Highlights: Tatum’s heroics can’t save C’s from blowing 24-point lead

Celtics

Highlights: Tatum’s heroics can’t save C’s from blowing 24-point lead

For the first three quarters of the Boston Celtics’ game against the New Orleans Pelicans, it looked like they were going to cruise to a victory. They started slowly out of the gate, but once they evened things up, they largely were able to keep the Pelicans at an arm’s length with strong play on both ends of the court.

Then the fourth quarter rolled around. From there, it was an unmitigated disaster.

The Celtics, who entered the quarter with an 87-74 lead and held a 24-point second-half lead, saw the Pelicans roar back with relative ease. With 4:10 left in the game, the Pelicans tied things up at 98 and the C’s faced a reckoning. They could either escape with a victory or continue folding.

They ended up executing the latter. The Pelicans managed to eke out a win in overtime to seal their largest comeback win in franchise history. It also highlighted one of the most disappointing losses of the season for the Celtics.

Jayson Tatum (32 points) did what he could to try to save the Celtics, including making two clutch shots at the end of regulation to send the game to overtime. But the team’s complete collapse on the defensive end, 46 points surrendered in the fourth quarter and overtime, ultimately did them in.

Here are the highlights from Boston’s loss.

FINAL SCORE: Pelicans 120, Celtics 115

BOX SCORE

CELTICS’ RECORD: 15-15

HIGHLIGHTS

Aaron Nesmith’s hustle and steal leads to Jaylen Brown 3-ball:

Robert Williams with the epic alley-oop jam off a feed from Jaylen:

Jayson Tatum with the easy steal, slam dunk:

Tristan Thompson rejects Zion Williamson under the basket:

JT gets open, drains a three:

Time Lord throws it down again:

Tatum puts the C’s ahead by one with 10.5 seconds left:

Tatum sends the game to overtime:

UP NEXT:

Tuesday, Feb. 23 at 7:30 p.m. ET: at Dallas Mavericks