On Friday evening, Jayson Tatum and the Boston Celtics took the court in Dallas with a chance to sweep the Mavericks and win the franchise's first championship in 16 years with a Game 4 victory. Instead, the Celtics put together far and away their worst performance of the postseason so far, with Tatum and his fellow starters being pulled out of the game by head coach Joe Mazzulla before the third quarter even ended and the deficit reaching as high as 48 (!) points at one point in the contest.

This all sets the stage for Game 5 on Monday evening from Boston, where the crowd will be decidedly less hostile to the Celtics' cause and Boston will have a chance to close out the title in front of their home fans.

One major storyline of this series so far has been the health of Celtics big man Kristaps Porzingis, who was injured in the team's Game 2 victory and did not appear in either of the games in Dallas with a rare lower leg injury.

On Sunday, Mazzulla did not exactly have a very specific update for Celtics fans hoping to know whether or not the Latvian star would be back out there on Monday evening.

“He’s trying. He’s doing everything he can to put himself in position to be out there,” said Mazzulla, per Daniel Donabedian of ClutchPoints on X, the social media platform formerly referred to as Twitter.

It's worth noting that for the Celtics' Game 3 victory, Porzingis was listed as out before the contest began, while in Game 4, he was listed as available and did suit up, but never saw any playing time in the blowout loss.

Pretty much everything that could have gone wrong for the Celtics on Friday evening in Dallas did go wrong. None of the starters played well at all, and the usually stable Jrue Holiday committed five turnovers, giving Dallas some unneeded momentum.

The Mavericks, on the other hand, played with the desperation you would expect from a team looking to avoid having their season ended, and the Dallas role players all stepped up in a much bigger way than they had in their previous three defeats.

The good news for the Celtics is that they still have four out of the six best players in this series even without Porzingis and should get a boost from playing in front of their home fans, even if some of the more loyal ones may have been priced out by TD Garden's insane ticket prices.

Game 5 is set for 8:30 PM ET.