The Boston Celtics defeated the Los Angeles Lakers, 111-101, at the TD Garden on Saturday night. It was the most anticipated matchup of the regular season, as the NBA world tuned in for it.

It was Jayson Tatum (40) and Jaylen Brown (31) combining for 71-points, 18 rebounds, five steals, and made nine 3-pointers while both of them defended LeBron James and Luka Doncic for the majority of the game.

The big takeaway from this game was that Al Horford is still invaluable for the Celtics and head coach Joe Mazzulla knows it, as he says postgame that he stopped coaching so that he could watch Horford play defense.

“I got to watch five possessions of him defend at a high level and at one point I wasn’t coaching, I was just watching him. I was like ‘man, this guys a future hall of famer and I get to watch this for free.’”

Horford finished the game with 14-points (5-9 FG, 1-3 3PT), nine rebounds, four assists, one block, and had the second-highest plus-minus for the game at +16.

Over the years, Horford has been relied on to defend some of the top scoring big men in the league with Giannis Antetokunmpo and Joel Embiid and he does it well with. But at age 38, he’s is still providing the Celtics with lockdown defense and we saw it in this game against LeBron and Luka.

Horford’s two-way ability at this point in his career caught the eye of Lakers head coach JJ Redick, as he game-planned to attack Horford but it didn’t work.

“We wanted to attack their bigs in space. We wanted to attack their smalls in tight spaces. I don’t think we did a good enough job of attacking their smalls in tight spaces… frankly, Al Horford’s awesome still. He still moves his feet and does a really good job defensively.”

Once again, the Celtics have relied heavily on Horford this season with the frequent amount of time that Kristaps Porzingis is on the injury report this season and has currently missed the last five games with an illness.

Horford’s played in 50-games this season and started in 34 of them. He’s averaging 8.3 points with 41/36/89 splits and 5.8 rebounds and 1.9 assists per game this season.

He is still a key component to the way the Celtics play and their goal of winning back-to-back championships.

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Photo Credit: Brian Babineau, NBAE Getty Images