The Indiana Pacers eliminated the top-seeded Boston Celtics 108-101 in a Game 7 at TD Garden on Tuesday night, sending the defending Eastern Conference champions home in the first round for the first time since 2018 and bringing to a close the most volatile opening round of an NBA postseason in a decade. With the Pacers’ win, the second-round bracket was finalized only hours before its first scheduled tipoff Wednesday night, and league officials confirmed the conference semifinals would begin on a compressed schedule that pushes the conference finals into the third week of May.

Tyrese Haliburton, who has carried Indiana since the play-in tournament, finished with 28 points, 11 assists and the dagger jumper of the night, a step-back 18-footer over Derrick White with 1:14 left that pushed the Pacers’ lead to seven. Pascal Siakam, in his second postseason since being traded to Indianapolis, added 26 points and 12 rebounds and was assigned much of the defensive responsibility on Jayson Tatum, who scored 30 points but shot 10 of 26 from the floor and went 3 of 12 from beyond the arc. Jaylen Brown, returning after missing Games 4 and 5 with a right hamstring strain, played 24 minutes and scored 14 points before checking out for good with 5:42 to play.

“We’ve been told all year we were too small, too young, and that the regular season was the regular season,” Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle told reporters in the visiting locker room. “We respected Boston the entire series. But we believed we matched up. Now we have to do it again, starting Thursday.”

The Celtics, who finished the regular season 62-20 and were installed as championship co-favorites with Oklahoma City as recently as a week ago, were the third top-three seed in the East to lose in the opening round, joining the Miami-swept No. 2 New York Knicks and the No. 2 Cleveland Cavaliers, who fell to the No. 6 Orlando Magic in six games Monday night. Boston head coach Joe Mazzulla, asked whether Brown’s compromised hamstring or the absence of reserve center Luke Kornet, who missed the final three games with a sprained ankle, defined the series, declined to single out either. “Indiana was the better team across seven games,” he said. “That’s what the scoreboard says, and that’s what I’ll say.”

The remaining first-round results trickled in across a 72-hour stretch that league television partners had openly hoped would extend further. The Houston Rockets finished off the Golden State Warriors in seven games Sunday in Houston behind a 36-point performance from guard Jalen Green and Stephen Curry’s 4-of-15 night from three; the Memphis Grizzlies, playing through Ja Morant’s strained groin and without center Steven Adams, lost Game 7 in Denver as Nikola Jokic returned from a left wrist sprain to finish with 27 points and 18 rebounds; and the Phoenix Suns closed out the Los Angeles Lakers in six games Sunday at Crypto.com Arena, sending LeBron James into what he confirmed last week would be his final offseason. The Minnesota Timberwolves and Atlanta Hawks completed their series in five and six games respectively, and the Oklahoma City Thunder, who swept the Sacramento Kings, have now been off for seven days.

The conference semifinal bracket: in the East, the No. 6 Pacers face the No. 7 Miami Heat, and the No. 6 Magic face the No. 8 Atlanta Hawks. It will be the first conference semifinal round in the modern NBA postseason format without a top-three seed on one side of the bracket, according to the league office. In the West, Oklahoma City faces the No. 8 Houston Rockets, and the No. 2 Denver Nuggets face the No. 3 Phoenix Suns. The Pacers-Heat series will tip Thursday in Indianapolis; Thunder-Rockets opens Friday in Oklahoma City; the other two series begin Saturday.

“You have to go back to the late nineties to find a bracket this top-heavy with mid-seeds, and even that comparison is generous,” said Karen Maldonado, a sports-media analyst at MoffettNathanson. “From a national audience standpoint, it is not what the networks drew up. From a competitive standpoint, it is the best basketball product the league could have asked for after a regular season that a lot of people complained was predictable.”

Television figures across the round suggested the audience has not minded the absence of the league’s most marketed stars. ESPN and TNT averaged 4.6 million viewers across 26 first-round broadcasts, the highest first-round average in five years, with three Pacers-Celtics games drawing more than 6 million and the Tuesday night Game 7 averaging 9.1 million, the largest non-Finals NBA audience since 2018. League executives privately acknowledged that the post-ceasefire return of full-capacity arenas, lifted from a 15-to-20 percent reduction recommendation in mid-March, contributed to the rebound.

The compressed second-round schedule is a logistical headache the league office has been quietly preparing for since the Pacers took a 3-1 lead Friday. Travel, broadcasting and arena scheduling were finalized in two overnight sessions between Monday and Tuesday, and the conference finals are now set to open May 19, three days later than the date the league had circulated as a target in February. Commissioner Adam Silver, in a brief statement Tuesday night, said the playoff format had “produced exactly the kind of basketball we hoped a healthy postseason would produce, even if the bracket on the wall does not match what most of us had drawn in March.”

Across town from where Indiana celebrated, the Boston front office faced a series of offseason questions. Brown’s contract runs through 2028; Tatum’s through 2029. Mazzulla, whose extension was signed in 2024, is under contract through 2027. President of basketball operations Brad Stevens, asked outside the Celtics’ locker room whether the loss would prompt a structural review, said only that the team would “do what we always do, which is study every part of how this season ended.”

Major League Baseball, in the background of the postseason noise, completed its fifth week with the Detroit Tigers and Baltimore Orioles still tied atop the American League at 17-7 each. The New York Yankees, 9-15, fired hitting coach James Rowson on Tuesday afternoon. The Los Angeles Dodgers held a four-game NL West lead at 17-8.

League officials said the second-round schedule, including potential Game 7 dates and conference finals contingencies, would be released in full Wednesday morning, with the conference finals broadcast windows to be confirmed once the semifinal brackets reach Game 4.