TORONTO -- For nearly half the night, this looked like the kind of game that gets away from you fast. Toronto came out firing, buried 10 threes in the first quarter to match a franchise record, and stretched the lead to 22 points early in the second. Boston looked flat, out of rhythm, and headed for trouble.
Then the Celtics flipped it.
Behind Jayson Tatum’s creation and a scrappy second-quarter group, Boston ripped off a 17-2 run to claw all the way back into the game before halftime. The defense tightened up, the stops started turning into points, and the whole tone changed in a hurry. Derrick White sparked one of the cleanest transition sequences of the night, and suddenly the Celtics were no longer chasing a blowout - they were right back in it.
The comeback mattered even more because of the setting. Boston was playing the second night of a back-to-back, with an 8:00 p.m. tip in another road city on Tuesday night.
A team could have folded after falling behind by 22. This one didn’t.
The final quarter turned into a grind. Neither team gave much ground, and for long stretches it was a one-possession game.
Toronto kept battling on the glass and pressuring the ball, while Boston looked for chances to run and get its offense moving. In the final two minutes, the building came alive again after a huge transition dunk put the Raptors up three.
Boston answered immediately. Tatum found Neemias Queta for a dunk, then the Celtics got a break when Jamal Shead missed a wide-open 3-pointer. Tatum pushed in transition, drew a foul, and Boston had the swing it needed.
Queta, who had been struggling a bit on the boards in the fourth, came through with a huge rebound and then knocked down two free throws to put Boston ahead 96-93 with 15.1 seconds left. Sam Hauser then stole Toronto’s inbound pass, and that was that. The Celtics escaped with a 98-93 win.
The second-quarter surge was the turning point. Tatum, White, Queta, Baylor Scheierman, and Payton Pritchard/Hauser all made the right plays at the right time to drag Boston out of a rough start. The energy changed, the execution sharpened, and the Celtics stopped looking like a team on its heels.
For most of the first 19 minutes, though, Toronto had the upper hand. Boston’s help-and-recover defense wasn’t finishing the job, and the Raptors kept stepping into open looks.
On offense, the Celtics had little going early. Tatum couldn’t find a rhythm, and with Paul George out because of illness, the rest of the group wasn’t creating much either.
That made the comeback all the more necessary - and all the more impressive. What had looked like a runaway Toronto win turned into a gritty Boston steal.
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