The Milwaukee Bucks and Boston Celtics met for the first time this season and Wednesday’s night game at TD Garden in an early battle for the top spot in the Eastern Conference, and the Celtics held off a furious rally to win 119-116 in the closing seconds.

A Damian Lillard three-pointer with 43 seconds left made it 114-111 Boston, but Jayson Tatum knocked down a free throw with 21 ticks left to give the Celtics a two-possession lead. After a foul, Lillard missed a dunk attempt with Derek White contesting from behind and Tatum sealed it with two more free throws with 11 seconds left.

The loss ended a five game winning streak for the Bucks, who are now 10-5. The Celtics remain atop the conference at 12-3.

Brook Lopez scored a season-high 28 points on 12 of 18 shooting for Milwaukee, and the big man was a huge force in the team nearly coming all the way back from a 20-point fourth quarter deficit.

“I was just trying to help my team, that’s all it ever is,” Lopez said of his offensive output. “I’m just out there trying to help my team win, doing what I can to help the team win.”

Lillard finished with 27, but was 3 for 10 from behind the three-point line. Giannis Antetokounmpo (21 points, 13 rebounds) and Khris Middleton (12) also scored in double figures. Tatum had 23 points.

“We can compete with the best of ‘em, we just have to play our best basketball,” Middleton said of what the Bucks could take away from the game. “Get off to better starts, which we haven’t done all year yet. You see against any team if you start slow it’s hard to play catch up the whole game. But, throughout the game I thought we played through a lot of rough stretches where we were still there. Our defense helped in the game and eventually our offense caught up to us. I like the way we competed all night even though we could’ve gave up. We didn’t, with how ugly it got at the start, a great crowd, hard place to play, hard place to win, but our guys stayed with it the whole night.”

First half shooting does in Bucks

There is a cliché that the NBA is a “make or miss league” – and while that is also an oversimplification it bore out in the first half in a bad way for Milwaukee. The Bucks missed their first seven shots as the Celtics took a 10-0 lead and the Celtics ended up shooting a higher percentage from behind the three-point line (12 for 23, 52.2%) than the Bucks did from the paint (13 for 27, 48.1%).

“You know that they’re an elite three-point shooting team and whatever you do, when you play the Celtics or a team like that, you gotta multiply it by two – you gotta close out harder, you gotta run back harder, you gotta jump higher, you gotta be more physical and I thought we did that in the second half,” Bucks head coach Adrian Griffin said. “It was the tale of two games there. The first half you have to execute at a high level and we missed a lot of shots around the rim that we normally make. But you gotta play through those, you gotta keep playing and I thought we did in the second half. I thought it was Bucks basketball in the second half.”

In the first half, Middleton was 0 for 6 and missed five shots from 12 feet or closer. Antetokounmpo was 4 for 13, and six of his misses were from 10 feet or closer. Lillard was 3 for 11 and three of his misfires were from 11 feet and in.

“I thought we had a lot of great looks – unfortunately they did not go down tonight,” Middleton said. “This is a night where you want those to go down. But it didn’t happen. I thought we still played well enough through stretches that kept us in the game, kept us fighting.”

Overall in the half, the Bucks trio combined for 19 points on 7-of-30 shooting (23.3%), including 1 for 8 from behind the three-point line. On the other side of it, Boston’s trio of Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown and Kristaps Porziņģis combined for 36 points on 14-of-23 shooting (61%). They also were 4 for 10 from behind the three-point line.

“We didn’t come out ready, simple as that,” Antetokounmpo said. “They came out ready to play. They made a couple shots. We kind of eased into the game and when you play a good team you cannot do that.”

While the game was 48 minutes long, that opening stretch of Milwaukee misses and Boston makes were the difference as the Bucks outscored them from there.

“Yeah, I think we missed nine layups in the first half,” Malik Beasley said. “Coach harped on that. Some nights it goes like that. But I think the good point is we fought. It was a three-point game at the end of the game and it shows that we can compete. They’ve been a team that’s been together for a couple years. With us, we’re kind of still jelling together and I feel like we did a great job of keeping our composure.”

Lillard didn’t feel like there was good pace, screening or ball movement on the offensive end in the first half, which only helped create some issues on the defensive end with a Celtics team that moves the ball well. To Middleton, that resulted in the Bucks chasing too much, whereas in the second half they were more attached to their man defensively.

“I think we just stepped up our aggressiveness,” Lillard said of the fourth quarter charge. “At halftime we came in the locker room and said we gotta step to ‘em. Everything they did was a little too comfortable on both ends of the floor. We weren’t disrupting them enough defensively and we weren’t making them get into rotations and guard hard enough offensively. You see what happened when we started doing that. We gave ourselves a chance. We were right there. I think it’s that story of you know, you gotta put four quarters together, especially with a really good team.”