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Jaylen Brown said the Cavaliers couldn’t stop he and team-mate Jayson Tatum after the pair combined for 64 points in the Boston Celtics’ 129-117 win against Cleveland.
Brown matched his career-high with 34 points, Tatum had 24 of his 30 points in the opening half and the Celtics cruised to their fifth straight victory on Friday night.
“I think that the both of us together, it is hard to scheme and stop us both,” Brown said. “We just come out and try to be aggressive. Days like today they couldn’t stop either of us.”
The Celtics have quite a young pair of stars developing in Brown and Tatum.
Brown posted the first consecutive 30-point games of his career. He had 30 in Boston’s Christmas Day win at Toronto.
“They both have been able to do a lot and have consistently grown and gotten better,” Boston coach Brad Stevens said.
“But I do not think we saw anything today that we haven’t seen out of both those guys in the last couple weeks, the last couple months. They have been playing well, and they obviously are playing confidently and feel good.”
Kevin Love equalled his season-high with 30 points and had seven rebounds for the Cavaliers, who had won their last three games and four of six. Collin Sexton added 21 points.
“Yeah, you see progression from both of those guys, and they are going to continue to get better because they are so young and hungry to get better,” Love said of Boston’s emerging pair.
“Every time I watch Boston, I am very envious of what they have out there, and remind myself they were much like us five years ago,” Cleveland coach John Beilein said. “They just have so many, four guys out there that are explosive, can score at any time.”
The Celtics only trailed in the opening minutes and led 62-47 at half-time.
1:15 Boston closed the first quarter by scoring the final seven points, taking a 33-22 lead into the break after Tatum’s three-pointer with 4.9 seconds left.
The Celtics then had a 10-0 spree midway through the second, turning a 12-point lead to 48-26 on Tatum’s step-back three from the right wing.
After the intermission, Boston maintained a double-digit lead for the entire third quarter, building it to 84-62 on Enes Kanter’s lay-up midway in before Love helped the Cavs slice it to 92-81 after three.
Cleveland finally reduced their deficit into single digits early in the fourth, but Boston put the game away when Brown nailed consecutive triples from the left wing 25 seconds apart that made it 108-90 with just over seven minutes to play.
