GAME 1 BETWEEN the Dallas Mavericks and the Boston Celtics was, to be generous, a basketball demolition.

Against the NBA’s best defense over the last quarter of the season, the Celtics got just about whatever they wanted offensively. Inside, if and when they probed the paint, they logged a franchise-best 60.4% blow-by rate — which measures how often a dribbler bursts past his defender, per Second Spectrum — while also shooting a perfect 15-for-15 from the restricted area.

On the perimeter, there was a similar tale of dominance for the C’s. Boston took 42 triples — and hit 38.1% of them — while Dallas launched 27 and connected on just 25.9% of them. Kyrie Irving, just 6-for-19 with 12 points, was 0-for-5 from outside.

“We’ve got to move the ball,” coach Jason Kidd said after the loss. “The ball just stuck too much.”

But it was the type of dominance from outside that should strike fear in Mavericks fans and hope for Celtics fans itching to hang an 18th banner inside TD Garden.

There are exactly 168 square feet of real estate on the court that deserve more attention than the rest. And how each team performs within that space could determine the 2024 NBA champion.

THROUGHOUT GAME 1, Luka Doncic, the league’s most double-teamed player each of the past two seasons, struggled to find open teammates behind the arc. He logged just one assist, his career playoff low and the fewest he has ever had — in the regular season or postseason — when logging 35 minutes or more. And this wasn’t merely a case of the Mavs missing shots off his passes. He had six potential assists — less than half of his playoff average of 15.4 potential dimes entering Game 1.

The Celtics’ starting five features five good defenders, including two — Jrue Holiday and Derrick White — who made this season’s All-Defensive Team. With such stingy one-one-one defense and a switch-heavy approach, Boston blitzed pick-and-roll ball handlers just 1.3% of the time this season, the NBA’s second-lowest rate, according to Second Spectrum.

The team’s five-man lineup with Holiday, White, Jaylen Brown, Kristaps Porzingis and Jayson Tatum blitzed just 11 times total all season. (Two of those came against Doncic.) Boston blitzed Doncic twice Thursday; one play resulted in Doncic missing a shot, and the other ended with him turning it over.

“They mostly play one-on-one. They don’t send a lot of help. That’s why,” Doncic said when asked why he was able to muster only the single assist in Game 1.

Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla understands that limiting Doncic’s passing can be a winning strategy. “We’re not here to stop those guys. We’re here to play a complete game of basketball and have an understanding of how each possession has an effect on everything else,” he said. “They’re going to score. That’s what they do best.”

By reducing Doncic’s options as a passer, the Celtics also take away his ability to get the ball to the corner — an area of the floor that Dallas has benefited from more than any other team in basketball.

The Mavericks launched more corner 3s — 11.3 per game — than any team during the regular season, and hit 39.4% of them against the Thunder in the West semifinals and 42.2% against the Wolves’ top-ranked defense in the conference finals. Dallas averaged a league-best 4.6 corner 3s per game this postseason entering Thursday.

But in Game 1, the Mavs managed just one corner triple — a meaningless trey by Josh Green with 58 seconds left and the game already decided — and three corner attempts.

WE’VE SEEN WHAT it looks like for Doncic and the Mavericks to break an elite defense.

Midway through the second quarter of Game 4 of the Western Conference finals against the Minnesota Timberwolves, Doncic dribbled around a screen at the top of the key. He had All-NBA guard Anthony Edwards at his back and 7-foot-1 Rudy Gobert, the four-time Defensive Player of the Year, standing in front of him, blocking his path to the basket. Two other Minnesota defenders, Mike Conley and All-Defensive Team pick Jaden McDaniels, were standing ready on either block, just in case Doncic managed to bowl his way past Gobert into the paint.

But then the Dallas superstar broke the league’s best defense.

Despite dribbling to his right, and appearing to look toward Green in the right corner, Doncic whipped a skip pass back across his body to the left corner, delivering a dime right into wing Derrick Jones Jr.’s shooting pocket. Conley, who’d cheated over a step or two to contain a potential Doncic drive to the basket, didn’t have enough time to recover. And the result, as it’s often been this postseason, was a wide-open triple from the southpaw.

“That pass, he makes that look simple,” TNT color analyst Stan Van Gundy said while calling the game. “This is just a laser — right on target, off the dribble.”

Sequences like these gauge the health of the Mavericks’ offensive attack — and will determine if they make this a series.

Doncic finished the regular season with a league-leading 170 assist opportunities off skip passes he threw that led to corner 3-point tries, more than twice as many as Tyrese Haliburton (77), who had the NBA’s second most.

His ability to manipulate defenses — scaring them with his scoring ability by putting pressure on the rim, which forces the defense to lose the other players on the floor — creates massive pockets of space and explains how the Dallas’ role players often get into a scoring rhythm of their own.

Jones, for instance, had an average of nine feet of open space to shoot when lining up his 3-point attempts during the season, the second-most space of any player who had at least 150 tries from deep, per Second Spectrum.

As a team, the Mavs enjoyed an average of 8.36 feet of separation as 3-point shooters when receiving a kickout pass from Doncic, the most separation created by any player this season.

But that might not matter against this Celtics defense. Boston held opponents to a league-low 35.2% shooting from the corners in the regular season and has been even better in the playoffs, limiting opponents to an NBA-low 23.5%. And the Celtics hit an NBA-best 43% of their own corner 3-pointers during the regular season, feasting specifically on drive-and-kicks to the perimeter, logging 141 points per 100 possessions on such plays this postseason, the best of any NBA playoff team since tracking began in 2013-14.

For what it’s worth: In Game 1, the Celtics shot 6-for-14, almost identical to their 43% on the season, from the corner.

OF COURSE THERE is more to consider in all of this.

If the vaunted Boston defense opts to continue to single cover Doncic, while staying synchronized to its perimeter assignments, it raises the possibility of the Mavs scoring in a totally different way: by going over the top, when Doncic — and to a lesser extent, Irving — opts to throw lobs.

Kidd said Doncic needs to be more aggressive and “take the layups” that Boston is all but encouraging him to try. If and when Doncic is able to bait the Celtics into surrounding him, he might find rookie center Dereck Lively II, who has changed the complexion of the Dallas offense, as a lob threat.

The long-limbed Lively made every single one of the 16 shots he attempted against the Wolves, who were repeatedly punished for focusing so much on Doncic.

Daniel Gafford was effective as a vertical spacer in the conference finals, too. A wild statistic to help illustrate how much the bigs have dominated in Dallas’ alley-oop game: Lively, Gafford and Jones have all connected on more alley-oops individually than any other team has during these playoffs. (Lively has 22, Gafford has 17 and Jones has 10. By contrast, the Nuggets, collectively, had nine.) It shows just how lethal the Mavericks can be when a defense becomes hyperfocused on Doncic and the shooters he’s considering passing to.

It’s this high-level tug-of-war — protecting the four corners, and showing defensive attention toward Doncic as opposed to defensive obsession with him — that could decide the series.