Without 3-point shooting, Sixers were doomed
BOSTON » In so many ways Wednesday, Brett Brown wished only to go back in time. And in so many ways, the only way that could work would be to keep moving.
So hours before he could coach the 76ers in a possible elimination game against the Celtics, he did what he would want his players to do. He tied his athletic shoes tight, and he just went out and ran free.
He jogged along the banks of the Charles River, on Storrow Drive, making certain to circle toward Boston University, where once he’d played point guard for Rick Pitino. He ran, and he thought, and he remembered when his favorite sport was much less complicated.
“You grow up in New England, and you are just so proud of the Celtics, and you make the trip to Boston when you are 7 and 6 and 11 years old, and I did it every year,” the Maine native would say later. “Just to be back in the city, and run that way, you are just flooded with memories.”
Maybe one reason Brown invited a mentalist to entertain his players on the eve of Game 5 of an NBA Eastern Conference semifinal series was to somehow get everything out of all of their minds. Or perhaps it was just so they could be lost in some pick-acard-any-card stunts. Either way, there wasn’t much more he could design, fool them with or desire. His team had won 52 games in the regular season and another five in the playoffs, often enough that it knew what to do and when.
“When we play free, we play as a team and as a unit,” Ben Simmons said. “And we just enjoy it and have fun.
With that, Brown’s only recommendation was that the Sixers take in every bit of the scenery, and that they feel pressure only to go out and play their way.
“I’ve said from Day 1 that we play fast,” Brown said. “We want to play fast. And I hope that pace means more 3-point looks.”
Those looks would come from a free-flowing, running offense.
Those looks would be the last thing the Boston Celtics would want.
“If we can click a night, hit a night where we are guarding like we’ve been guarding, and then make some shots, that’s when we can be at our best,” Brown said, during the morning shoot-around. “I would like to see more threes. I would like to see more threes. That’s the way the sport is being played now.”
All season, that’s what the Sixers did, rebounding well, pushing the ball and allowing Ben Simmons to start an offense with land-speed-record chest passes inches inside the three-point line. They won by penetrating and kicking to 3-point shooters, with Brown demanding they not hold onto the ball for more than half a second. They had a style. The Celtics needed five games to rob them of that style.
That’s why Brown had to know early Wednesday that his first winning season as an NBA head coach was about to end. That’s when he had to see that what he wanted, he was not receiving. That was the first hint at what was about to come: A 114-112 loss, the fourth in five games to the Celtics, and another season down without that true championship contention that the franchise’s cockamamie building process was supposed to ensure.
With Brown saying throughout the series that the Sixers needed to win with lengthy shots, they had only eight 3-point attempts in the first half, making two, or about as many as the mascots usually swish during timeouts. For that, they were down, 6152, after 24 minutes, and with that, their spirit would be tested. There is a reason, Brown kept saying, why none of the first 129 NBA teams to have fallen into an 0-3 hole were unable to recover and win a series. It was that, at some point, the burden crushes the will. And the Sixers’ will, which had allowed them to avoid being swept, was being thrown to a vicious test.
The Celtics, it was proven, were the wrong opponent for the Sixers. They defend too well individually to allow 3-point shooters to wiggle free. They retreat quickly on defense, making it difficult for their opponents to run. And they proved big and determined enough to throw a wall at Simmons, denying him his usual end-to-end sprinting lanes.
Brown kept hoping that it would change. It didn’t.
As they did while surviving Game 4, the Sixers tried to adapt, running more sets, forcing the ball inside. It was all they could do at that point. But it was not, as Brown said early in the series, who they are. While the Sixers courageously battled to earn a fourth-quarter lead, it was the Celtics who had controlled the pace of the game and the series.
With their season in peril Wednesday, the Sixers made only eight 3-point shots on 21 attempts.
So the predictable soon will begin. The Sixers will talk about being young, about benefitting from the experience, about their process having been a year ahead of schedule anyway.
“It’s a young team,” Brown was found saying Wednesday, even if it was not as an excuse. “That can be a good thing. It doesn’t water down the desperation we feel. But it’s a free group.”
That was what he’d hoped, that they would run and bury threes and force a Game 6 in the Wells Fargo Center Friday.
Instead, his run to fulfillment, already long, will just grow longer.