Series of bad matchups has left a good season in peril
PHILADELPHIA » Marco Belinelli tossed in a shot from the corner, near the three-point arc, and the horn sounded and 20,758 made the Wells Fargo Center rattle. Brett Brown raced off the court and toward the locker room in utter joy. Confetti fluttered from the ceiling, covering the floor.
“It was drawn up to be a walkoff three,” Brown said. “I thought it was.”
It wasn’t. And because it wasn’t, there were the Sixers, their fans and their event planners, doing what they do best. They were convincing themselves that it was time to celebrate before it was time to celebrate.
Belinelli’s attempt, the officials accurately ruled, was good only for two points, not three. So instead of giving the Sixers a victory in Game 3 of their Eastern Conference semifinal series with the Celtics, it produced only overtime. And that’s when they all were hit with something else familiar: Their process to become championship-ready was going to take a little longer.
The Celtics would wind up winning, 101-98, taking a 3-0 lead in the series and giving their fans, not just the confetti-clean-up crew, a reason to brandish brooms. No team in NBA history has recovered from an 0-3 mess to win a series, and 129 have tried. So unless the Sixers, who recently had a 17-game winning streak, unload a fourgame job in a hurry, that number will grow to a buck-30. And Brett Brown will know why.
Because any basketball tournament, whether of the single-elimination or the first-to-16-wins variety, is defined by matchups, the Sixers have stumbled into cyclone of irony. For while they are built in such a non-conformist way, with a 6-10 point guard unwilling to take outside shots and a 7-0 center who can be the best in his field, they were supposed to be the one team that any opponent would least like to play. Not that they were the best team; that, they would have to prove. But they were the most unusually constructed team. And that would be their most useful weapon.
Yet while Brown didn’t acknowledge it at first, he had to have a sinking feeling when the Celtics outlasted Milwaukee in seven first-round games. For there it was, the one matchup the Sixers did not need. There were the Celtics, the one team that would give the Sixers matchup trauma, even without Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward.
“The regular season is very different from the playoffs,” Brown would say, just after the Sixers had come to face elimination. “We understand that. And the fact is the Boston Celtics do expose some of our weaknesses. They can defend positionally quite well all by themselves. The abundance of three-point shots that we were used to getting in the regular season and a little bit in the Miami series doesn’t happen as frequently. Joel Embiid has two elite defensive players in Al Horford and Aron Baynes that he has to figure out. And it’s physical.
“When I put my basketball hat on, we’ve seen this: Sometimes you get into a bad matchup. And we have to perform better. There is no doubt about that. I am not leaning on the ‘youth’ (as an excuse.) I’m the coach. I’ll take responsibility for all of this. But there are portions of what I just said that I know to be true.”
Because basketball is so easily charted, and because that’s why it is so enjoyable, there will be criticisms, some real, some knee-jerk, about timeouts called and saved, about substitutions made and not made. Embiid basically called out the officials Saturday for not sending him to the line enough in a rough game. There is some luck involved; another inch behind the line, and Belinelli’s shot would have justified the confetti bath. But that can explain a game, or a play, or a situation. A series is defined over a longer period. And that’s when the matchups can matter.
Even before the series, Brown consistently delivered one warning about the Celtics: That, as they are constructed, they will guard at a high level without much help. For that skill alone, the threepoint shooting that lifted the Sixers to 52 regularseason victories and a three-seed in the East would be challenged. That option compromised, it would require Ben Simmons to be more valuable as an offensive force. Yet the Celtics have the muscle to wall Simmons off every time he tries to steamroll into the lane. So repelled, the presumptive Rookie of the Year has been forced to take more short fade-aways and lower-percentage flip shots than the dunks he was enjoying during the winning streak.
At some point in their own championship search, the Celtics will feel the loss of Irving. But the alternate Boston point guard, Terry Rozier, provides exactly the level of smooth movement to be a special and particular pest to the Sixers’ nontraditional backcourt configuration.
“Some of the match-ups have hurt us,” Brown said. “I respect their positional defensive athleticism, and switchable people. That’s the story. I definitely do not think it’s the youth.”
It’s not the youth. But for the Sixers, it would be better if it were. At least they could emerge from the series claiming to have been boosted by the experience.
Instead, they are learning that, as constructed, they are not just a matchup problem, but that they can have matchup problems too. And that’s not going to easily swept away.
Contact Jack McCaffery @jmccaffery@21stcenturymedia.com; follow him on Twitter @JackMcCaffery