pace with Orlando, but that’s not their game. In the regular season, they held opponents to just 17.7 free-throw attempts per game, but on Friday night, the Magic shot 26.
All of those margins absolutely destroyed the Celtics, giving the Magic easy pathways to put up points. And for a team that struggles to score in the half-court as much as Orlando does, that was a much-needed boost.
But while Mazzulla somewhat disregarded the physicality as a bigger factor than those margins, the truth is, the two are intertwined.
The Celtics turned the ball over 19 times, but they were heavily bothered by the Magic’s pushing and shoving. They gave up 15 offensive rebounds, but Orlando was playing with extreme force in the paint. Orlando shot 26 free throws, but the Celtics were trying to match the style of the game.
Two things can be true, and in Game 3, that was the case. One, the Magic’s physicality completely changed the course of the game, and two, that shouldn’t matter if the Celtics had simply controlled their controllables.