TD GARDEN — Jayson Tatum dropped 26 points in the Boston Celtics 99-91 win over the Indiana Pacers in Game 2 of the series on Wednesday night. Finally, he was able to do so with Kyrie Irving on the floor. Sierra Goodwill, Jeff Goodman and Jimmy Toscano have more on the importance of Tatum’s consistency throughout the NBA Playoffs. “I get really excited,” Tatum said of the playoffs. “It’s the best time of the year for basketball and it’s the most important time of the year. You’ve got to try to be your best, be aggressive, because every game really counts. “In the playoffs you don’t win quickly or lose quickly,” Tatum said. “It’s a long game. We needed everybody out there.” ON FINAL 3: “We were just all on the same page toward the end,” Tatum said. “We were making great plays, sharing the ball, getting stops.” Too Busy to watch The Garden Report video segments? Then subscribe to the PODCAST version HERE and listen to all your favorite Celtics’ personalities and analysts on-the-go! Get the inside scoop on the Celtics every week on CLNS Media’s Celtics Beat Podcast with host Adam Kaufman. Listen and subscribe here . For all your Celtics content needs throughout the 2018-2019 season follow us on Twitter @CelticsCLNS<doc-sep>Using a big run to erase a 12-point fourth-quarter deficit, the Boston Celtics took a 2-0 series lead over the Indiana Pacers on Wednesday night with a 99-91 Game 2 home victory. It was definitely a defensive game, but nowhere near the 84-74 slugfest the teams played in the opener on Saturday. Boston was led by Kyrie Irving, who scored a game-high 37 points on 15-for-26 shooting, including 6-for-10 3-pointers, while handing out seven assists. Jayson Tatum added 26 points, including some clutch late buckets to help seal the win for Boston. Indiana had four players in double figures, led by Bojan Bojanovic's 23 points on 4-of-8 3-point shooting, but the Pacers once again struggled to put the ball in the basket when it mattered most. Here are a few takeaways from Boston's Game 2 win. Kyrie, Kyrie, Kyrie Irving is one of the best scorers in the NBA, and his full arsenal was on display during Wednesday's Game 2. Irving had pretty much every facet of his offensive game working, hitting 3-pointers, mid-range pull-ups, and finishing at the rim. With his team trailing by four in the fourth quarter, Irving checked in at the 7:35 mark and proceeded to knock down two 3-pointers to give Boston the lead and all the momentum. Big plays by Tatum The Pacers wisely began to force the ball out of Irving's hands late, which left it up to other Celtics to step up and close out the game. Tatum answered the bell, hitting a huge corner 3 in transition to give the Celtics the lead, then finding Gordon Hayward under the basket for a wide-open layup to make it a 3-point game with 12.1 seconds left to play. He also sealed the win with a soaring and-one dunk to give Boston a 2-0 series lead. There's been some talk about Tatum's progression being stymied a bit this season, but his performance late in Game 2 shows he's capable of being a big-time playoff presence for Boston. Ice-cold Pacers After struggling offensively for much of Game 1, the Pacers looked much better on Wednesday night. But, when crunch time hit in the fourth quarter and Boston ramped up its defensive intensity, Indiana simply couldn't buy a bucket. Most of their looks were well defended, but they went freezing cold as the Celtics went on a 16-0 run, during which they took a late fourth-quarter lead. Eventually the run was broken by a Wesley Matthews 3-pointer, but never was Victor Oladipo's absence more noticeable than when the Pacers desperately needed a bucket down the stretch, and seemingly had nowhere to turn. Don't sleep on Bojan He may not be a household name, but Bojan Bogdanovic has had an excellent year for the Pacers. He was already one of the best 3-point shooters in the NBA, but was thrust into much more of a playmaking role as Indiana's leading scorer following the Oladipo injury. He was fantastic on Wednesday night, nearly pushing the Pacers to victory with two big 3-pointers late in the fourth, but ultimately they fell short.