BOSTON — The only thing you need to know about Game 1 is that Kristaps Porzingis was the best player.
He was better than Luka Doncic, he was definitely better than Kyrie Irving.
Porzingis’ playing time was limited after missing more than a month with a calf injury, but his impact in the Celtics’ easy 107-89 win over the Mavericks on Thursday night was impossible to ignore.
“It was awesome,” Jaylen Brown said of his teammate and friend. “Nobody is more proud and excited for him than I am.”
Somewhere in his lake house in Montana, or wherever he lives these days, Phil Jackson would be proud. Porzingis was his highest draft pick in 2015 and his best management hire. Of course, Jackson screwed it up. He screwed it all up, after all. But all of Porzingis’ star power, all of what we witnessed at times when he was in a Knicks uniform, was on full display on the biggest stage of all.
The Latvian recorded 20 points and three blocks in just 21 minutes off the bench, injecting the home team with the energy and productivity they needed to take Game 1.
“He was calm. You can’t let that happen,” Mavericks center Derek Lively II said. “We let him get too relaxed early in the game. We’ve got to learn from that. We’ve got to get better. He’s a shooter. We all know that. So we’ve got to limit his calmness, we’ve got to limit the shots he takes.”
Irving, meanwhile, couldn’t make a shot. As expected, he was booed in his hometown and struggled to make 12 points on just 6 of 19 field goals. Outside, stores were selling shirts with messages like “Fuck Kyrie” and one with Irving’s face with a clown nose.
The controversial guard then had a major misstep, and Doncic also struggled as he only recorded one assist.
“I felt like I had a lot of great chances,” Irving said, “and they hit the back of the rim or they missed a little bit left or right.”
The Celtics still have to prove it.
That’s the sentiment, the narrative, surrounding this team, because they’ve been so close to winning for so long that you forget Boston’s core two are still in their mid-20s. They’re doubtful because the Celtics have never won a championship.
And the first win is always the hardest.
But watching them beat the Mavericks, there’s every reason to believe this is the year Larry O’Brien returns to Beantown. The Celtics are in their 16th year with 17 wins. They lost in the 2022 Finals. They lost in the 2023 Conference Finals to the Miami Heat, and in the process, Jayson Tatum, in particular, established a reputation for losing when it really mattered.
There was some fear the same thing could happen on Thursday, when Boston’s 29-point lead dwindled to eight in the third quarter.
But this time, instead of collapsing, the Celtics rallied back and led to 19 points at the start of the fourth quarter.
game over.
Dallas head coach Jason Kidd waved the white flag with five minutes left and replaced the starting lineup. The Celtics had a deep roster around Tatum, so they didn’t expect much from him. In fact, Tatum only made 6 of 16 shots and scored 16 points. It was the rest of the team that led Boston to victory in front of a rapturous crowd.
First up was Porzingis, who had missed 10 straight games and at least five weeks with a calf injury and whose availability was arguably the biggest question mark heading into Game 1. But Porzingis scored 18 of his 20 points in the first half alone.
The X-factor was taken into account in the first match.
“He was great. He made shots, he converted shots, he blocked shots. He energized our team when he came off the bench,” Kidd said. “We need to be a little tougher offensively. We need to get him to do something different. He took great chances and made some shots.”
