Everything you need to know about Game 4 of the Sixers-Celtics series was encapsulated in a single Boston possession late in the first quarter.
Jayson Tatum missed a three-pointer, and teammate Baylor Scheierman tracked down the offensive rebound.
And well, OK, it happens.
But then the ball found its way to the C’s Nikola Vucevic, who also came up empty from the arc.
And Jordan Walsh gathered in the miss for Boston. And Tatum tried again from deep, but was unable to connect. And the ball caromed out
of bounds, off the Sixers.
The possession ended with Philadelphia’s Dominick Barlow fouling Vucevic. That the veteran center missed both free throws is immaterial. The Celtics were taking the game to the Sixers. Had been since the opening tip, in fact. And they never stopped, en route to a 128-96 runaway.
Even with Joel Embiid back in the lineup, the Sixers shot miserably and defended horribly. But the long and short of this one is that they got outworked. That is reflected most in their work on the boards (or lack of same), and it is as inexplicable as it is embarrassing.
Staring at a 3-1 series deficit, this is all they could muster? Hoping to make a stand, they instead laid down? Hoping to redeem an up-and-down season, they instead cashed in their chips?
Unacceptable.
Nick Nurse said this one was, like the Game 1 blowout loss, an “about-as-bad-as-we-can-play game,” and there can be no dissent on that score. Boston swished a franchise-playoff-record 24 triples, six of those by backup guard Payton Pritchard, who finished with 32 points. Tatum added 30, and Jaylen Brown had 20.
The Sixers also shot 33.3 percent while falling behind by 18 at halftime. At that point the rebounding difference was 36-23 in the Celtics’ favor. That includes 9-0 on the offensive glass, leading to a 13-0 advantage on second-chance points for the visitors.
The Sixers did not collect their first offensive board until 6:51 remained in the third quarter. Read that again: 6:51 in the third quarter. The final rebounding gap was 51-30, the difference in second-chance points 18-9.
Again, unacceptable.
“It’s tough,” Tyrese Maxey said. “Honestly, that’s tough. … I hate to say this, but we’ve gotta wash it. We’ve gotta let it go right now, because it happened. We’re down 3-1, and we’ve got a game on Tuesday, and our season’s on the line, so we’ve gotta play desperate.”
But why not do that on Sunday?
“We shoulda been,” he said. “Shoulda been.”
Nurse said his team was “a half-step behind, energy-wise,” and that when it came to rebounds the Celtics “wanted to chase ‘em down more than we did.”
“It’s hard to watch, and hard to explain, too,” he said.
Which is why the arena had begun emptying out long before the final buzzer. The only ones who seemed to be left were Celtics fans, and most of them were chanting, “We want Boston,” a mocking reference to the chorus sounded by Sixers followers during the play-in victory over Orlando.
Well, the Sixers got the Celtics all right. Got every bit of them, and have been ill-equipped to deal with them.
“It’s certainly disappointing at this stage for sure, right?” Nurse said.
Paul George said boardwork had been the Sixers’ “Achilles Heel all season,” and that is a fact. They averaged 43.6 rebounds a game to 45.3 for their opponents. It’s also true that in this day and age cleaning up the defensive glass has become far more challenging than in the past, given the number of long rebounds that result from all the three-pointers that are hoisted.
Boston, which is as triple-happy as any club in the NBA, crashes the glass from the corners and wings with regularity, as evidenced by the fact that the Celtics reclaimed 29.2 percent of their regular-season misses, the league’s sixth-best rate.
The work of backup wings Scheierman and Walsh on the aforementioned possession typifies how they operate. (An even better example was the damage inflicted by starting guard Derrick White late in Game 3. He grabbed two offensive boards, leading to five critical points in a game the C’s won by eight.)
Vucevic and Sixers backup center Andre Drummond, who respectively have played 15 and 14 years and claimed over 10,000 rebounds each, discussed before the game how much their jobs have changed over the years.
The 35-year-old Vucevic, who began his career with the Sixers in 2011, acknowledged that all the long rebounds have led to bigs sharing board duties with their shorter accomplices. He also mentioned how much the pace of the game has increased since he broke in.
His own game has changed, too, in that he guns more from the perimeter than ever before.
“When I’m crashing,” he said, “I try to see where the ball might go. It’s not so much being physical but also trying to move a little more. There’s a little more movement involved now in rebounding than I think there was before. It’s definitely affected the rebounding, the way the game is being played now.”
Drummond, who for his career is averaging nearly 12 rebounds a game, at first disputed that his role is all that different than before.
“For me it doesn’t change,” he said. “I still try to go after all of them.”
And, he added, “The game’s still the game. People miss, so you’ve just gotta know where the ball’s going. If anything, there’s a lot more misses than normal.”
But he did admit that the ball comes off long more than ever, and that rebounding has become a group project.
The guards, he said, have “got to come in, too. They’ve got to come in from the free throw line or the top of the key. Once they shoot those shots, it comes off anywhere.”
Drummond was destined for a rough night, one that saw him go rebound-less while playing a little over five minutes. He was also repeatedly targeted by the Celtics defensively.
But none of the other Sixers really distinguished themselves, either. And now, as Maxey said, they have to wash this one and move on. It’s not a matter of them doing anything different tactically in Game 5; rather, Nurse pointed out, it’s a matter of playing with “better energy, toughness, guarding, rebounding.”
“It’s going to have to be a big mental pickup,” he added.
That would be nice. They are professionals, after all. But the time to make a stand was Sunday, at home, with a full complement of players available. Instead the Sixers rolled over. And that simply cannot happen.
