Talk about blowing an opportunity.

The Sixers had a nice little run going, with big moves at the trade deadline followed by a quality win against Denver and a national television drubbing of Los Angeles on Sunday afternoon. They were 7-4 through their last 11 games, a gauntlet that included Golden State, Toronto, and multiple playoff teams over multiple weeks.

But instead of finishing on a high note, they stumbled again to Boston, this time at home. They blew another opportunity against another top Eastern Conference team, falling to 1-7 this season against the Celtics, Bucks, and Raptors. Most importantly, they took all of the goodwill built up over the last few days and deposited it right into the trash can.

We’re right back at square one, which is this:

“The Sixers can’t beat the Celtics.”

Truly, it’s opening night and Christmas evening all over again. It’s like Groundhog Day without the overgrown rat from Western Pennsylvania.

As Metallica once said, “Nothing Else Matters,” and you know what? James Hetfield was right. Lars Ulrich was right. Nothing else matters besides beating the Celtics. That’s all anybody is talking about, and they’re justified in doing so. You can go out and beat the Knicks by 40 tonight and fans would not and should not care, because it’s not about beating the Knicks or Hornets or Hawks by 40, it’s about beating Boston by any amount of points at all.

The Sixers were not horrible last night. We are, after all, talking about a three-point loss. But the myriad issues throughout the game were similar to what we’ve seen before. They cobbled together too many mistakes to really get into a shooting or defensive rhythm throughout.

They only shot 71% from the foul line, which is way down from a 77% season average. The turnovers, 14, were manageable, but Boston only coughed it up six times, so that’s another loss. The three-point shooting was below average, the shot selection was junky and poor in the first half, and they just looked tight to start. Boston looked loose and played within themselves. The Sixers played like they knew they’ve only beaten this team twice in the last two years.

Defensive miscues

Late in the fourth quarter, Boston was just seeking out mismatches over and over again. There was a chunk of plays around the five minute mark, I believe, where they just went after JJ Redick on every single play and the Sixers did a really lackluster job of addressing it. There were other situations where Redick and T.J. McConnell were on the floor together and having trouble on the defensive end.

Said Brett Brown post game:

There’s a physicality that you have to play with to beat them and you’re reminded of that. They do a really good job of going at mismatches, we could all see the difficulty at times that we had guarding some of the physicality of them trying to post us with different mismatches, those types of things I think are. There’s a physicality that you learn from… To Rich’s [Hofmann’s] point, they go at mismatches hard, they duck in, they’re physical with that philosophy.

They seek out mismatches pretty much every time down the floor in crunch time situations.

Case in point:

Those plays are killers, because when Marcus Smart can post up JJ Redick and drive the lane, the rest of the defense collapses, the Celtics swing the ball around the perimeter while the Sixers scramble to recover, and Jayson Tatum eventually knocks down a wide open three.

More Brown:

I think you have to find some level of better ball pressure; you have to find some level of better resistance, sort of staggered steps, there’s some technique things that we can do better and I think most importantly that at times you can’t overreact. If tough twos for a while are the palatable shot and, admittedly, you can’t live like that, but periods of the game you can, then we have to be disciplined to do that. To start running around the gym and getting into scramble mode, isn’t in my interest, our interest either.

Yes, if you’re going to leave JJ on the floor, make it harder for them to pick on him. Deny that entry pass into the post. Re-evaluate how you switch if they put him in a pick and roll. Maybe you have to blitz or throw a second guy into the equation, or maybe Redick just cannotbe on the floor in these situations. Maybe you play Jimmy Butler as a two-guard and bring in James Ennis or Jonathon Simmons to close out games instead.

Joel Embiid on this:

We need to do a better job of denying the ball and pressuring the ball. At the end of the day, it comes down to guarding your own man and that’s what we have to do. These guys, they take advantage of when we do help, and they move the ball pretty well. So, we just need to do a better job of guarding our own man.