<doc-sep>The Boston Celtics are winning ugly, but they’re winning. On the strength of their two young guns — Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown — along with a ridiculous closing fury from Kyrie Irving, the Celtics held off another workmanlike effort from the Indiana Pacers to win, 104-96, and take a 3-0 lead in their first-round series. Boston will have its shot at a sweep on Sunday. The Celtics were as inconsistent a team as there was during the regular season, finishing a disappointing fourth place in the Eastern Conference. That set up this opening-round date with the Victor Oladipo-less Pacers. The hope for the Celtics was that they could find their consistency before facing the Milwaukee Bucks in Round 2, but they have found all three meetings with Indiana an uphill battle. After falling behind by double digits in the first two games of the series, Boston blitzed the Pacers in the opening quarter, taking a 41-28 lead thanks to 4-for-4 shooting from Brown and 8-of-10 shooting from distance as a team. As was the case in Game 2, though, the Pacers put the clamps on Boston for the remainder of the game. It took another 25 minutes for the Celtics to score 41 more points, and in that time Indiana made it a game. Well, until Irving did this: Irving has been everything the Celtics could have imagined in the clutch. Despite some shaky shooting through the first three quarters, he followed that ridiculous spinning fadeaway jumper over Domantas Sabonis with an assist on an Al Horford 3-pointer that gave Boston a seven-point lead with four minutes to play. His ability to penetrate was magnetic, drawing defenders to him and creating space for a closing lineup that also featured Tatum, Brown and Gordon Hayward — the quintet that was supposed to make the Celtics one of the league’s most dynamic teams. There was some question as to whether the Celtics would flip the proverbial switch in the playoffs, and while they haven’t looked flawless, they’ve been good enough to be the first team to take a 3-0 lead in any series this year. Momentum is building. Story continues It doesn’t hurt that Brown and Tatum combined for 41 points on 16-of-25 shooting. (Brown was 8-of-9 from the field and 4-of-5 from distance.) If those two are playing at that level, the Celtics could be scary, especially with Irving in the closer’s role. Irving added 19 points and 10 assists in the win, and didn’t play well. Neither did Gordon Hayward, who had six points on seven shots. There is plenty of room for improvement, but Boston is becoming a real threat. The defense has been the NBA’s best in the playoffs, holding Indy below 100 points in a third straight game. The Celtics have yet to see everyone running on all cylinders, but contributions from at least two supporting actors before Irving steals the show has been a recipe for success against an inferior opponent. That won’t be enough against top-seeded Milwaukee, but Boston has at least one more game to cook up some consistency. Kyrie Irving might be the best closer in the playoffs thus far. (Getty Images) – – – – – – – Ben Rohrbach is a staff writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at rohrbach_ben@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @brohrbach More from Yahoo Sports:<doc-sep>If the Celtics are going to live up to expectations this postseason, they’re going to need Jayson Tatum to do the same. The young wing will ultimately decide Boston’s ceiling. When the Celtics are struggling, they can look so ordinary that it's genuinely shocking. That's what we saw in the third quarter of Game 2 against the Pacers. Marcus Morris was bricking pull-ups, Gordon Hayward was finishing drives with meek fadeaways, Al Horford looked 45 years old, Kyrie Irving's isolation scoring wasn't enough, and Terry Rozier was hurting more than he was helping. In general, the third quarter Wednesday night was one of those now-familiar stretches where the answer to "What happened to the Celtics?" begins to seem like, "Maybe they were never that good." When the fourth quarter began, things changed. Horford sparked a run with four quick points (his first all night) before switching all over the floor and helping smother the Pacers on defense—Indiana didn't make a single shot inside the three-point line over the final 12 minutes. Kyrie, meanwhile, continued to do Kyrie things. He got whatever he wanted against the Pacers defense, destroying Indiana on switches, and finishing with 37 points on the night. An 11-point deficit at the end of the third quarter became an 8-point Boston win by the buzzer. The finish was a reminder of why the Celtics might still be dangerous after a season full of false starts and empty hype. But