After Jaylen Brown stopped beating himself in Game 5, the Miami Heat had no chance to do it.
On consecutive possessions late in the first quarter, Brown had the ball stripped from him, first by P.J. Tucker and then by Victor Oladipo. The Heat turned both into easy baskets. Turnovers were a big part of the Celtics’ problems in their Game 3 loss and Brown had an unsightly seven of them. So when he turned it over a third time in the final minute of the first quarter of Game 5, Boston coach Ime Udoka subbed him out and pulled him aside.
“You’re acting like you’re surprised that they’re reaching and poking from behind. It wasn’t as much live-ball turnovers trying to make a nice pass. It was literally getting taken from us,” Udoka said. “Be strong with the ball. Five games in now, we’re having too many of these type of turnovers, not being strong with the ball in the crowd. He understood that. ...Knew if we cleaned that up, we’d be in good shape. Obviously, he and the rest of the group did a great job.”
Most pro athletes aren’t quite as good as they think they are. Sometimes that extra confidence allows them to reach greater heights than their talent dictates. But sometimes it leads to them repeatedly making the same mistake because they believe they’re too good to keep failing.
Brown was failing when he drove to the basket. He kept doing it with bad results, playing right into the hands of the Heat, who’d have been plenty happy to keep the game in the mud. Brown thought he was being hand-checked and the referees weren’t calling it.
“Hopefully next game some of those hand-checking calls, I’ll get one. But I’m going to keep being aggressive and keep getting into the paint,” he said. “Miami does a good job of slapping down and reaching and grabbing, making it tough for you. It’s a little bit of both. I got to do a better job, for sure, but overall as a team, we got to do a better job, too.”
Brown is averaging 2.18 turnovers in wins and 4.4 in losses this postseason. Whether some were the result of uncalled fouls or not, he was smart enough to change his approach Wednesday.
After a quiet second quarter, Brown started taking and making jump shots. He hit two in the Celtics’ 10-0 run to end the third quarter and then was the best player on the floor in the fourth quarter, almost single-handedly delivering the knockout punch that moved the Celtics within a game of the NBA Finals.
Brown made three 3-pointers in the first 3:39 of the fourth quarter as the Celtics turned a once-close game into a route. Brown had 13 of his 25 points in the fourth quarter and had just one turnover after the first quarter.
With 5:18 left he drove to the basket one more time, this time bounding through an open lane. His emphatic, one-handed dunk put the Celtics up 89-71 and sent many Heat fans to the exits.
“The game opened up for me in the second half. I didn’t want to get down,” Brown said. “I didn’t want to look into the past, think that this game was over. My team needed me to come out and respond. First half was (expletive), threw it away. Come out, play basketball in the second half.”
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