The Boston Celtics emerged Friday from seven games of knockdown, drag-out carnage with a Toronto Raptors team that was their equal in tactical genius and competitive relentlessness. Before they get the chance to take a breath, they'll face more of the same in the Miami Heat.

In the wake of Friday's 92-87 win, Jayson Tatum and friends will make this trip to the Eastern Conference Finals, their third in the last four years, confidently.

They just knocked off the defending champs and got ascendant play from Tatum, who finished the series with averages of 24.3 points, 10.3 rebounds and 5.3 assists.

Boston survived by exhausting every last strategic tweak and tapping into energy reserves from who-knows-where. Four Celtics logged at least 43 minutes on Friday after the same four played over 50 in a double-overtime Game 6 defeat.

And they did all that against a willful, experienced and creative opponent that dragged itself back from the edge of elimination over and over again.

It's an all-time undersell to say Boston is now battle-tested.

The Heat have plenty of their own reasons to enter the conference finals with similarly high levels of self-assurance. They cracked the Milwaukee Bucks' code with relative ease and had that series on ice before Giannis Antetokounmpo's ankle knocked him out of action.

Jimmy Butler dominated Game 1 like a true alpha, Goran Dragic approached Kyle Lowry levels of scrappiness and craft, and the Heat executed with precision throughout.

It has to be said, though, that the Bucks were a battering ram: powerful but unsubtle, capable of performing only one function. Miami reinforced the door, and Milwaukee couldn't break it down.

The Celtics will present a different and more complex challenge. Against Toronto, they proved they could adapt to tricky coverages while routinely mixing up their own strategies and personnel groupings. They won't make predictable booming swings at the Heat's door. They'll go around back, try to slide through a window or figure out how to unscrew the hinges and walk right in.

That's the kind of resourcefulness it took to vanquish Toronto.

Miami will be fresher, but that advantage may be offset by Boston's surprising edge in experience. Tatum and Jaylen Brown played their first conference finals in 2017 and then returned the next year.

Butler just got out of the second round for the first time in his career, and his youthful supporting cast—Bam Adebayo, Tyler Herro, Duncan Robinson and Kendrick Nunn, among others—are new to deep-postseason action. Though 23 and 22, respectively, Brown and Tatum are already grizzled playoff vets.

The Heat also went just 1-2 against the Celtics during the regular season, and their No. 12 defensive rating suggests that while they succeeded in solving Milwaukee (and a hollowed-out shell of an Indiana Pacers team), they might not have the same stopping power against a team like Boston. Miami also has more obvious targets for opposing offenses in its rotation, while Kemba Walker was the only Celtics player the Raptors had any success attacking.

That said, the similarities between these two teams are more significant than the differences.

Both feature an enviably large supply of multi-skilled, like-sized wings. Butler, Jae Crowder and Andre Iguodala will match up just fine with Tatum, Brown, Marcus Smart and, at some point soon, Gordon Hayward.

Brad Stevens and Erik Spoelstra are similarly masterful tacticians.

Boston's Daniel Theis and Miami's Adebayo are new-age centers who would have been undersized power forwards 10 years ago. Each one lends his team a degree of defensive versatility and offensive skill that most of the currently eliminated playoff teams lacked at the position. That's not a coincidence. For the most immediate evidence of the old-school center's obsolescence, note Marc Gasol's minus-19 in 19 minutes of Friday's loss.

The days of the lumbering 5 have been fading for years, but they may be officially over now. And while Theis and Adebayo lack conventional center size, they still do plenty of conventional center things.

Theis proved that against Toronto several times, conspicuously so in Game 7.

Remember, when opponents have to shrink their own lineups to keep pace, everything is relative. Sometimes, the 6'8" "big" is tall enough to overpower everyone else on the floor.

Adebayo, a brilliant passer, is even more physically imposing than Theis. Both allow their teams to switch up coverages and keep opponents off balance—a must in a seven-game series this late in the playoffs.

If you mash all those shared characteristics together—the versatility, skill, strategic adaptability and modern centers—you get a pretty good encapsulation of where the NBA game is headed. In that sense, this conference finals pairing feels right; the two East teams most ahead of the stylistic curve are the ones left standing.

That is, until one knocks the other out.