if last night's game was both sides of the Boston coin and everything that makes this team so confounding, it's telling that it was neither Horford's defense nor Kyrie's offense that actually put the Celtics over the top. The difference was Jayson Tatum. With the Pacers swarming Irving in the final minutes, it was Tatum who buried a monster three in the final minute to give Boston the lead. Then, 30 seconds later, it was Tatum who passed up a contested three to drive the lane, draw help defenders, and then find Gordon Hayward wide-open down low for a game-sealing layup. Tatum is the one who will decide how far this Celtics team can actually go. Kyrie isn't dominant enough on a nightly basis to carry this offense on his own, and Horford isn't explosive enough to provide the kind of firepower that makes Boston dangerous. Hayward has his moments, and I'm sure Jaylen Brown will have a handful of huge games in the next few weeks, but Tatum is a better shooter than Brown and a better finisher than Hayward. He's the wing this team needs more than anyone else. The Celtics only look like the team they are supposed to be when Tatum is playing like the future star everyone thinks he is. It's been a complicated two years for Tatum. As a rookie, he entered the league drawing hand-wringy comparisons to Rudy Gay before exploding onto the scene and exceeding all reasonable expectations in Year One. He averaged 13.9 PPG and 5.0 RPG, shooting 47.5% from the floor and 43.4% from three-point range, and he was dominant for various stretches of Boston's conference finals run. Celtics fans emerged from last year talking about Tatum like he was a future MVP candidate—and certainly untouchable in trade talks. In Year Two, after a summer of workouts with Kobe Bryant that were mentioned on every single Celtics broadcast for the first two months of the season, Tatum has regressed in some key areas. His three-point shooting is down (37.5%) and his shot selection has changed. After taking 32% of his shots at the rim as a rookie, that number dropped to 26% this season. While he still puts up a healthy number of attempts from three—30% of his overall shots—despite the dip in his accuracy, a lot of Tatum's shots at the rim have become pull-ups, and he's now taking 43.9% of his shots in the midrange. Most of those shots are contested, too, and he's hitting them less often than he did as a rookie (42% to 34.9%). This was a season in which an MVP trajectory began to look a little bit far-fetched, and a Rudy Gay trajectory began to get uncomfortably realistic. Tatum isn't exceptionally explosive as an athlete, his handle can look suspect at times, and if his threes aren't falling, his game begins to look like a highlight reel of contested pull-ups that don't really fit in the modern NBA. He's no longer considered untouchable in trade talks after this season, either. In fact, most around the NBA expect the Celtics to offer him for Anthony Davis in July. Tatum, himself, reportedly said, "Yeah, I'd trade me for Anthony Davis, too." The question is whether anything that happens over the next few weeks might change the way we think about this story. Tatum is still really good. If not quite an MVP-in-waiting, he could definitely be a perennial top-15 player along the lines of Paul George. For all the gripes about midrange jumpers, it’s encouraging that he can create clean looks for himself in the halfcourt, a skill that becomes twice as valuable in a playoff setting. He can also guard multiple positions, and he can hit threes. He had 26 points against the Pacers on Wednesday after 15 points in Game 1, and after shooting 35% from three after the All-Star Break, he might be due to bounce back at the perfect time. One of the craziest things about the NBA playoffs is how much reputations can change based on a handful of random-seeming events. If Tatum had missed his three in the final minute, for instance, maybe the Celtics never retake the lead and Indiana wins Game 2. In that case, every conversation today probably focuses on another relapse for a perpetually disappointing Celtics team—not the return of Kyrie Irving and the team everyone was expecting. Those narrative stakes are ridiculous, but they're also what makes playoff basketball so addictive in the first place. And with that in mind, now we can all wait and see where the story goes for Tatum.<doc-sep>
