Coming off three straight road games against championship hopefuls, the Celtics got a reprieve Saturday in their return to TD Garden.
The Washington Wizards are one of several teams vying for the No. 1 pick in the 2026 NBA Draft, and they looked expectedly overmatched in a 111-100 loss to Boston.
The victory snapped a two-game losing streak for the Celtics, who came up short against the San Antonio Spurs on Tuesday and Oklahoma City Thunder on Thursday while playing without multiple rotation players.
Jayson Tatum, who sat out against OKC along with fellow starter Derrick White, overcame a slow start Saturday to finish with 20 points, 14 rebounds, seven assists and two steals while shouldering his heaviest workload since his return from Achilles surgery last Friday. Tatum played 32 minutes — up from 27 in each of his first three outings — checking back in midway through the fourth quarter after Washington had cut a 30-point Celtics lead to 14.
Neemias Queta led all scorers with 24 points — 22 of them in the first half — to go along with 10 boards, three assists and one block. His backup, Luka Garza, added 15 points off the bench, with the two big men shooting a combined 16-for-19 from the field.
The Celtics’ primary offensive weapon early in the game was feeding Queta inside. Boston’s starting center racked up 13 first-quarter points on 6-of-8 shooting. Five of those makes were layups, with Tatum and Jaylen Brown assisting on two apiece.
Given how well Queta has played this season, that at-the-rim scoring binge was impressive, but not shocking. It did, however, underscore just how far he has come since being named the starter last summer. Before this season, the 7-footer had scored 13 points in a full game just four times in his NBA career.
Luka Garza, Queta’s primary backup while Nikola Vucevic’s fractured ring finger heals, continued the trend early in the second quarter, converting three layups in a three-minute span.
Boston’s perimeter shooting took longer to develop, which helped the underdog Wizards hang around through the opening quarter. The Celtics went 2-for-12 from 3-point range in the first. Washington went 7-for-16, including three straight makes by Tristan Vukcevic, and led 27-26 late in the first.
Then the Celtics’ threes started falling. Baylor Scheierman hit one to close the first quarter, Sam Hauser added two early in the second and Boston surged ahead. It outscored Washington 35-14 in the second quarter to take a 64-41 lead into halftime.
All the while, the Celtics kept getting the ball to Queta, and he kept piling up points. At the half, he had 22 on 10-of-12 shooting, five shy of the single-game career high he set against Philadelphia two weeks earlier. Nearly all of his production came in or near the restricted area, including a nifty spinning layup around Wizards center Alex Sarr.
Sarr, the No. 2 overall pick in 2024, is a minus-101 across six career meetings with Boston.
As the second quarter wound down, Tatum began to find his stroke. His outing followed a similar pattern to his season debut against Dallas last Friday: zero points in the first 20-plus minutes of game time, then eight in the final 3:04 before halftime.
The recently recovered Celtics star drew a shooting foul, fed Queta for a cutting dunk and sank a 3-pointer on consecutive Celtics possessions, then pulled up for an 18-footer a minute later.
Tatum carried his momentum into the second half, notching another eight points and five rebounds in the first six minutes of the third quarter. By the 8:33 mark of the third, he’d secured his second double-double in four games since his comeback. Two minutes later, Boston’s lead reached 30.
The Wizards carried a 10-game losing streak into Saturday and were four days removed from the historic ignominy of allowing 83 points to Miami’s Bam Adebayo. But they didn’t fold. Their reserves rallied in the fourth quarter — aided by shaky shooting from Schierman (1-for-8), Hauser (4-for-11) and Payton Pritchard (2-for-11) — forcing Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla to reinsert Tatum, Brown and Queta to halt their charge.
Vutkevic’s sixth 3-pointer of the evening cut it to 104-92 with 4:21 to play before a Tatum layup and a Hauser three shut the door.
The 44-23 Celtics, who hold a 1 1/2 game lead over the New York Knicks for second place in the Eastern Conference, will host the Phoenix Suns on Monday as they continue a stretch of six home dates in seven games.