The comeback
LOS ANGELES — Best regular-season record. Check. Win a playoff game on the road. Check. Come back from the largest first-quarter deficit in Finals history to hand the Lakers their first home loss of the playoffs.
The Celtics can add another notch to their belt.
“We’ve learned a lot about ourselves,” Celtics guard Ray Allen said after the game. “And we’re still a fairly new team, and coming into these situations, we just said, just fight. No matter what’s going to happen, just fight, do what you can do, play as hard as you can play, and we’ll see how we end up. But nobody is ever going to quit.”
The deficits were daunting. It was 26-7 with 3:15 remaining in the first quarter. It was 45-31 with 3:28 remaining in the second. Late in the third quarter, the Lakers still maintained a 68-48 lead.
“We said coming out of the third quarter that regardless of what the score is, we’re not going to look at the score, we’re just going to go out and play and compete,” said Paul Pierce. “If we go out there for the next 24 minutes and compete and not worry about the score and play like our lives depended on it, we’ll have a chance and we can be happy about our effort at the end of the day.”
Down 13 with 3:30 left in the third, Allen and Pierce drove for lay-ups, and Eddie House knocked down a three to cut the lead to 6 points. After a pair of Allen free throws, the Celtics ran down the clock and found P.J. Brown for a dunk to cut the lead to 2 as the game headed to the fourth.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have talked about it at halftime, but I mentioned it to them at halftime that we had to come out and win that third quarter,” said Lakers coach Phil Jackson. “They caught us in a situation where we didn’t execute very well.”
Leon Powe actually tied the game with 10:03 left, but the teams continued to go back and forth. The Celtics didn’t have their first lead until Eddie House nailed a corner jumper with 4:07 left to play.
Pierce made some clutch free throws down the stretch, and the Celtics left the Staples Center crowd in a state of stunned silence.
“We let a huge opportunity slip away,” said Lakers guard Kobe Bryant. “So I’m upset, hurt, disappointed. It’s a huge loss, no doubt about it.”
Said Pierce, “We just went out there and played as hard as we could, and we believed and we stuck together and was able to pull off this win. Incredible.”
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