76ers vs. Celtics Game 7: Jayson Tatum, Joel Embiid and the unpredictable series

Everything is coming easy for the Philadelphia 76ers.

And everything is coming hard for the Boston Celtics.

That is it. Two nights after an embarrassing second-half performance, the second-seeded Celtics submitted one of their worst efforts of the season, losing to the Sixers, 106-93, in Game 6 of their first-round playoff series, and now they face a Game 7 — and the possibility that they can blow a 3-1 lead — at home on Saturday.

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A reminder: Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown have never lost a first-round series as a tandem. They have never blown a 3-1 lead. None of this has ever happened to them.

Everything that can go wrong has gone wrong for the Celtics. They are getting run off the 3-point line, shooting far fewer wide-open looks and converting them less often. As is custom in the playoffs, they are relying more on isolation on offense as a result, forcing a ton of tough shots and turning the ball over with greater frequency.

“They’ve made an adjustment on some of their stuff defensively,” said Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla, whose team isn’t rebounding its own misses, either, “and we have to find different ways to create against different coverages. They’ve changed their coverages throughout the series and done a good job of it. Sometimes it’s harder to create, so we have to do it faster against different coverages and execute that.”

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They are, in a word, hesitant, and that is a bad place to be when they have been playing freely in that space all season, taking the most 3s of any team left in the playoffs and converting them at a top-10 rate during the regular season. Credit Paul George and Kelly Oubre Jr., in particular, for their work opposite Tatum and Brown.

“I think in tandem me and him have been phenomenal on the wings,” said George.

Defensively, Boston’s drop coverage against Tyrese Maxey’s pick-and-roll operation has been a disaster, as he has operated in space provided by Boston’s big combination of Neemias Queta, Nikola Vučević and Luka Garza. Only Detroit’s Cade Cunningham has run more PNRs in the playoffs, and no one has scored more than Maxey on…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/article/76ers-vs-celtics-game-7-jayson-tatum-joel-embiid-and-the-unpredictable-series-170904117.html

Author : Ben Rohrbach

Publish date : 2026-05-01 17:09:00

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