Boston just kept hunting all throughout the 4th quarter, and the Sixers weren’t able to get enough stops to build any kind of respectable lead or keep pace when it really mattered.

Joel’s night

He struggles against Al Horford, who defends him better than anybody in the league.

Embiid was asked what the veteran center is doing to frustrate him:

He’s not doing anything, it’s just on me. I was sleepwalking for three quarters and that’s on me. Like I said, that’s on me. It has nothing to do with anybody.

I’m not a big fan of that answer. Sure, you can put it on you and take responsibility for your performance, but Horford is not “not doing anything.” His resistance points are sound, he does a good job of keeping his arms down, and he stands Joel up right on the low block in a position where Embiid is too far to power through him for a layup but too far for a comfortable turn around or floater. It’s a weird middle area between Embiid’s catch point and the rim, and for whatever reason, Joel just comes up short when he’s 1v1 with Horford. The Celtics are doing anything special. They’re not doubling or digging, they’re just letting Horford use low leverage and solid technique to defend a bigger guy.

I think Gordon Hayward actually did a decent job of explaining it after the game:

Al’s a smart defender, so I think he’s able to use spacing and angles and really kind of knows when to gap him, when to get up to him. He’s also just a tough defender, like taking bumps, able to not get backed all the way down and then still being long enough to contest his jump shots. Embiid’s a monster, so for Al to play like that is really encouraging. We’ve seen him do it in the past too. That was a good job by Al.

It was a really nice job, and in these cases Joel just has to keep going at Horford until he wears him down. He’s a bigger guy, he’s younger, and he’s always going to win a four-quarter war of attrition. Horford finished with five fouls last night, and if Joel is down there working him throughout the game instead of taking an inexplicable eight three-point tries, then maybe the result is different.

There’s just no reason your 7’2″ center should ever take eight three-pointers in a game. Redick and Tobias Harris are the only players who should be taking that many three-pointers.

Joel was also complaining about the no-call vs. Horford at the end of the game, and he’ll get fined for saying “the refs fucking sucked” at his press conference. Here’s the play:

https://twitter.com/TheRenderNBA/status/1095526596675551232

Yes, it’s probably a foul, but Joel is playing for contact there. He’s not using his body to drive Horford back and he’s leaning into him. Joel is going to get cheap rip-through contact fouls against JaVale McGee and Jarrett Allen in the first quarter of meaningless games, but he’s not getting them against Al Horford in the fourth quarter, not after Horford does a solid job against him for the first three quarters. Either way, that no-call isn’t why they lost the game. It was just one play.

Embiid came out tight, he played another lackluster game against the Celtics before finally showing up in the fourth quarter, and then came across as fairly petty and maybe just outright immature in his press conference.

Ben Simmons

Same thing as always.

Boston does a nice job sealing off his transition movement by sliding a second guy to the elbow and meeting him right at the top of the foul line. Ben picks up his dribble, kicks the ball back out, and the Sixers are then playing half court offense.

Sure, there were some blown assignments by Boston, and Ben got free a couple of times. That huge dunk was one play, and he did finish 7 of his 9 looks last night, so he was really efficient when he did get to his spots. The two misses were actually ugly jump shots, so if you take those away, he had an excellent 7-7 night from his preferable range:

More important than his individual shooting, it felt like he just couldn’t get the rest of the offense into a rhythm throughout. He only finished with five assists vs. three turnovers, and said this after the game:

I don’t think we were putting the ball to the rim. I think we slowed down a lot in transition and tried to call a few too many sets, which we got a little bit of a flow. But that’s just how the game went.

They slowed down in transition because Boston did the slowing, which is one of their strengths. The Sixers scored only 12 fast break points last night against a season average of 15.7, and those first quarter baskets, the ones where Ben is pushing and everybody is running the floor, those get them loosened up as much as anything.

