Jaylen Brown scrolled through his phone while sitting silently in a near-empty Celtics locker room late Wednesday night. He had showered and dressed and would soon walk down a hallway to a TD Garden press conference room, where he would try to explain what had just happened in his team’s 111-101 loss to the Heat in Game 2 of an Eastern Conference opening-round playoff series.
First, he looked up and saw Derrick White sitting at his locker about 15 feet away, still in uniform with ice packs wrapped around both legs.
“It’s the playoffs,” Brown said.
White nodded in agreement before sighing.
“[Expletive] happens,” he said.
When star forward Jimmy Butler and point guard Terry Rozier were ruled out for the eighth-seeded Heat, there was a belief around the NBA that the Celtics would have little trouble flicking them aside and moving on to more substantial challenges.
But the Celtics knew better. Even while shorthanded, the Heat are still dangerous.
And after getting walloped in Game 1, Miami made several key adjustments in Game 2. First, and most prominently, the Heat began spraying 3-pointers from all angles at all times, understanding that the great equalizer would create their best chance of an upset. Then they set a franchise playoff record by drilling 23 of 43 attempts.
On defense, the Heat pushed Celtics center Kristaps Porzingis as far from the hoop as possible and made up for a size disadvantage by congesting the paint with swarming arms that swatted at entry passes as if trying to knock a bug out of the air. Porzingis shot just 1 for 9, with batted balls erasing other potential opportunities, and the Celtics were outscored by 32 points during his 30 minutes.
“It wasn’t like we weren’t playing hard or connected,” Jayson Tatum said. “There were some missed opportunities, I would say, that we wish we got back.”
This loss hardly puts the Celtics in the predicament they were in last season, when the similarly eighth-seeded Heat roared to a 3-0 series lead before a frenetic Boston comeback fell short in a Game 7 loss.
But at the very least, the Heat successfully delivered the message that no matter how undermanned they are, this will not be easy for the Celtics. Now, rather than going to Miami on Saturday night with a chance to all but finish off the Heat, the Celtics will arrive facing pressure.
“To think that you’re not going to have ups and downs throughout a run, you’re not being realistic,” coach Joe Mazzulla said. “You just have to go back and look at what we did well and what we didn’t, and then figure out the areas that we can improve upon.”
The improvements will start with stopping the Heat from crafting another historic shooting performance. Miami attempted just 33.7 3-pointers per game during the regular season, ranking 18th in the NBA. But after getting throttled in Game 1, when the Heat took 12 fewer 3-pointers than Boston, there was a renewed understanding that they needed to try something bigger and more urgent. So the 3-point barrage began.
It may have been humbling to the Celtics, who generally extinguish opponents with a similar strategy. But there was also some luck involved.
Butler is the only Heat player who shot above 40 percent from the 3-point line during the regular season, and he was back in Miami receiving medical treatment for the sprained knee that is expected to sideline him for weeks.
But there was Caleb Martin, who is quickly emerging as an unlikely villain in this city after crushing the Celtics in the conference finals last year and sending Tatum tumbling to the floor after a hard foul in Sunday’s Game 1. The guard made 34.9 percent of his 3-pointers during the regular season and hit 5 of 6 Wednesday.
There was rookie Jaime Jaquez, a 32.2 percent shooter, hitting 3 of 6. There was Tyler Herro, not just draining 6 of 11 on his way to 24 points, but also emerging as the primary playmaker and dishing out 14 assists.
“I just thought they made a lot of shots that we normally feel comfortable with,” Brown said.
Tatum and Brown, meanwhile, did not get enough support. The duo combined for 61 points (33 for Brown, 28 for Tatum), but at the start of the fourth quarter, no other Celtic had scored more than seven. The Heat’s ability to disrupt Porzingis, who was acquired last summer in large part to feast against defenses such as this one that switch on screens at every position, was most glaring.
“I think they do that a lot where they swarm, obviously being undersized but very athletic,” Jrue Holiday said. “I think that they’ve always swarmed and didn’t really let KP go one-on-one, which we’ll have to go back and look at it and try to adjust with that, too.”
The Celtics trailed by 9 points early in the fourth quarter but were positioned for a run. White hit a 3-pointer that was followed by a traditional 3-point play that made it 94-89. But 3-pointers by Haywood Highsmith and Jaquez stretched the Heat lead back to 100-91 with just over five minutes left.
Two free throws by Tatum briefly pulled the Celtics within 102-96 before Martin answered with another 3-pointer and Herro added a runner that sent many of the Garden fans shuffling to the exits.
Adam Himmelsbach can be reached at adam.himmelsbach@globe.com. Follow him @adamhimmelsbach.
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