BOSTON — In Game 6, as in Games 1 and 3 of this Eastern Conference finals series, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown couldn’t avoid the crowd, and this time responded with 11 combined turnovers.
The Celtics’ star duo combined to only take seven second-half shots, and even if Tatum was 3 for 4 to Brown’s dreary 0 for 3 over that stretch, neither was able to rescue the Celtics from the fury of a 47-point performance from Jimmy Butler. Each Celtic only took one shot in the fourth — Tatum made his — and were generally unable to make the necessary difference.
Over the first half of the season, when performances like this one were more commonplace, it was called a lack of poise. And that issue keeps popping up at the most inconvenient times, now with Sunday’s Game 7 in Miami set to determine whether the Celtics make their first NBA Finals appearance in 12 years.
