After Sunday’s game at TD Garden, Al Horford shared a post on his Instagram page. “Ainda estou aqui,” the caption read, white text superimposed over a photo of the veteran big man leaping in front of the Celtics bench.
Translation: I’m still here.
It was a fitting description of Horford’s latest performance, which head coach Joe Mazzulla hailed as “elite” and “amazing.”
The 38-year-old scored 19 points on 7-of-12 shooting; grabbed eight rebounds, including three offensive boards; and tallied three steals in Boston’s 110-103 victory over Denver, all while largely limiting arguably the NBA’s best all-around player, Nuggets center Nikola Jokic.
Jokic finished with 20 points, 14 rebounds and nine assists in 39 minutes, decent but unspectacular stats by the three-time NBA MVP’s standards.
“I just like to compete,” Horford said. “It comes down to that. In Jokic’s case, in my opinion, he’s probably the top player in our league right now. It’s just so much that he does. He’s so difficult to defend because he’s so unpredictable. What makes it worse is that he plays the right way. He’s looking to make winning plays and somehow he still gets all these crazy numbers and these crazy stats. For me, when you go against a guy like that, it’s not me against him. It’s everybody really has to be synced in in what we need to do and what the game plan was. I felt like our guys were tonight, and they provided that help.”
Horford’s efforts helped the Celtics withstand the loss of starting center Kristaps Porzingis, who missed his second straight game with an illness, and deflect a second-half comeback bid by Denver. The Nuggets cut Boston’s lead from 20 points to three in the fourth quarter, but Jokic was a nonfactor down the stretch as the Celtics pulled away late.
After hitting a 3-pointer that made it 95-91 Celtics with 5:57 remaining, Jokic did not score again until he flipped in an inconsequential layup with 8.1 seconds to play and Boston up seven. Jokic, who ranks in the top three in the NBA in points per game, rebounds per game, assists per game, offensive rating and total plus/minus, also had more turnovers (one) than assists over the final seven minutes.
“It’s huge, especially (against) guys of the highest caliber (like) Jokic,” Derrick White said. “You’ve seen (Horford) guard pretty much every big in the league, so it’s a lot of trust we have in him. He’s always going to make it difficult for them — as difficult as you can. He’s just a great guy to have on your team.”
With 4:29 remaining, Horford intercepted a cross-court Jokic pass while guarding forward Michael Porter Jr., then drew a foul on Jokic at the other end. Later, after a second-chance White floater put the Celtics up 104-99 with less than a minute to go, Horford deflected a Jamal Murray pass to Jokic, ran the floor, received a transition feed from Jaylen Brown and laid it in to essentially ice the game.
Brown, who assisted on four of Horford’s seven made baskets, called him “the ultimate team guy” and “a great connector for our unit.”
“You can’t always tell going in (when Horford will have a big game),” Brown said. “When it’s there, you know. So tonight, big-time matchup on Jokic for a large part of the game, fighting and battling on the boards, we wanted to reward him for his work. So I was looking for Al early, was able to connect to him a few times, and had that final one in transition where he gets the deflection, sprints in transition, I see him running, throw it back to the big fella.
“He’s supposed to dunk that, but he’s got five kids, so we let him slide.”
Boston’s oldest player added a pair of free throws in the closing seconds to cap one of his best outings of the season. He finished with his second-highest point total of 2024-25 despite making just one shot from 3-point range (on three attempts), which is where most of his scoring typically comes from at this advanced stage of his career.
The last time Horford scored 19 or more points without making multiple threes was on Feb. 10, 2021, when he was playing for Oklahoma City. His 12 points in the paint were his most in a game since Jan. 19, 2023, and his six fast-break points were more than he’d totaled in his previous 26 contests combined.
What stood out most to his teammates and head coach, though, was his defensive work against Jokic. It was the latest example of Horford elevating his game when faced with an especially challenging big-man matchup.
“You take a look at his stat sheet, it doesn’t always show what he does for us,” Mazzulla said. “Most of what he does can’t be measured. But he has the innate ability to impact the game in so many different ways, and he’s one of the best players in the league at guarding the other best players in the league, no matter the position that they have. He was just elite tonight on the defensive end of the floor, with his positioning, his communication, his physicality, his rebounding. It was amazing to watch.”
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