The Sixers failed to show up for Game 1 against the Boston Celtics, losing 123-91 in a game that was effectively over after the first quarter. Tyrese Maxey led the Sixers in scoring with 21 points on 20 shot attempts.
The Sixers came out completely unprepared to deal with the Celtics on both ends of the floor, learning all the wrong lessons from their play-in victory over the Orlando Magic. Rather than feeling like they got away with substandard process against a mediocre Orlando team on Wednesday, they played Game 1 as if they’d discovered a viable path to victory. Turns out, leaning heavily on iso-ball against the Celtics isn’t going to get it done.
The most disheartening part of the Sixers’ offensive approach in the first half was that they hardly even made an effort to put pressure on the Celtics’ weak points. With Derrick White matched up against Tyrese Maxey and Sam Hauser guarding VJ Edgecombe, the Sixers made very little effort to get White off of Maxey with ball screens, letting the game devolve into a Maxey vs. White competition, a battle the Celtics often won. That was compounded by how the Celtics defended 1-5 ball screens — they sat in deep drop against pick-and-pop possessions to concede trail jumpers to Andre Drummond, and Maxey’s poor run of pull-up shooting continued, with their lead guard failing to punish Boston for giving him tons of space above the break. He is a glorified 1.5 level scorer at the moment, and as long as that remains the case, it’s difficult to envision a path to victory for the 76ers.
Frankly, this was also an awful decision-making game for Maxey, who needs to be better and smarter even if he is battling a hand issue. The playoffs are a possession battle as much as anything else, and he had a gruesome turnover on a two-for-one play at the end of the first half that an experienced All-Star simply cannot make. A rookie would be embarrassed by a wild, jump-pass turnover that gifts the opponent an extra possession to end the half, so he should certainly be expected to be better there.
The offensive environment, of course, was a total disaster. There’s not going to be a lot that Tyrese Maxey can do if Boston doesn’t have to guard anyone else on the floor, and if they don’t use off-ball screens and movement to free guys up. The Celtics had no reason to move from in/around the paint, with Philadelphia hoisting brick after brick on the perimeter, incentivizing Boston to get more extreme with their coverage. Philadelphia went into halftime 2/16 from three, with Kelly Oubre (0/3), VJ Edgecombe (0/4), and Paul George (0/1) offering particularly disappointing performances, shrinking the amount of available space the Sixers had inside the arc. Oubre was given the most open series of threes I can remember a Sixers role player getting in a playoff series, and I’m not sure one of them was even close to going in. He wasn’t much better inside the arc, frankly, missing multiple six-foot shots after doing the hard work to get to the paint.
It wasn’t until around the midway point of the second quarter that they finally started getting into some plays that work, running Edgecombe through some off-ball screens on handoffs to generate downhill momentum. Edgecombe got a few to go down in the closing minutes of the second quarter, but at that point, it was too little and too late to bring the game back. Paul George was the only starter you could argue had a “good” offensive game, and it’s fitting that it relied on him just beating up one-on-one matchups for the bulk of his points.
If they were going to engineer an upset with that offensive reality, the Sixers needed an A+ defensive performance, and that’s hard to manage when you’re playing out of scramble and transition defense for 3/4 of the game. Boston did an outstanding job of punishing crossmatches, with Jayson Tatum scoring 21 first-half points by exploiting mid-post matchups with Andre Drummond, Tyrese Maxey, and other size mismatches. Jaylen Brown took his turn doing the same thing in the third quarter, pulling his own dominant run out of thin air,
When the Sixers were able to preserve their individual matchups on the wing, Oubre and George did an okay-ish job at battling with Boston’s two star wings, but more often than not, they failed to fight hard enough to avoid switches. Add in the possessions where they overextended to try to get into the Celtics as high up as the logo, and Boston was able to get downhill and score far too easily. For any haters of Philadelphia’s help principles, perhaps this game shows why they did play the way they did all season. The Sixers stuck more to shooters than they have most of the season, and the Celtics had their own struggles from deep as a result. But without extra bodies around the paint, Boston had a layup line going for most of the first half, with rim protection nonexistent.
The players did not do their part on Sunday, squandering any good opportunities they created with miserable shooting and decision-making. But this was as bad a coaching start as the Sixers could have gotten, a complete absence of ideas until the game was already teetering toward unwinnable. A lot of work to be done from here.
This may end up being a small-ball center series for Philadelphia. Adem Bona and Andre Drummond each had their chances to impact the game or make a clear case for the starting job, and each made you feel that they might need to upgrade the center position behind Joel Embiid in the offseason.
For Bona, the problems were the same as always, with his first two fouls coming in less than two minutes of action, and his hands letting him down around the rim on both ends of the floor. The second foul was the full Bona experience, with Adem missing clear passing opportunities to either corner to dribble an extra time right into a charge in transition. It didn’t get a lot better from there, with Bona missing an uncontested two-footer after pulling down a tough offensive rebound.
But I was even more disappointed in Drummond, who came into the playoffs on a good run of form and promptly fell off a cliff in Game 1. He was stuck in cement, trying to cover ground in space, constantly stuck in no man’s land while judging where he needed to be between the rim and Boston’s floor-spacing bigs. Drummond picked up an unnecessary technical foul arguing with Scott Foster in the first half, and had a catastrophic meltdown in the second half, right as it looked like the Sixers might go on a run. After securing a defensive rebound with a chance to continue chipping away at the lead, Drummond threw a half-hearted outlet pass in Tyrese Maxey’s direction, with Boston picking it off and immediately canning a three-pointer.
Even more frustrating was the fact that Nurse called an immediate timeout, and persisted with Drummond after the timeout, with the veteran big man proceeding to stumble his way through the next couple of minutes before his coach decided enough was enough. When the head coach has no urgency to get an underperforming player off the floor in a playoff game, it’s not stunning that the rest of the players followed his lead.
— Perhaps Quentin Grimes should have taken the alleged 100k raise offer from the Sixers last offseason.