Welcome to the Athletic NBA Show podcast here on the Athletic Podcast Network. I'm Zach Harper. Got Jared

Weiss from Indianapolis, the Boston Celtics beat the Indiana Pacers 105 102. The third close game in this series.

It is a sweep.

The brooms are out.

The Celtics are headed to the NBA finals.

The Celtics hold the Pacers scoreless in the final 333 of this ball game to win 105-102.

Jared, just business as usual for the Celtics team, right? That's what they do. The irony is they finally get a sweep, and it's by far their hardest series yet. Right. You know, like, as I've been covering a team that's just been waltzing through the postseason, so I don't remember exactly what it's like to see a challenge up close, but I think this kind of counts. It didn't go seven games.

They never thought that their entire lives were ruined, but they at least had to try.

Yeah, can you have a close sweep? This feels like it was very close, but also after game one,

when Indiana gave that away, probably at no point did I think the Celtics were going to lose a game.

I did think they were about to lose game one, and then once they went to overtime, it was all Celtics.

Obviously, game two was a blowout.

Game three was very close, but another game given away.

Game four, very close, but I don't even know if you can call this one given away.

I think the Celtics just won it.

Yeah, I mean, like the turnovers were absolutely insane at the end there.

Indiana's been doing that.

I guess one of the separators between these teams is that Boston's very late game execution generally is a little bit more composed.

Indiana kept turning it over in these huge moments and fumbling it away. But also Boston was able to manufacture some of the

shots that they needed. It's like the Jalen Brown block to the to the Derek White 3, which is pretty

much all Brown making that happen. Like that was the clean execution that you need to win these

big game from late in the postseason. And they at least got that. So, you know, I think you got to credit the Celtics more so for it. And the main thing you got to credit the Pacers for is, like, Andrew Nemhart stepped up, and was he better than Tyrese Halliburton? Like, he was incredible. The Pacers got better once they lost haliburton yeah they actually kind of did which is weird um yeah yeah is he tree young now

...