Jaylen Brown reveals Celtics had a team meeting between Games 3 and 4
BOSTON -- For the Boston Celtics, Game 3 in Miami was bad. Very bad. Just about everybody in the basketball world was looking at them and saying that they had quit. It was rough.
Such a moment could have buried the Celtics, but instead they showed resolve with a second-half comeback and a Game 4 victory just two days later to keep their season alive and send the Eastern Conference Finals back to Boston.
They did that with some strong play on the court, obviously. But Jaylen Brown revealed after the win that a team meeting on Monday helped get the Celtics headed in the right direction for the biggest game of their season.
Brown said that the team "galvanized" on Monday night, saying of Game 3's ugly performance, "we didn't want to go out like that." He didn't reveal too much about the team meeting, though Chris Forsberg reported it took place at Top Golf.
"Just coming together and talking it out," Brown said. "Like a lot of times when you get to this point, down 3-0, you see locker rooms and teams start to go in another direction. We wanted to make sure that we stayed together, we wanted to make sure that we looked each other in the eye and came out today and put our best foot forward. And I'm proud of our group for doing that, because you see teams with their back against the wall, and you see they just collapse. You didn't see that tonight. You seen us come together, you seen us play defense, you seen us make the right plays. And I feel like that shows a lot about our character, especially in a game where everything is on the line and everything that went wrong in the last couple of games."
Brown was asked for more.
"I think that showed our character. Like right now, obviously we underperformed in the last three games and you start to hear all these stories come out about X, Y, Z. Who knows where they actually come from? And 99% of them is not true at all. So we wanted to stay together. And I think that was an emphasis last night before we played today, was make sure we was on the same page," he said. "We didn't want to come out and lay an egg. We wanted to come out and play together, wanted to come out and trust each other, come out and play some defense, have some pride about yourself, and find a way to win the game. And we are more than capable of doing it, so tonight we got it done."
Tatum also spoke about the meeting.
"Everybody was in good spirits, right? Everybody was upbeat," Tatum said. "As cliche as it sounds, we just tried to take it one game at a time. We tried to break it down of we didn't play well those first three games. We didn't deserve to win. But you know, we didn't want that to define us, to define the season. And we still got a long, uphill battle to go. But tonight was a good start, and we'll just try to carry this momentum towards Thursday."
