In an appearance on WFAN prior to the start of the Nets-Celtics series, Brooklyn GM Sean Marks admitted that his team had a lot of offensive firepower, but had some defensive deficiencies they hoped to clean up during the postseason.
Marks, then, surely didn't enjoy watching Jayson Tatum drop 50 points – one more than LeBron James' 49 in 2014 for the most against the Nets in a playoff game – in the Celtics' win Friday night, which cut Brooklyn's series lead to 2-1.
Neither did head coach Steve Nash.
"They definitely are gonna have belief now," Nash said after the game. "They got a win at home and were able to stop the momentum after playing two games in Brooklyn. Big challenge for us. We've got to come out and be sharper, be better at both ends of the floor and try to slow them down and execute offensively."
The team has to slow down Tatum, who shot better than 50 percent from both the floor overall (16-of-30) and almost 50 percent from three-point range (5-of-11).
"He had some tough ones over us tonight. I don't think he got anything easy, but for a scorer like that, once you start to see the ball go into the rim, it just pushed that team to another level," Kevin Durant said of Tatum. "So I feel like the fadeaways he was making, the step-back threes, those are his shots but we've still got to contest on them, so I think we've got to be more physical as a group with our switches and our rebounding and getting out in transition. We'll watch the film and see how we can get better."
Durant, though, sees Brooklyn's late comeback as a positive.
"We started off the game well, but for the whole game we've got to consistently be there for each other defensively. If we do that, we're in good shape," Durant said. "Their best player had 50 points, and we're still in the game late. That's as solid a sign of anything, but we don't want to take no moral victories out of nothing, we've just got to come back with it next game."
That next game is Sunday night, and is incredibly pivotal – a Nets win gives them a 3-1 lead coming back home for Game 5, but a Celtics win makes it a virtual best-of-three.
Sunday's Game 4 now becomes even more crucial, as the Nets can either push Boston to the brink of elimination, or the Celtics can even up the series with all of the momentum on their side.
"We've got to play better as a unit, and we will in Game 4.
This this thing isn't going to get easy for us, like, it's going to be difficult. We expect that," James Harden said. "We've got to take up the challenge of being more detailed on our coverages on both ends and whatever we've got to do, and just take it possession-by-possession."
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