Sports / Basketball — The Celtics beat the Knicks 107-103 at TD Garden on Friday night, as Jayson Tatum scored 36 points and took over the final minutes just as New York’s comeback reached a single point. The loss drops the defending champion Knicks to 0-2, while Mikal Bridges went scoreless and was benched for the closing stretch.
BOSTON — The Celtics beat the Knicks 107-103 on Friday night at TD Garden, and for most of the fourth quarter the game followed a familiar script: Boston builds a cushion, New York storms back, and the building waits to see whose star closes it. This time there was no debate about the answer. Jayson Tatum scored a game-high 36 points with nine rebounds and seven assists, and nine of those points came late in the fourth quarter, after the Knicks had cut a 12-point deficit to one. The defeat sends the defending champion New York Knicks to 0-2 to open their title defence, following their 106-100 ring-night loss to the Philadelphia 76ers on Tuesday. Boston, which lost its opener at Detroit, improves to 1-1. The full game report was carried by Reuters via Field Level Media, and the New York Post’s courtside account told the same story from the Knicks’ side of the floor.
How the Celtics-Knicks game was decided in the final two minutes
Boston led by as many as 12 points three separate times in the fourth quarter, the last of them at 94-82 on a three-point play by reserve centre Neemias Queta. Then the Celtics stopped scoring. Boston missed seven consecutive shots while New York mounted a 9-0 run, and Karl-Anthony Towns dunked to pull the Knicks within 94-91 with 4:09 remaining. Towns missed a long three 28 seconds later, and Tatum answered with a layup to end the drought. Even so, the Knicks kept coming: Jalen Brunson’s fallaway jumper with 1:41 left made it 99-98, a one-point game, and TD Garden braced for the kind of comeback New York produced throughout its championship run last spring.
Tatum closed the door personally. Out of a timeout he sank a turnaround jumper over Josh Hart. On the next New York possession, Towns was whistled for an illegal screen — a turnover that the Post described as costly, and that will feature in every replay of this game in New York. Tatum then hit a long corner fallaway, again over Hart, to stretch the lead to 103-98. OG Anunoby answered with two free throws, Tatum replied with a three-pointer, Miles McBride hit a three of his own, and Payton Pritchard finally iced the game by splitting a pair of free throws with 11 seconds remaining. Seven of Tatum’s late points came in direct response to the Knicks cutting the lead to one; as the Post put it, every time New York climbed out of the hole, Tatum sent them back down.
The numbers behind Boston’s 107-103 win
The quarter-by-quarter line shows how swing-heavy the night was: New York took the first quarter 27-26, Boston edged the second 24-22 to lead 50-49 at half-time, the Celtics won the third 33-24 to build their working margin, and the Knicks won the fourth 30-24 without ever quite finishing the job. Behind Tatum, Paul George and Queta scored 15 points apiece for Boston and Derrick White added 12. There was also a subplot in green: Mitchell Robinson, the one member of last season’s Knicks rotation who did not return to the champions, played against his old team in a Celtics uniform and finished with four points and four rebounds in just over 22 minutes.
New York’s box score is a study in imbalance. Towns had 22 points and 10 rebounds, Anunoby 20 points, 10 rebounds and eight assists, and Hart 10 points and 12 rebounds — three double-doubles. McBride was the bench spark, scoring 20 points and hitting six three-pointers after entering the game for the struggling Bridges. Brunson scored 19, but on 7-of-17 shooting, missing 10 of his 17 attempts in 37 minutes — a second straight inefficient night after his disappointing opener against Philadelphia. New York actually won the rebounding battle 44-37 and shot 40 percent from three, but its turnovers fed Boston fast-break points all night, and the offence, in the Post’s phrase, trailed for all but about two minutes of the second half.
The Mikal Bridges problem is now a story, not a slump
The single most alarming line of the night belongs to Mikal Bridges. A starter on a championship team, Bridges shot 0-for-8, finished without a point, and was benched for the final eight and a half minutes while McBride played his minutes and nearly dragged New York back into the game. One scoreless night can be written off. Two quiet nights to open a title defence, the second ending on the bench in the building of the team’s biggest rival, becomes a rotation question. Head coach Mike Brown’s decision to close with the bench guard over his starting wing was, in effect, an in-game admission that the comeback had a better chance without Bridges on the floor. How Brown handles Bridges’ minutes and role against Orlando on Sunday will say a great deal about whether this was one bad week or the start of a genuine reordering of the Knicks’ hierarchy.
Why this matters
An 0-2 start is not a crisis in an 82-game season, and the Knicks themselves supplied the best evidence for calm on Friday night: as Reuters noted, this is the first time New York has lost consecutive games since dropping Games 2 and 3 of its first-round playoff series against Atlanta in April — after which the Knicks won 15 of their next 16 games and clinched the franchise’s first championship since 1973. Champions are allowed a slow week. But the manner of the two losses carries information that the record alone does not. On ring night, the Knicks lost at home to a Philadelphia team built around a newly arrived LeBron James. In Boston, they lost a game in which their three frontcourt starters all recorded double-doubles, their sixth man scored 20, and the opponent missed seven straight shots in the fourth quarter. They lost it in the two areas title defences usually leak first: late-game execution against an elite closer, and the reliability of the supporting cast. Brunson has now shot inefficiently in both games, and Bridges has yet to score in a way that registers. A defence of a championship is a season-long referendum held every night in somebody else’s building, and Boston — itself trying to prove it still belongs in the East’s top tier after its own opening loss in Detroit — treated Friday exactly that way.
Context: a rivalry that now runs through the champions
Knicks-Celtics is the Atlantic Division’s oldest argument, but its centre of gravity shifted last spring when New York, not Boston, finished the season holding the trophy — the Knicks’ first title in more than five decades. That history is why a Friday night game in the season’s first week drew a national streaming window and a playoff-grade atmosphere, and why Boston’s home opener was always going to be played at a higher emotional register than a normal October game. For the Celtics, the win also steadies a shaky opening week: they had lost 121-113 in Detroit on Tuesday, and a second straight defeat, at home, to the champions, would have invited a very different conversation about where this roster sits in the conference. Instead, the East’s first week ends with the champions winless, Boston level, and Philadelphia — the third party in this triangle — unbeaten after spoiling ring night. Readers following the league’s opening week can also see how the Western Conference’s first heavyweight result landed in our report on the Lakers’ 127-105 win over the Warriors.
What happens next
The schedule gives New York no time to brood. The Knicks host the Orlando Magic at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, October 25, in what has suddenly become a get-right game with a national storyline attached: the champions, at home, trying to avoid an 0-3 start. Boston rests until Monday, October 26, when it hosts the Chicago Bulls — the team that beat Detroit’s conquerors is not the test; consistency is, and the Celtics will want to show that the Detroit loss, not the Knicks win, was the outlier. For the neutral, the lasting image of Friday is simpler. The Knicks did almost everything a visiting team needs to do to steal a rivalry game late. Then the best player on the floor decided the last two minutes belonged to him, and 36 points later, the champions were 0-2.
Sources: Reuters / Field Level Media game report (Tatum 36 points, quarter-by-quarter comeback sequence, consecutive-loss context); New York Post courtside report (Bridges benched for the final 8½ minutes, Brunson 7-of-17, Towns’ moving screen); Sportradar final score and records (Celtics 107, Knicks 103; Boston 1-1, New York 0-2); NBA game highlights summary (Tatum 36/9/7; Towns 22/10). File photos via Wikimedia Commons as credited.