Before tipoff both teams had learnt that the Atlanta Hawks had beaten the Cleveland Cavaliers therefore - unless Chicago beat Boston – the Hawks would top group C in the NBA Cup standings. To qualify for the next phase of the tournament Boston would have to beat the Bulls by as much as possible and hope that their points differential would exceed that of the other second placed sides in the Eastern Conference. With both teams knowing they needed to win to advance and Boston needing to put points on the board to increase their chances of qualifying, the game quickly became an offensive free-for-all. Jayson Tatum was sensational through the opening three quarters, but when Boston needed it most Payton Pritchard went absolutely berserk in the fourth quarter to give Boston hope of reaching the quarter finals.
After missing the opening 17 games Kristaps Porzingis played his started his second game of the season and quickly got to work against the poor Chicago defence. The Latvian hit the Celtics first three of the night and also kickstarted another sensational first quarter of offense. Boston scored 39 points in the period and rapidly gained a 9-point lead.
However, Chicago quickly battled back and after just two minutes the Boston lead was down to just two. A growing issue for Boston is their lack of bench scoring outside of Payton Pritchard, when compared to the Bulls who had seven guys come off the bench and two of them reach double-digits, including Talen-Horton Tucker. The former Lakers guard scored nine consecutive points to give his new team a five-point lead. In typical Celtics fashion they battled back and even tied the game when Jayson Tatum beat the buzzer with a three.
After ending the half in style Tatum completely took over the game, he scored 13 points in a fantastic quarter. The former Duke Blue Devil had an exceptional night yet again with 35 points and 14 rebounds. Nevertheless, Chicago’s big man Nikola Vucevic cancelled out a lot of the good that Tatum had done, he scored 32 for the Bulls and grabbed 11 rebounds to lead the way for Chicago.
When the fourth began we quickly learnt that Derrick White had sustained a foot injury that would rule him out for the remainder of the game. In his absence the majority of the Celtics early fourth quarter offense fell to Pritchard, and he completely dominated. He scored 19 points including five threes to restore Boston’s lead. With Boston needing to rack up as big of a lead as possible, Joe Mazzulla took a timeout with just 1.6 seconds left to play. Sam Hauser then received the ball off of the inbound pass and nailed a three falling away to the corner which gave Boston a 138-129 win.
For Boston to qualify for the knockout stages they will need Orlando to beat the Knicks on Tuesday night and one of either Milwaukee or Detroit to beat each other by 7 or more points.
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