Simmons, 76ers pull disappearing act
BOSTON — Ben Simmons sat on the bench with his legs spread wide and his hands clasped between his knees. He was wearing a blue warmup and holding a clear mouthpiece and following the action with his eyes. This was midway through the fourth quarter of a game that many will tell you was a must-win for the Sixers, yet for the previous eight minutes of action, they had carried on without him.
Rewind a couple of quarters.
If this 2018 Eastern Conference semifinal does indeed end, we will look back at these as the pivotal minutes: five of them, the last of the second quarter, and an unraveling so sudden and dramatic that you could still feel their impact as the closing seconds of the night arrived. What happened? For the previous two days, there had been talk of adjustments, and pledges that the team whose embarrassing display of defense cost it Game 1 would be replaced by a different unit come Game 2. An hour-and-a-half before game time, Brett Brown spoke in confident tones about his expectations for the evening.
“I feel like you are going to see a different team tonight,” the Sixers coach said. “I’ll be real surprised if you don’t.”
And you did. For about 20 minutes of basketball, the team from Monday night seemed dead and gone, another ghost in a city full of them. Three days after making just 5 of 26 attempts from 3-point range, the Sixers connected on 7 of 9 attempts over the first 18 minutes, taking a 51-30 lead on a tough Robert Covington jumper from the left corner over tight defense by Terry Rozier.
And then . something happened. The exact nature of that something was tough to gauge given the rapidity with which things unraveled. The team that everybody swore we would no longer see suddenly reappeared between the TD Garden end lines.
It was a team that was playing without Simmons even when he was on the court. He air-mailed a point-blank shot attempt on the game’s first possession and later missed bad on a baby hook in the paint. But the Sixers carried on without him, building that 21-point lead thanks to contributions from their outside shooters, JJ Redick connecting on a trio of 3s and Covington a pair. And then, with about five minutes remaining in the second quarter, everything changed.
For one of the few times this season, Simmons was a significant contributor to the problem. He turned the ball over twice as the Celtics exploded for a 20-5 run to end the first half. In the third quarter, he got caught with the ball in his hands as the shot clock expired on a dead-end possession.
By the time Jayson Tatum threw down a ferocious tomahawk dunk from the baseline with 2 minutes, 24 seconds remaining in the third quarter, the Celtics held a 76-68 lead and a building that had spent much of the first half flatlining was pulsing with the energy of a fan base fully confident that it was on the side of the better team.
It’s hard to argue with that diagnosis.
There were some selfinflicted wounds, no doubt. An awful foul by Joel Embiid on a desperate off-balance 3-point attempt by Marcus Smart as the shot clock expired. A number of misses from point-blank range. A turnover that saw Dario Saric dribble off his foot and then get outraced to the ball by Jaylen Brown, who closed out his sprint with a soaring dunk.
For the most part, though, the Sixers simply disappeared. Simmons spent a significant chunk of the second half on the bench watching T.J. McConnell run an offense that found a way to staunch the bleeding. When he returned with 5:29 remaining, the Sixers had clawed their way back to take a 93-91 lead. That lead didn’t last long.
There will be plenty of ink spilled between now and Game 3 about what went wrong for the Sixers during their two-game trek to Boston. There are all sorts of theories you can turn to, but the end result is what matters most. Down 2-0, the Sixers find themselves as close to mortality as they’ve been since before Christmas, when their remarkable run to the No. 3 seed in the Eastern Conference began.
To have a shot at postponing their demise, they need to figure out a way to get their rookie point guard back where he has spent most of the season: in the center of things, dictating to others instead of the reverse.