Slowly but surely, James Harden sucked every last gasp of oxygen from TD Garden on Sunday afternoon. The man they call “The Beard” – that crafty maestro of step-backs and soul-crushing triples – turned a laugher into a heart-stopper, exposing the Celtics’ Achilles’ heel: their inability to slam the door when the lead swells to canyon size.
What started as a 24-point demolition job had shriveled to a razor-thin six with 22 ticks left on the clock. That’s when Jordan Walsh, the gritty rookie with fire in his veins, got a little too aggressive on a Harden three-point prayer. Foul. No flagrant called after the review, but Joe Mazzulla nailed it post-game: “He’s one of the best foul drawers in the league. Guard him for 33 minutes, and you’re gonna cough up two or three trips to the stripe. I prefer not to.”
Harden? Ice in his veins. Swish. Swish. Swish. Three freebies buried, and the sea of green in the stands collectively held its breath, like a prizefighter waiting for the haymaker.
Jaylen Brown answered with a thunderous dunk – lead back to five. But Harden? He just smirked, bolted down the floor, and buried a dagger triple right in Derrick White’s grill. Two-point game.
White, cool as the New England autumn, drills two freebies after an intentional hack. Ball’s inbounded, and boom – Harden strikes again. Another step-back three, pure as fresh powder. One-point nail-biter.
On back-to-back possessions, White and Brown threw everything they had at him – length, quickness, desperation – but Harden’s herky-jerky pump-fake and fadeaway made fouling feel inevitable. Walsh had just gotten schooled the hard way. Two Payton Pritchard free throws iced the clock at 2.0 seconds, setting up the final gut-check.
Kris Dunn uncorked a laser – Tom Brady in a defender’s jersey – to Ivica Zubac at the foul line, White draped all over him. But in a blur, Harden sprints the floor like a man possessed. Zubac whips it to him wide open at the arc. The Garden faithful? Pure horror. A collective gasp echoed off the rafters: Oh God, not like this. Silence swallowed the arena as the rock sailed true…
Front rim. Clang. Celtics steal a 117-115 gut-punch survival.
The eruption? Delayed. Shock. Relief. And yeah, a whisper of disappointment rippling through the crowd. Deep down, even the die-hard Celts fans nursed that twisted basketball itch – just let it drop, Beard. Give us the chaos. It didn’t. Boston escapes with win No. 7, a victory forged in the fires of near-collapse, all courtesy of Harden’s second-half supernova.
But Superman doesn’t suit up without a origin story. Blame the third quarter – that brutal, momentum-mangling frame where the Clippers flipped the script and lit the fuse.
With 9:29 left in the third, White slices past John Collins for an easy bucket, ballooning Boston’s bulge to 24 at 76-52. Lights out, right? Wrong. Dead wrong. By quarter’s end? 90-85. A blistering 33-14 Clippers avalanche, sparked by… a three-second violation on Pritchard. Harden cashes the tech freebie. Harmless blip? Nah. That was the pebble that triggered the rockslide.
“We put ’em on the line, slows the pace, lets ’em set their D,” Pritchard lamented. LA feasted: 12 free throws, 11 makes. “Fouls killed our rhythm,” White added. “They grabbed second-chance boards like it was a fire sale.”
Three offensive glass grabs for the Clips, 4-for-4 conversions, 12 cheap points. Brown owned his rust: “I bricked a bunch at the rim – layups I gotta bury. They turned my misses into daggers. That got ’em rolling.”
Boston? Ice cold inside: 4-of-8 in the restricted zone, 6-of-12 in the paint that frame. The Clips didn’t need transition fireworks (just five fast-break tallies), but every Boston whiff let LA reset, reload, and punish. Game-long? Celtics 17-of-32 at the cup. Oof.
Freebies. Boards. Brick city. Whatever blueprint Boston sketched in the first half? Erased in a fog of freshman mistakes. The air? Sucked out.
Enter the fourth: LA’s masterstroke. “They subbed Harden back in,” Mazzulla said, eyes narrowing. “And went full sniper squad.”
Boston clawed back early, stretching that five-point edge to eight. Then Harden re-enters – and erupts. In the final 7:41? 18 points on 5-of-8 shooting, 3-of-4 from deep, 5-of-5 at the line. “Tip your cap,” Pritchard conceded. “Dude was dropping nukes.”
But it wasn’t solo stardom. LA flipped to a spacing nightmare: Bogdan Bogdanovic logging nearly the full frame (11:59), Brook Lopez and Nicolas Batum sprinkling threes like confetti. Ty Lue’s chess move? “More shooters – you can’t double without mercy,” Mazzulla broke down. “Harden orchestrates, we hack him on a three, then driving. Their spacing? Chef’s kiss. Forced us to pick our poison.”
First half? Celtics hounded Harden in the backcourt (shoutout Walsh’s pressure), blitzed him in pick-and-rolls, trapped to Zubac. Chaos in the paint. But that shooting barrage? It shredded the scheme. “Game plan was solid,” Pritchard shrugged. “They just pivoted mid-flight.”
The Clips clawed to the brink, but Boston? They didn’t fold. They grinded. They scrapped. In the eye of Harden’s hurricane, the Celts clawed back with pure, unfiltered hustle – the kind that turns “almost lost” into “we got this.”
“It’s runs, man,” White preached. “Good teams weather ’em. Find your shift.”
Like with 5:03 left: Neemias Queta airballs twice in the paint, snags both boards, powers home an and-one on the third. Garden? Erupts as Queta roars – pure catharsis.
Or 9:36 gone: Brown picks Dunn’s pocket, jets coast-to-coast for another and-one. Steal of the soul.
Even 11:02 in: Baylor Scheierman’s shoeless scramble after Brown’s miss. Kobe Sanders barrels in – foul incoming? Nope. White steps up, absorbs the charge on a flying Batum. Block party.
“We made clutch plays,” Brown beamed. “Closed games? Battle scars. We’re getting scarred up right.”
For every Harden heart-stab, a Boston Band-Aid: Queta’s grit, Brown’s banditry, White’s wall. Small? Sure. But in a fourth-quarter knife fight, inches win wars.
Harden’s rampage ripped open Boston’s fatal flaw – that leaky dam when leads hit double digits. The Clips nearly flooded the joint. But the Celts plugged the holes, just enough to float another W.
That’s the gospel for this green machine all year: Harden’s your boogeyman, but hustle’s your holy water. Grind it out, or get drowned. Sunday? They swam. Barely. And in the NBA’s shark tank, barely’s a banquet.