Listen, rules are rules.
It doesn’t mean they are dead, it means what the title says.
They, and their season are on life support.
Not just for a few possessions or a quarter.
The full 48 minutes.
Not one guy, every player.
Every coach, whether it was the head guy or the assistants.
All you had to do was watch the first few minutes.
There was no fight.
The Celtics were punched in the mouth right from the jump and never bounced back.
It’s a fair concern in my opinion given what we’ve seen these last two games.
It’s been losing basketball.
We all know how that ended.
What they thrived at was bouncing back and showing that resiliency.
We saw that again this year vs ATL.
Unfortunately, the Celtics have now lost two in a row in this series.
Recent history suggests that’s a bit of an issue.
We’ve seen this team respond in a similar situation when all the odds were stacked against them.
We’ve seen what this team is capable of when they show up and play to their potential.
That’s their only hope right now.
They had an opportunity to do that last night, and failed miserably.
Alright, we have a lot to get to.
Let’s dive in.
The Good
- No.
I’m not doing it.
Not after what we had to watch last night.
This team deserves zero spinzone right now.
Coming out and putting up a performance like that was beyond pathetic.
Shit, pick any adjective you want and it fits.
The entire roster choked.
Joe and his staff didn’t do much and what they did try clearly didn’t work.
you’re able to survive when maybe one or two guys have an off night.
When it’s everyone that touches the floor?
Let’s move on.
The Bad
- As with everything, things start at the top.
Yes, he woke up offensively.
We’ll get to the defense in a minute.
There’s no denying that a huge issue in Game 4 was Tatum’s 0-5 start.
He’s too important to the offense to just not make a single shot he takes to start games.
Especially in games as important as Games 4 & 5.
Instead, he once again started 0-5.
It didn’t matter that Jaylen was 4-6.
It didn’t matter Smart/White/Brogdon started a combined 5-8.
Sorry, but not good enough!
He was a force.
The Celtics had a 139.7 Drtg with Tatum on the floor.
So just add it all up.
The poor shooting start put the Celts in an early hole offensively.
It’s no accident that Tatum was a team worst -26.
When you’re the franchise guy, the good and the bad always start with you.
Fair or not, that’s the reality.
In the playoffs, that’s even more true.
Shooting is going to come and go over the course of a game.
What needs to be consistent is what you do on the defensive end of the floor.
We saw it in Games 2 & 3.
That was 8 quarters of locked in, full 48 minute defense.
It’s been the exact opposite.
The Sixers have had a 121.6 Ortg, which is 7 points higher than their playoff average of 114.1.
In terms of individual defense, there was no resistance by basically any Celtic defender.
It wasn’t just the lack of stops either which is what makes it so frustrating.
This game was filled with stupid defensive fouls after stupid defensive fouls.
Multiple guys fouling 3P shooters.
Rob reaching in late in the shot clock on Harden drives where he had nowhere to really go.
All that shit adds up.
- When I say this was a collective failure, I’m not kidding.
Look at those lineups!
Take out Smart and run with White/Brogdon?
It literally did not matter who touched the floor last night, nothing worked.
Not only did it not work, it was devastatingly bad.
You aren’t going to win playoff games with that.
Here’s Joe’s challenge.
They need to figure out what the hell they are going to do about the Harden/Embiid P&R.
So, they started playing drop.
How is that even possible?
What good is homecourt advantage if you never even win on your home floor?
- Offensively, it was another instance of this team just playing way too slow.
There was no urgency with their offense, no pace.
Did you get that sense last night?
I sure as shit didn’t.
The Celtics only had 5 fastbreak points.
Part of that is not getting stops, but another part is not playing fast and with pace.
It was not the free flowing offense that we’ve watched for 6 months.
The Ugly
- Where to even start.
I guess Al Horford would be a good choice.
Look, I love Al.
What he’s doing at 36 is awesome.
3-9 (2-7) in Game 4, and a horrific 0-7 (0-7) last night.
Each miss basically wide open, those are situations where you cannot miss every single one you take.
What compounded the misses was the fact that the Sixers immediately went down and scored.
It’s one thing to struggle shooting if you’re also going to get stops.
When you don’t get either, well we saw what happens.
Brogdon missing multiple wide open layups and overall not being all that impactful on either end.
Derrick was just….out there.
He’s been regressing hard this entire series and it sort of feels just like the Finals.
- The sad part is, the bigs play wasn’t all that better.
In fact, you could argue it was worse.
We talked about Al, but Rob was certainly not all that great either.
I can’t remember the last time we saw Rob play that many minutes and have such little impact.
Then with Grant, all he did in his 9 minutes was commit two bonehead fouls on Embiid.
Getting awful production from your guard trio and your big trio is a huge storyline of this game.
In reality, it goes a long way in describing what happened in Game 5.
You have to credit the Sixers, they stepped up and knocked down their open looks.
That’s what you have to do on the road if you want to steal a game.
Many will just look at the Celts 3P shooting, but look at the open/wide open 2PA as well.
This was a night where truly, nobody could throw a pea in the ocean.
The Celts finished 39/31%, while also missing 9 motherfucking FTs.
That’s choking in my opinion.
In these last two losses, the Celts are shooting 43/35% from the floor.
They’re getting clean looks, you have to execute.
- Of course, the biggest issue here is what the Celtics are on the verge of doing.
They’re healthy, the field has opened up for them, everything was there for the taking.
Instead, they fucked around.
It starts back to the ATL series.
When you get into these short series, one bad game can end your season.
That was the Celtics Game 5.
So now this is it.
Win out or your season is over.
