Celtics display championship poise after holding off Timberwolves

Take a look at NBA.com’s “lead tracker” from the Boston Celtics’ 107-105 win over the Minnesota Timberwolves.

What sticks out to you?

The title of this one might’ve given it away, but if you pointed to the inverted peaks and valleys, you’ve got the right idea.

Boston’s second half consisted of building leads and then fending off the inevitable responses that the Timberwolves made. Sure, you can complain that they continued to allow the visitors to get back into it, but that’s basketball. It’s a game of runs, after all.

The real test is how a team will respond when things stop going their way, and the Cs did a great job of that on Sunday.

Minnesota would work to cut the differential down to one or two possessions, just to look up at the scoreboard and see that they were back down by double digits.

Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla credited his team’s poise and physicality as the characteristics that allowed them to bend without breaking against one of last season’s Western Conference finalists.

“Yeah, you just need to have the poise and the physicality. I mean, they test you every possession on both ends of the floor with their physicality and their rim protection and their ball pressure,” Mazzulla said after his team was up by as many 19 points. “And then they got dynamic guys that can score at any time. So, they’re going to go through runs. It’s just a matter of how you handle them, and I thought our guys handled it well with the physicality on offense and our connectivity and our poise defensively.”

We got a great look at the “bend don’t break” Celtics at the beginning of the third quarter. They had just watched the Wolves rip off a 9-0 run to close the first half, cutting their lead to three points at the break. Fortunately, they came out of the gates with fire on the defensive end. By the time Minnesota had scored their first field goal of the half, Boston had already blocked three shots and had ballooned the lead up to 15 points. The two teams went back and forth for the remainder of the quarter, but the lead was 11 heading into the fourth.

The Timberwolves pushed again. They managed to cut the deficit down to five after the first minute and a half of the final frame. This is where Boston’s physicality came into play. They started to work the ball inside, targeting guard Nickiel Alexander-Walker in the paint, possession after possession. Both Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown used their strength and size to pin Alexander-Walker low and get easy looks to help push the lead back to two possessions.

“I say it all the time: ‘How do we respond? How do we withstand what they’re trying to do?’” said Tatum. “It’s always by a collective effort on both ends of the floor and guys finding ways to make a play on both ends.”

Both ends were essential to Boston’s “final act” of this win.

Minnesota’s final run was met by a pair of massive threes from Brown and Derrick White and a well-connected defensive stand by Boston on the final possession.

Look at these rotations.

Both Tatum and Jrue Holiday did a tremendous job of closing out three-point shooters, keeping Minnesota from even getting a shot off (Naz Reid’s attempt was deemed late).

Sure, it wasn’t a perfect win. There were lapses throughout the night that led to the Timberwolves getting back into this game over and over again, but the Celtics didn’t let anything get out of hand. They responded like champions every single time things got tense.