NBA Finals: How Celtics turned key moment into Game 2 win over ...

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BOSTON — Waves are thrashing, the sky has turned black and the boat has been taking on water. What’s a frazzled skipper to do?

Drill a hole in the boat’s bottom for the water to run out, of course.

That’s essentially what happened to coach Jason Kidd when his Mavericks saw the Boston Celtics’ lead jump from two to six points deep in the third quarter. One timeout quickly turned into two timeouts and Dallas never recovered, losing Game 2 of the NBA Finals Sunday at TD Garden, 105-98.

The moment: The Celtics turned a 63-61 lead midway through the third quarter into a 69-63 edge and Kidd had seen enough. He retreated to a timeout with 4:56 left, subbed three players and advised the Mavs on how they could whittle down Boston’s biggest lead to that point.

Two minutes later — 119 seconds to be exact — Kidd was retreating and subbing en masse again. It now was Boston 75, Dallas 63.

The impact: Boston’s lead doubled in the gap between those timeouts. And everything that the Mavericks were bemoaning afterward showed up in that span. Turnovers. Three-point misses. The Celtics’ defense generated offense and struck quickly.

The teams’ disparity in depth was on display here, too. Kidd was trying to give some of his guys – Kyrie Irving, Derrick Jones Jr. and Maxi Kleber — a breather, so in that first timeout, he turned to Josh Green and Jaden Hardy, who ranked seventh and 11th, respectively, in playoff minutes among the Mavericks.

Luka Doncic, battered and in high usage, soldiered on – and had the ball stolen on Dallas’ second possession after the stop-the-bleeding break. Jaylen Brown snatched it and got it to Jrue Holiday, who dunked, all in three seconds.

Green missed a 3 — the Mavs shot 6-for-26 from the arc overall — and Holiday rebounded. Green fouled Brown for two free throws that opened the first double-digit lead of the game, 73-63.

Irving subbed back in for Doncic, but nothing changed. The crafty Mavs guard launched a 3-pointer from 26 feet that missed, with Tatum claiming the rebound. Tatum was double-teamed at the other end, only to be bailed out by the resourceful Holiday cutting for a shovel pass and layup.

From bad to worse. Kidd had seen enough, again. Huddle up, Mavs.

There were 15 minutes left in the game, but bumping that lead to 12 points gave the Celtics and their fans room to breathe, a margin for mistakes and a comfy cushion in general.

When Dallas fixed things out of timeout No. 2 and put together an 11-5 spurt, forget about tied – it still trailed by six. That made Payton Pritchard’s banked 34-footer to close the quarter more painful, pushing the lead to nine. Dallas’ sign of life in the fourth, a 9-0 run, cut the gap to five but no closer.

All thanks to needing two timeouts to accomplish what should have taken one.

What they’re saying: “Boston is a team that can run off 3s in a hurry. Just trying to keep that from happening. Also, looking at just trying to give my guys some rest because they were fighting extremely hard. We are playing uphill, and so the lead went from six to 12, but then we responded after that second timeout.” — Mavs coach Jason Kidd on his back-to-back timeouts.

“The whole year the strength of this team has been one through however many guys we’ve got. We trust whoever goes in the game and those guys just work so hard. Every time anybody checks in the game, they just give us great minutes.” — Boston guard Derrick White on his team’s depth and ability to wear out opponents.

“They have a lot of great players. Basically anybody can get off.” — Doncic on the Celtics’ depth, evident in four players scoring in the 12-2 stretch that cracked open the game.

What’s next: Kidd was satisfied with Dallas’ defense Sunday. What he talked about several times afterward was finding a reliable third scorer to join Doncic and Irving and, of course, taking better care of the ball. The Mavericks’ 15 turnovers (eight for Doncic) led directly to 21 Boston points in a game they lost by seven.

Holiday’s first season in Boston has been defined by his knack for providing whatever it takes in each game – a steal here, a bucket there, a pass or nonstop harassing on other nights. In context, that only makes the Celtics more dangerous, because they have a half dozen who can score, defend or lead by example as needed.

Kidd said the Mavericks were playing uphill in Game 2. An 0-2 start to the Finals means the hill just got steeper for Wednesday’s Game 3 (8:30 ET, ABC).

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Steve Aschburner has written about the NBA since 1980. You can e-mail him here, find his archive here and follow him on X.

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