Jayson Tatum scored 25 of his 36 points in the second half of Boston’s win over my Knicks on Friday night, and I’m less mad about the loss than I am scared of what the Celtics just showed everybody else in the league.
The final was 107-103. Close enough to shrug off if that’s what you need right now. But the Knicks drop to 0-2 to open the season, and per NBA.com’s breakdown of the game, no defending champion has opened a title defense that poorly since the 2011-12 Mavericks.
A single loss is noise. Two losses to open the year, with the second one coming against a Celtics team still figuring out who it is, is a pattern.
Tatum’s 36 points against the Knicks weren’t evenly distributed. He was ordinary for two quarters, then turned into exactly the problem Boston signed him up to be, scoring 25 after the break and personally accounting for seven of the Celtics’ final eight points to close it out. This is the clip making the rounds today:
https://x.com/LegionHoops/status/2113812994132258917
Fourteen made field goals, nine rebounds, seven assists, three steals, against a defense that beat San Antonio in five games four months ago. That’s not a guy breaking out of a slump. That’s just Tuesday for him, except it was Friday, and it was my team on the other end of it.
He didn’t do it alone, which is the part that should actually worry New York. The Celtics’ new-look Big Three showed up even on a night when two of its three pieces were just okay, with Paul George adding 15 points and seven boards and Neemias Queta chipping in 15 more off the bench, including a three-point play late that pushed the lead to double digits.
George is in Boston because the Celtics sent Jaylen Brown to Philadelphia this summer, a trade a good chunk of Boston still hasn’t forgiven even before George played a real minute next to Tatum. One good half against the Knicks doesn’t settle that argument.
It’s just the first time it looked like it might actually work.
The third quarter is where New York lost the plot. Boston outscored the Knicks 33-24 in that period alone, per ESPN’s recap, turning a one-point halftime game into a double-digit hole the Knicks never fully climbed out of.
Watching that happen to the team that beat San Antonio for a title four months ago is not how I wanted to spend a Friday night.
Now the part I owe you, because I’m not going to pretend this Celtics team is some finished product just to make my own panic sound smarter. Three nights earlier, in Paul George’s actual Celtics debut, Boston blew a 22-point second-half lead and lost 121-113 in Detroit, even with George dropping a franchise-record 38 points on 12-of-21 shooting. That’s a team that doesn’t know how to close yet.
A Celtics squad that couldn’t hold a 22-point cushion against Detroit still had enough, three nights later, to take apart a defending champion that hadn’t even started its road to the next title. That makes what happened to the Knicks worse, not better.
Jalen Brunson didn’t disappear. He scored 19, Karl-Anthony Towns added 22, OG Anunoby went for 20 with 10 boards and eight assists, and Deuce McBride dropped 20 off the bench. Five Knicks in double figures, and New York still lost anyway.
This was supposed to be the year the title defense rolled on without much resistance, the stretch run from the banner night that was supposed to start this differently carrying straight into business as usual. Instead:
https://x.com/LegionHoops/status/2113813824600158453
I don’t have an answer for what’s going on in New York yet, and neither does anyone else two games into a season. But I know what I watched Friday, and I’d rather be scared now, while there’s still time to fix it, than find out in May that I wasn’t scared enough.
