Quite a few fans of the Boston Celtics were thinking the same thing as Los Angeles Lakers legend Magic Johnson when the dust settled on the Celtics’ Game 4 overtime loss to the Philadelphia 76ers, although the players on Boston’s roster seemed to feel otherwise. “I thought Celtics’ Head Coach (Joe) Mazzulla made a mistake not calling a timeout and setting up a play in the final seconds of the game,” opined Jackson on social media postgame.
“We’ve been doing it all year,” countered Al Horford to the media via MassLive’s Brian Robb. “We feel confident in that and I felt like that was the right thing. The momentum was there. Jayson had the ball in his hands making a great play. And if Smart would have caught it half a second earlier, it would have been down.”
“I’m not getting too hung up on that play,” he added.
“I’m sure you guys know if you call a timeout they’ve got a chance to set up their defense,” suggested Jayson Tatum. “Sometimes when you call a timeout. There’s times you feel confident that you’re going to get a good shot. You’ve just got to trust that the guys on the floor are going to make the right plays. I should have passed it probably a second earlier.”
There is a world where both Magic, Tatum, and Horford are all right in that the Duke alum ought to have been (and should continue to) getting into his actions faster, but Mazzulla should have called a timeout once it was clear he was not going to do so.
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Story originally appeared on Celtics Wire