In a conference finals as unpredictable, mind-boggling, painful, and gutsy as any you’ll ever watch, the Miami Heat and Boston Celtics split their time between throwing haymakers and bobbing on the ropes. And when Miami lost Game 6 on a gut-punch putback at the buzzer, it felt like it would need something close to a miracle to prevail in Game 7 and avoid a historically unprecedented loss against a team that just beat it three straight times.
Caleb Martin might not be a miracle, but his Game 7 for the ages, helping lead Miami to a stunning 103-84 victory, on top of tremendous production and efficiency over a week of high-leverage competition, was definitely a basketball phenomenon.
In a game-high 45 minutes, Martin scored 26 points, grabbed 10 rebounds, and went 11-for-16 from the floor. The numbers alone are impressive, but the context is remarkable. Martin averaged a career-high 9.6 points per game this season. He didn’t play a second in Game 7 of last year’s conference finals, benched for the first time in that entire playoff run. Now, as someone who started only one game for the Heat since the All-Star break before Game 6, he was almost voted the MVP.
What he did in this Game 7 will be the stuff of legend. On the biggest stage of his career, in a hostile environment that was ear-drum-mutilatingly loud 10 minutes before the opening tip, Martin outplayed Boston’s two All-NBA forwards. There are top-15 players in this league right now who will never do what he did through most of this series, let alone Monday night. According to Second Spectrum, he finished with a 72.7 effective field goal percentage against Boston, a postseason high in any round from any one player who took at least 75 shots. In the series finale, at least half of his buckets were timely, challenging, and against elite defenders who took away what he initially wanted to do.
Still, Martin stopped runs. He closed quarters. He drilled stepbacks late in the shot clock. He missed four of his first five shots, and the first make was a one-handed putback that came after he beat Jaylen Brown to the ball off a box out. Martin was fortitude and resilience personified, a walking back-breaker who repeatedly sucked the air out of TD Garden. “Caleb definitely made a name for himself,” Bam Adebayo said. Look at this fallaway in the paint against basically ideal individual defense by Al Horford:
Or this baseline turnaround that had shades of Kobe Bryant. Martin got Derrick White in the air, put the ball on the floor, spun away from Rob Williams’s help, and then slashed the tires that were starting to carry momentum in Boston’s direction:
“It just shows you what I’m capable of,” Martin said. “And I just want to continue to stay locked in. I knew how they were going to guard me throughout the series, and I just want [to] take advantage of that.”
To say Martin outperformed expectations would be a slight understatement. His quantified shot-making in this series was +19.4, which is higher than any other player in these playoffs for one series (minimum 75 shots). That number is an absolute monster, but it doesn’t even fully capture just how consistent and relentless Martin was in a game that, short of the actual Finals, couldn’t possibly have had bigger stakes.
“It’s been amazing,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra reflected afterward. “Every bit the competitor that you talk about with Jimmy or Bam or whatever. Caleb is a competitor. You get to the higher stakes, the further you get along, the more competitors are going to reveal themselves. Game 7s, or get to the conference finals, it’s not for everybody in this association. Otherwise more players, more teams would do it. You have to be wired a little bit differently, and Caleb is. He’s pure. He competes on both ends. Lays it all out there for everybody to see.”
More than that, though, Martin slid right into a larger part. He looked like a better, two-way version of what the injured (and handsomely compensated) Tyler Herro would’ve likely been.
“He’s accepted different roles,” Spo continued. “But we needed him to be more of a player. With Tyler and Vic [Oladipo] out, we’ve needed more offense. But yeah, he has so much respect in that locker room just because of how hard he competes. It’s like his last breath on every single possession, and I love the guy for that.”
Martin didn’t win Game 7 by himself, of course. The Heat made 50 percent of their 3s (14-for-28) against a Celtics offense that missed their first 11 attempts and finished 9-for-42 behind the arc (which ties for their second-least accurate outing this season). Boston’s 84 points were a season low, too.
Ultimately, the Celtics couldn’t overcome their own poor shooting, or a sprained ankle sustained by Jayson Tatum on the game’s very first play. They were minus-15 in seven rough minutes by Malcolm Brogdon, who said that he would consider offseason surgery to repair the partially torn tendon in his elbow that caused pain every time he shot the ball in this series.
Tatum’s ankle kept him from moving as well as he otherwise could have. His 14 points on 13 shots helped tell that story, but even more glaring was how rigidly he moved on defense, unable to stick with Heat shooters who freed themselves up for open looks.
“It’s tough because it kind of impacted me the rest of the night,” Tatum said after the game. “It swelled up and it was just frustrating that I was kind of like a shell of myself. It was tough to move. Just frustrating. Especially it happening on the first play.”
Meanwhile, Butler scored a game-high 28 points and, increasingly, looked more comfortable than he did in Game 6, finding his spots, hunting preferable matchups, and creating space. On the other end, Miami’s defense swarmed. The Heat darted in and out of passing lanes, didn’t foul, packed the paint, squeezed the ball to the perimeter, and got back in transition.
They made life hard for Brown, who committed eight of Boston’s 15 turnovers and had a stepback blocked by Duncan Robinson. Brown missed eight 3s in total and finished 8-for-23 from the floor, capping off a massively disappointing series for him, on the cusp of a potential supermax contract extension. “My team turned to me to make plays and I came up short,” Brown said when asked how Tatum’s ankle impacted the game. “I failed. It’s tough. I give credit to Miami, but [I did] just a terrible job.”
This series was a perfect storm for the eighth-seeded Heat. They shot the ball brilliantly from behind the 3-point line, confused Boston with their zone, competed on the glass, and fought for every loose ball. They won ugly and with glamor. And the unlikely face of their success, in so many ways, was Martin. Heading to Denver for Game 1 of the NBA Finals on Thursday, the Heat may very well need him to once again be the difference-maker. It’s a tall task, on a quick turnaround, against a defense that will likely intensify its coverage on him as best it can.
“To the untrained eye, he just looks like he’s an undrafted guy who has been in the G League, who has started with Charlotte and now he’s here,” Butler said. “Started on a two-way contract. That’s what it looks like to y’all. To us, he’s a hell of a player, hell of a defender, playmaker, shot-maker, all of the above.”
And if Martin can be this phenomenal for two more weeks, Miami may just shock the world … again.
