Sixers squander historic opportunity in bonkers environment. In Game 7, shots need to fall.
Sixers #Sixers
Easy is boring, right? Easy isn’t an accomplishment. Easy isn’t what memories are made of. When history is told, when elegies are written, when tributes are spoken, when toasts are raised, it isn’t the easy times on which they dwell.
That said, easy would have been nice.
“If I have to go to war in Game 7 in Boston,” Sixers guard Tyrese Maxey said. “I want to go with this group.”
If the Sixers do manage to secure their first trip to the Eastern Conference finals in more than two decades, we will remember their 95-86 loss to the Celtics in Game 6 as a prelude to a more appropriate ending. If they fall short, we will remember it as a crushing blow that both exemplified the promise of the current roster and reignited the questions that will haunt it into the summer. We’ll find out which direction the wind is blowing on Sunday in Game 7.
Sometimes, it’s as simple as the shots not falling. There are nights where you can can twist yourself into knots trying to find something that a team should have done differently. We tend to look at games as referendums, particularly games of this magnitude. We pore through their entrails and autopsy them to death in search of something bigger that they say: about the stars, about the coaching, about the team as a collective. But some games are just games. Some losses are just losses. Some nights, the ball rattles and swirls and bounces in through the net. Other nights, it doesn’t. For the Sixers, this was one of those other nights.
Make no mistake. They were not perfect. And they were imperfect in the most inopportune of moments, within both the game and the series. The Sixers entered Thursday night with a chance to do something that they and their fan base were desperate to do. They’d given themselves an opportunity to do it in the most fortuitous circumstances possible: up 3-2, at home, backed by a crowd that had spent six straight postseasons waiting for a chance to make themselves heard in this sort of moment. It was there for them. Even after the Celtics opened the game with a 15-3 run, the game was still there.
There are always nits to pick. Always. Joel Embiid had too many moments where he tried to make something happen off the dribble rather than moving the ball. He was too off balance, too careless, too dismissive of the cost-benefit of bringing the ball below his waist. James Harden could have been less reluctant about going to his step-back three. Doc Rivers could have been a little more adamant that Maxey get his shots.
But let’s not trip over ourselves in a search to assign blame. The Sixers played well enough to win in every facet of the game except for the one that is the ultimate judge. The Celtics knocked down 15 of their 35 three-point attempts. The Sixers made eight of their 34. The math is pretty simply. Subtract and multiply. There’s your margin.
The order of them doesn’t matter. Jayson Tatum spent the first 43 minutes of the game missing practically every shot he took. Then, he spent the last five minutes knocking down the ones that ended it: a three-pointer with 4:14 left to give the Celtics an 84-83 lead, another one on the next possession to push the lead to four, a third one with 1:53 left to make it 92-84, and a final dagger to give the Celtics a 95-84 advantage. They were big shots, but they wouldn’t have been nearly as devastating had the Sixers knocked down there’s. De’Anthony Melton got two excellent looks from three-point range early in the fourth quarter and missed them both. P.J. Tucker had a trio of them in the first half.
“It’s a make-miss league,” Rivers said. “I would say we had a lot of wide open threes. We didn’t make them.”
There were other issues down the stretch. Both Rivers and Embiid noted after the game that the Sixers did not do a good enough job of getting their big man the ball. The ball stayed in one place. The offense stalled. The result were too many frantic possessions, too many low-percentage looks.
“We got a lot of wide open shots and we didn’t make them,” Embiid said. “We stopped moving the ball. And I don’t think I touched the ball the last four minutes of the game. Like I said, miss a lot of good looks. I didn’t touch the ball at all.”
Embiid’s first point is still the biggest. The damage was done in the first half, which the Sixers opened by missing 10 of their first 11. Just off the top of my head, there was a missed wide open corner three by Tucker, an airballed alley-oop attempt by Tobias Harris, an open eight-footer Harden that clunked off the front of the rim, a Harris fast break layup blocked, a floater from Maxey that rattled in and out, and a shot from the low block by Embiid with position, two more wide open misses from the corner by Tucker. That’s only eight of the Sixers 29 first-half misses, 18 points in half that the Celtics finished leading by seven. They say that it’s a make-or-miss league, but this was something much more detrimental than coming out on the wrong side of that disjunction. This was a home rim that looked an inch too small for the side that was supposed to have the benefit.
Now?
“Who doesn’t love Game 7?” Embiid said.
The only thing that’s certain is that one team won’t.
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