Winslow Townson/Associated Press As much as Uncle Drew dazzles in the regular season, Playoff Kyrie Irving ups the ante from every angle. Irving did Irving things early and often during the Boston Celtics' Game 2 victory over the Indiana Pacers on Wednesday. The Shamrocks needed every last one of them, as the Victor Oladipo-less Pacers were typically quicker to the basketball, flowed better on offense and played with relentlessness on the other end. For 47 minutes, it seemed Irving and the Pacers would trade body blows until the final whistle. Then Jayson Tatum happened. The 21-year-old owned the final minute. His fingerprints were found on eight of the 10 points scored in that stretch, which turned a 91-89 Boston deficit into a 99-91 win for the preseason favorite now looming as the Eastern Conference's biggest wild card. Tatum's corner triple off a delicious dime from Jaylen Brown gave the Celtics a 92-91 advantage with 50.8 seconds remaining. The next time down, he fed a cutting Gordon Hayward to push Boston's lead to 94-91. One horrifically timed Pacers miscue later—Wesley Matthews' inbounds pass went out of bounds—Tatum sealed the victory by hammering home an and-1 flush. "He made the right plays," Celtics head coach Brad Stevens succinctly said of Tatum. Video Play Button Videos you might like That's coach speak for: "We don't win this game without him." And the Celtics definitely don't. They followed Irving's lead, but the six-time All-Star could only do so much. His jaw-dropping stat line of 37 points, seven assists and six rebounds barely budged in the final minute, with only one defensive board added to his tally. In other words, even with Irving at—or very close to—his best, Boston couldn't shake loose of the scrappy but starless squad. Three different starters scored in single digits, including Al Horford, who powered through illness but supplied just four points in 37 minutes. The second unit managed only 21 points on 24 shots, and that's with Hayward notching 13 points on 4-of-7 shooting from the field. The Celtics never hit their stride until Tatum did. And if Boston is going to shake off a season of frustrating inconsistency and never-quite-right chemistry to make the lengthy playoff push so many envisioned, he must continue to serve as a big part of the formula. Irving lives for this time of year. We know that already. The Celtics' support scorers are shaky from one game to the next. That's not new information. But Tatum can be the exception when he plays to his potential. We should know that already, too. No player's stock saw a bigger jump during last year's postseason. Thrust into the spotlight by injuries to Irving and Hayward, Tatum—barely a month removed from his 20th birthday when those playoffs began—calmly grabbed the keys to this offense and had the most playoff points for a team that fell one win shy of the NBA Finals. "Circumstances don't affect him," Stevens told Sopan Deb of the New York Times. "First game of the season, he's unaffected by the jitters that everybody has. Seventh game of a playoff series? Unaffected. At least, he shows himself to be unaffected, and he can thrive in that environment." Young as Tatum is, Wednesday was already the 21st postseason outing of his career. Some may argue that's not enough time to form a playoff reputation. Maybe they're right. But that wouldn't make the early returns on his 2019 postseason any less encouraging. Through two games, he's supplied 41 points on 54.8 percent shooting and striped six of his nine long-distance looks. "I just get really excited," Tatum said. "It's the best time of the year." Behind that mentality, the Celtics could be transforming before our eyes. They'll always be stingy on defense while Stevens calls the shots. They'll always have an isolation wizard while Irving rocks green and white. But this isn't a championship-caliber offense without Tatum resembling—or, better yet, outperforming—the breakout star we saw last season. Assuming Boston disposes of Indiana, it likely has a showdown waiting with the top-seeded Milwaukee Bucks and MVP contender Giannis Antetokounmpo. Find a way out of that series, and it might go head-to-head with the Toronto Raptors or Philadelphia 76ers, both multi-star teams. Survive the Eastern Conference gauntlet, and it's on to face the Golden State Warriors, James Harden's Houston Rockets or whatever the Wild West sends to the championship round. The Celtics aren't making that trek without Tatum at his best.