LOS ANGELES — The play looked familiar but absurd – a perfect encapsulation of everything Boston Celtics guard Marcus Smart brings to the floor on a nightly basis.

The Celtics needed a stop to have a chance as overtime wound down, trailing by three. The Los Angeles Clippers wanted the ball in the hands of superstar Kawhi Leonard, one of the most dangerous isolation players in the league.

But Smart didn’t want Leonard to have the ball. What Marcus Smart wants on the defensive end, he often gets. This play was no exception.

Smart was far from perfect in Wednesday’s contest. A 37.2 percent 3-point shooter entering the evening, Smart hoisted 11 3s and made just one. Presumably, if Gordon Hayward was available, some of those shot attempts would have floated his way, but in a game where Jayson Tatum was lightning hot, passing some of them off to the third-year forward might not have been a bad idea.

Still, it was Smart who denied Leonard the ball around a dribble handoff with Lou Williams, Smart who baited Williams into throwing a point-blank pass, Smart who knocked it away, Smart who battled through Leonard’s attempts to hold him off, and Smart who unfurled his body in midair like a flag without a pole to give the Celtics a final chance to send Wednesday’s game into double overtime. Smart launched himself at the ball, grabbed it and somehow threw it off Leonard’s leg and out of bounds. Leonard protested weakly, but the call was pretty clear, and Boston had its chance at a second overtime.

Leonard, of course, got the last laugh – he blocked Kemba Walker’s last-second 3-point attempt from the corner. But once again, the Celtics were in position to challenge for a win, largely thanks to Smart.

“He plays hard,” Leonard said when asked about Smart after the game. “They want to be somewhere at the end of the road, too, so they’re going to come in and play both ends of the floor. That’s what you want. It’s going to get you better as a player and a team.”

The Smart formula has grown a little predictable over the years. Two or three defensive highlight plays per night that are a little difficult to comprehend as they happen, plus a couple of questionable shots that go in, plus a few even more questionable ones that don’t equals one hard-nosed guard whose contributions are difficult to define. Some Celtics fans would follow Smart over a cliff. Others grow frustrated with his offense and scream about his shot selection. The calculation repeats again and again.

On Wednesday, the Celtics got the full Smart experience. He missed several 3-pointers, but completely undeterred, he kept hoisting them. On the other end, he battled and bothered Leonard, which isn’t easy to do. Among Leonard’s many basketball attributes, he’s supremely unflappable, but Smart’s ability to bother an opponent is one of his many defensive attributes.

And, of course, as the game wound down, Smart was the player who gave the Celtics a chance to keep themselves alive.

The Celtics did not go into Wednesday’s game looking for moral victories.

“We believe truly that we can compete with anybody in this league,” Smart said. “But it’s going to take every possession. We can’t take it for granted. We’ve got to take every possession like it’s our last possession. We’ve got to really protect the ball and come up with the shots that we want and execute the way we want. We let them get us out of (our) stuff a little bit and you’ve got to credit those guys. They’re really good, and we’ve just got to be a little better.”

“I wish I could have done a better job for our guys so we could have maybe have gotten over the hump,” Coach Brad Stevens added.

The Celtics can probably get there. To do so, they need Smart to be himself, and over the last six years, they have learned they can comfortably expect that – the negatives, as well as the positives that outweigh them.

“We shot the ball very poorly, our defense wasn’t great, but we still were in the game, plain and simple,” Smart said. “Clean up a couple things, and it’s probably a different outcome and we’re talking different about what happened tonight.”