When Boston sits back and plays for the transition denial, you’re running your half-court base and whatever other sets, which is not what the Sixers would prefer to do coming out of the gates. They did turn that into some successful isolation and pick and roll for Jimmy Butler late in the game, and Butler is a huge help in those situations, when the rest of the team is stuck and they need somebody to create in other ways. If these teams meet again in the playoffs, Butler really could have a big series. He scored 22 points on 12 shots last night, it was just those missed free throws at the end that were a killer.

One more note about Ben – his defense on Jayson Tatum was good. Tatum was at his best when Boston was getting switches and moving the ball around, but in 1v1 situations with Ben, he wasn’t great, shooting just 3-9 against him:

Good job right there.

Tobias Harris

Bad shooting night. If he’s even slightly better than 4-14 and 0-6 from three, then the Sixers probably win by 4-5 points.

Tobias post game:

I thought that in the first half we really never got to our pace of how we kind of wanted to play. Usually that comes from being able to take the ball out, a majority of the time. So we weren’t really able to get out in transition as we wanted. They got on the glass, got a lot of second-chance points. But I just thought overall in the game, it was tough for us to get to our type of flow and our type of rhythm out there, which is going to happen. But I think it’s something that we have to identify early on and try to get some things ready for us. Overall, I still thought that we gave ourselves a legitimate chance to win that game, but it just went the other way.

11 second chance points for the Celtics last night on the strength of four Horford offensive rebounds.

That’s not a ton, but it’s disappointing when you think about the fact they’re getting second chance opportunities while also getting enough bodies back to defend in transition. A lot of teams will simply punt the offensive board to drop multiple players into defense, so in the course of a game you’re usually limiting fast break points at the expense of hitting the offensive glass. Boston was able to wriggle in there and get some offensive boards they had no business getting last night.

Rotation stuff

Jonathon Simmons was first off the bench while James Ennis and Jonah Bolden were DNPs, and I have no idea why. Brown again linked Simmons and Harris’ minutes together with Boban Marjanovic, giving us a grouping that looked like this:

  1. B. Simmons
  2. J. Simmons
  3. Furkan Korkmaz
  4. Harris
  5. Boban

And then we saw a little bit of the same unit beyond that: Joel Embiid, Mike Scott, Jimmy Butler, JJ Redick, and T.J. McConnell. So the splits from the Laker game were more or less similar last night. There was also a point in the game where we got a Ben/JJ/Simmons/Mike Scott/Boban lineup, which played a pretty ineffective chunk of minutes.

But this was a Jonah Bolden game. When you have bigs like Al Horford and Daniel Theis who can space the floor and shoot from the perimeter, then Bolden as the first five off the bench makes more sense than Boban, in my mind. Boban is gonna have to be a situational guy moving into the playoffs.

Other notes:

  • The early Horford foul leading to the technical… I dunno. He played pretty good D there but might have been a little handsy right before the whistle was blown.
  • I swear I saw a Spain pick and roll at the beginning of the second half. I forgot to DVR the game, so I’m gonna have to go look back and see if I can find it.
  • Boban’s size results in some totally bizarre and usually hilarious on-court optics. There was a point in the 1st quarter, around the 5:00 mark, where he reached up and snagged a weakside rebound without even leaving his feet. In the 3rd quarter, he had a post up on Horford where he didn’t even move his feet or back him down, he simply just turned and flicked the ball over his head for a bucket.
  • It felt like Hayward was wide open on every single shot he took last night.
  • When Embiid got the and-1 bucket against Horford late in the 4th quarter, it was the loudest I’d heard the WFC this season.
  • Butler has been doing a great job lately of getting to the line. He was fouled twice last night on three point attempts.
  • The Celtics are probably better without Kyrie Irving. Same thing as last season. When he’s on the floor, they need to hide his defensive shortcomings, but last night, as you’ve seen before, Terry Rozier and Marcus Smart are defensive upgrades that present more matchup issues for the Sixers, more than if Kyrie was out there.
  • People will complain and say I didn’t criticize Brett Brown enough, but obviously the head coach plays a role in addressing all of the things I just wrote about, does he not?