NEW YORK — Injured Celtics star Jayson Tatum visited the team hotel on Thursday, his teammates said Friday at the morning shootaround ahead of the Game 6 loss to the Knicks.
Tatum underwent surgery to repair a ruptured Achilles’ tendon on Tuesday. His mood during the visit was as good as it could have been under the circumstances, Payton Pritchard said.
“It was really good seeing him, obviously he’s out of surgery,” Pritchard said. “He seemed like he was in really good spirits and stuff.”
“Honestly, he’s probably about to be stir crazy for a while now, but it was just good when you see one of your brothers, your teammates, go through a situation like that and you just want to be there to comfort him with anything he needs.”
While the Celtics had a win-or-go-home showdown ahead of them, that didn’t come up much during Tatum’s visit. The Celtics won by 25 points at TD Garden Wednesday night without Tatum, but were unable to muster the same kind of performance in Game 6.
“We didn’t talk about basketball at all,” Pritchard said. “That stuff is bigger than basketball now. It’s just seeing how he is as a person, how he’s dealing with stuff. The basketball side, we’ll handle that. Just want to check in as a friend.”
This time, the Knicks thrashed the shorthanded Celtics, holding them to just 37 points in the first half of their 119-81 triumph over the defending champions.
New York’s defensive renaissance came one game after they gave up a series-worst 127 points in their Game 5 loss at TD Garden.
They returned home with renewed energy, while the Celtics looked depleted as they tried to squeeze the last bit of juice from their offense without their top scorer and rebounder.
Help wanted
Missing Tatum changed the Celtics’ approach in multiple ways, Pritchard said before the game.
“He’s a great player that can attack isolations and matchups,” he said. “When you have a stud like that, you take advantage of that.”
“We don’t have that anymore so now we need to transition into more pace, more off ball, more stuff like that. It doesn’t mean some of us aren’t able of attacking, it’s just that JT is at a different level with that.”
Mitchell Robinson with OUTSTANDING defense… leads to a layup for Karl-Anthony Towns on the other end!
NYK on a 17-4 run in the 2Q on ESPN 👏 pic.twitter.com/TmKtT53rax
— NBA (@NBA) May 17, 2025
Jaylen Brown committed seven turnovers, one shy of his career-high that was set during Game 7 of the 2023 Eastern Conference finals. Tatum left that game with an ankle injury on the first possession.
Brown finished with 20 points after fouling out with 2:50 to go in the third quarter, and his teammates did not provide much offensive help Friday night.
Kristaps Porzingis, who has been battling a lingering viral illness, struggled again. Derrick White, who began Games 4 and 5 with the hot hand from beyond the arc, struggled to find his shooting stroke. Jrue Holiday and Al Horford didn’t provide enough to move the needle.
The Celtics shot 26 for 71 (36.6 percent) from the field as a team and 11 for 37 (29.7 percent) from deep.
Second-round struggles
A soft-spoken Joe Mazzulla offered his congratulations to the Knicks at the podium, saying the Celtics ran into a great team in the second round.
The second-round has proven to be treacherous for defending champions in recent years. The last four teams to win it all have all fallen in the second round the following year.
“I think that’s what we’ll spend the summer looking through,” Mazzulla said. “That’s obviously a psychological hurdle over the last, what, seven or eight years now. Spent time studying that this offseason, just wasn’t able to get through that hurdle.”
The Warriors were the last team to repeat as champion in 2018. The Celtics have not won back-to-back titles since Bill Russell’s final season in 1969.
As deflating as the Tatum injury was, the Celtics blew two 20-point leads at home in this series and were down by nine with three minutes remaining in Game 4 when Tatum got hurt.
The Knicks left no doubt in Game 6, dominating the Celtics from the opening tip.
Brown said losing feels even worse now that the Celtics know what it’s like to taste championship glory. Losing to the rival Knicks was not a welcome feeling, he said.
“Losing to the Knicks feels like death,” Brown said. “But I was always taught there’s life after death. So, whatever’s next in the journey, I’ll be ready for.”
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