Miami is guaranteeing a Game 7 victory. Boston is looking to complete an impossible comeback, to rewrite history instead of just being a footnote to it.
Either Miami’s Jimmy Butler and Erik Spoelstra will pull off Joe Namath-Mark Messier-type guarantees Monday at TD Garden, or they’ll suffer the biggest choke in the annals of playoff basketball.
To many, Boston may have as much talent as any team in the league. But this Game 7 won’t be just about talent but temperament, the ability to handle pressure. Boston hasn’t always done that well at home in these playoffs, but have given themselves a golden opportunity to erase all that.
But it’s just a chance, nothing more, if they don’t finish the job.
The Red Sox are the only Major League Baseball team to overturn an 0-3 deficit — in the 2004 ALCS against the Yankees en route to a World Series win. Nobody has ever pulled it off in the NBA, but the Celtics are a Monday win away.
Of the 150 NBA teams that had tried, only three had even forced a Game 7; and all of them fell short on the road. Boston is on the brink, but brinks don’t count.
“Oh, no, we all talked about it. We’re all aware it’s not time to celebrate. We didn’t accomplish anything,” Jayson Tatum said. “The job is far from finished. This is a great [Heat] team, really well-coached team, and we’ve got to be ready on Monday. It’s not over.
“The series is not over. We’ve still got a big game Monday.”
Injuries — the second-most in the league this season — have made this year hard on the Heat, who had to fight through the play-in. The Celtics — talented, but inconsistent — have made things tough on themselves.
Throughout these playoffs, Boston has given away games through a lack of focus. Yes, they’re 5-0 in elimination games, but a team this gifted shouldn’t have been repeatedly pushed to the limit by the 76ers and shorthanded Heat.
“It doesn’t get too much worse than being down 0-3. We feel like we’ve been to hell and back. We feel like we can face any adversity that gets thrown at us,” Jaylen Brown said. “It all means nothing if we don’t come out and give our best effort on our home floor on Monday night.
“I can’t even imagine what it’s going to be like for Game 7. It’s going to be huge. The best two words in sports is ‘Game 7.’ ”
Actually, the best two are world champs. And after upsetting top-seeded Milwaukee and eliminating the Knicks, the eighth-seeded Heat had won their chance to play for a title. Until they fumbled it away, allowing Derrick White’s tip-in with a fraction of a second to lose Game 6 on Saturday night in Miami.
It was in the same building where Heat star Ray Allen hit his iconic shot to beat San Antonio in Game 6 of the NBA Finals in 2013, forcing a climactic Game 7. The Spurs shook off that heartbreak of having the title ripped away and played well, but fell in the end. Will the Heat suffer a similar fate?
The Heat are heavy eight-point underdogs, and TNT’s Charles Barkley said “There’s not a person in America” who thinks Miami will win. But there will be a handful in the Heat locker room Monday that believe they will.
“I don’t know how we are going to get this done, but we are going up there and getting it done,” Spoelstra said.
“I’m not going to let our guys quit,” Butler said. “I don’t give a damn what happens, we’re going to go in there and we’re going to win.”
If they don’t, they’ll have suffered the biggest postseason collapse in NBA history. And written the most unpredictable chapter in Boston’s unpredictable season.