The Magic beat and beat up the Celtics in Game 3 of their Eastern Conference first-round series Friday night at Orlando, their hideous-to-us, beautifully-ugly-to-them 95-93 victory serving as a precise reminder of why the defending champs need to get this rock-fight of a round over with as soon as possible. The Celtics will end this and send the Magic to an offseason of, I assume, randomly cheap-shotting visitors to Disney World. But the physical, hacking, and selectively dirty Magic are teaming up with the whims and grind of the postseason to put some dents in the champs, which is exactly what they don’t need from a supposedly easy first-round series. Think the Magic, who can’t shoot but are superb open-field tacklers, are annoying to watch? Imagine what it’s like to play against them. The Celtics do know what they have to do Sunday night to get their third win in this series and restore order. They cannot let the Magic continue to draw them into a plodding game, particularly on the offensive end. “We just got stagnant,” said Jayson Tatum, who scored 36 points but shot just 3 of 10 in the second half and turned over the ball seven times, often with overly casual passes. “We’ve just got to play with some more pace and movement. That’s when we’re just at our best.” Hopefully Tatum, and Jaylen Brown, too, since he has fallen into his overdribbling habit and had six turnovers of his own, heed that advice. If the Magic are taking away the 3-point line, which they do extremely well, forget fiddling around and falling into iso-ball routines, and attack. “Respond with force,” as Brown put it, referencing both the proper offensive approach and the overall mind-set they have to have against a Magic team whose fundamental ’90s basketball philosophy seems to be, “They can’t call every foul.” The Celtics can beat the Magic on pure skill, but it’s going to be fascinating to see if they decide to match the Magic’s aggressiveness. Brown, who suffered a dislocated finger in Game 3, did issue a warning. “There might be a fight breaking out or something, because it’s starting to feel like it’s not even basketball and the refs are not controlling their environment,” he said. I kind of hope they do counterpunch, figuratively if not quite literally, and you know Joe Mazzulla, who is always for a little blood on the hardwood, probably would be cool with the literal part. I’m not necessarily suggesting a McHale-on-Rambis sort of open-court takedown, and I’m not suggesting they borrow Isaiah Stewart from the Pistons for the night. Let’s just say that Franz Wagner, who has the ugliest 3-point shot south of Cameron Payne but has been cooking Kristaps Porzingis one-on-one at will, is overdue for a hip-check into the third row on one of his all-too-comfortable jaunts to the hoop. I nominate Al Horford and his dad-strength as the deliverer of the overdue message. In a weirdly reassuring way, the loss was a reminder of the Celtics’ rather large margin for error, and why, if injury attrition doesn’t get them along the way, they should be considered at the least the favorite to emerge from the East. One thing went right — Tatum looked like himself after missing Game 2 with a bone bruise in his wrist. His status Friday went from doubtful, to questionable, to, in the first half at least, automatic. We can exhale in unison now. Everything else bordered on a debacle. Porzingis endured another rough one (he’s 0-for-10 from three in the series), his best game being one where his forehead was split open. The Magic are one of the few teams that can remind Payton Pritchard that he’s small. Sam Hauser doesn’t have a point in the series. The Celtics turned over the ball 21 times, gave up 15 offensive rebounds and 15 second-chance points, blew a 10-point halftime lead, scored just 11 points in third period, endured some curious officiating, and played without Jrue Holiday, who almost certainly would have made a clutch play or two in the final moments, because that’s what he does. And yet they lost by only 2. Sure, the loss did feel like a flashback to some of their immature, underwhelming playoff performances against lesser opponents in their pre-champion days. (Think: the six-game first-round series against the Hawks in ’23.) But this Celtics core absorbed many lessons on the journey to collecting Banner 18 last summer, and they have earned faith that they will get this right in Game 4. They know what they need to do. Play smarter and faster, in part because it’s smart to get away from this feisty opponent as fast as possible. And if they can put a few retaliatory dents in the Magic along the way, even better. Time to remind them that there are consequences for coming at the champ.
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