Antoine Walker joins Jones & Mego, defends Joe Mazzulla
Jimmy Butler doesn’t need any extra motivation to step up in crunch time and take a playoff game into his hands. He has already done that plenty against the Celtics and others over the years.
But if he did need some fuel, he got it courtesy of Grant Williams in the Heat’s 111-105 Game 2 win at TD Garden Friday night.
With 6:37 remaining, Williams drilled a three before Butler could close on him and pushed the Celtics’ lead to nine at 96-87. In an alternate universe where the C’s hang on for the win, that would have stood out as the defining moment of a mostly solid night for Williams, who re-entered the rotation and played 26 minutes after not seeing the floor at all in Game 1.
In this universe, however, Williams’ night would ultimately be defined by what happened at the other end of the court seconds later.
Butler drove on Williams, spun off him, hit a shot, and drew a foul in the process. Words were exchanged, and suddenly Williams and Butler were face-to-face and just about screaming at each other.
Both got technical fouls for the exchange. Butler went to the line and hit his free throw to cut the Celtics’ lead to six. Then he scored six more points over the next four minutes as the Heat erased the rest of the deficit.
Butler hit a jumper over Williams with 2:58 to go to tie the game at 100 all. After a Marcus Smart turnover, he came right back and hit another shot in Williams’ face to give Miami its first lead since early in the third quarter. They would hold onto that lead for the rest of the game.
Obviously, it’s a tough look for Williams. The narrative writes itself: Williams poked the bear, and then got run over by the bear for the next several minutes. It was reminiscent of an incident in March, when Williams told Cleveland’s Donovan Mitchell he was going to hit two late free throws to give the Celtics a win, only to miss them both en route to an overtime loss.
But to pin this loss entirely on Williams, or even mostly on him, would be incredibly unfair. It’s not Williams’ fault that Jaylen Brown shot 7-of-23 and had an all-around brutal night, including a pair of costly turnovers late. It’s not Williams’ fault that Jayson Tatum made zero field goals in the fourth quarter for a second straight game and had five turnovers on the night. And having Williams try to guard Butler 1-on-1 down the stretch was a choice coach Joe Mazzulla made, not Williams.
Williams was actually the only Celtic to make a field goal in the game’s final eight minutes. He made three. Williams may have woken up Butler, but it’s not his responsibility to wake up his teammates, all of whom have been in this situation before, and struggled in this situation before.
After the game, Williams explained that Butler “said something, and I just responded.”
“I’m a competitor and I’m gonna battle,” Williams told reporters. “He got the best of me tonight, and at the end of the day, it’s out of respect, because I’m not gonna run away from it.
“…For me, it’s a matter of understanding that yeah, sure, you did ‘poke a bear.’ And how are you going to respond? Because for me, he made some tough shots. I battled and I’m going to keep battling. He’s going to have to make every single tough shot the rest of the series, and I’m not going to turn and look otherwise because I respect him as a (expletive) player.”
Butler, meanwhile, was happy to feed into the narrative that Williams provided the fuel for his fourth-quarter fire, and even called him out after the final buzzer by yelling “that can’t be the answer” to “the Jimmy Butler problem.”
“Yes, it did [fuel me],” Butler said in his postgame press conference. “But that’s just competition at its finest. He hit a big shot, started talking to me. I like that. I’m all for that. It makes me key in a lot more. It pushes that will that I have to win a lot more. It makes me smile.
“I do respect him, though,” Butler added of Williams. “I just don’t know if I’m the best person to talk to.”
He’s probably not, and that’s a lesson Williams learned the hard way Friday night. The Celtics still could have won, though, if Williams’ teammates had learned their own lessons about how to play in the fourth quarter of a tight playoff game. Unfortunately, they still haven’t figured that one out, and now they’re in an 0-2 hole because of it.
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