The Boston Celtics just suffered their most humiliating defeat not just in the era of Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, but maybe ever. Until yesterday, they had never blown a 3-1 lead in a playoff series in franchise history. What made watching their undoing even harder is knowing Al Horford's presence would have made a huge difference.
The Celtics survived without Horford throughout the regular season, but then just happened to go against the one team where he would have been useful against: the Philadelphia 76ers. There were a multitude of reasons for why Boston blew a series they absolutely should have won, but at the top was their inability to stop Joel Embiid.
The Celtics tried pretty much everything to slow Embiid down when he came back, and nothing really worked. Because Horford has been the NBA's premier Embiid stopper, he would have been quite useful for that alone.
If Horford had stopped Embiid in his tracks, this may have been a five-game series as it was supposed to before Philly stormed back. Boston may not have needed Embiid to be canceled out, but merely slowed down to finish off the Sixers. Because they not only had no options but lost the one guy who could have given them the edge they needed, they lost.
Of course, Boston couldn't re-sign Horford because they didn't have the cap room to do it, but for anyone who forgot, they really tried to open it, but all signs pointed to they couldn't unless they wanted to lose a draft asset in the process.
It was pretty painful the first time too
When they lost Horford in 2019, everyone knew right then and there that their frontcourt would be a problem. Losing him and trading Aron Baynes left them with a frontcourt of Daniel Theis, Enes Freedom (then-Kanter), Robert Williams III, and Vincent Poirier.
Theis played well above his paygrade, but he was still simply a solid rotation big. Everyone knew what Freedom could and could not do. Williams simply wasn't ready. Poirier did nothing besides turn into a difficult Celtics trivia question.
It was actually pretty impressive how far Boston went without Horford back then. Ironically enough, they beat the Sixers in the first round with Embiid, but part of why the Raptors pushed that team to seven was the disparity in terms of frontcourt talent (Serge Ibaka and Marc Gasol).
In fact, the primary reason why Miami beat Boston the following round was because the Celtics had no answer for Bam Adebayo. When Horford came back two years later, it was immediately clear how much his presence changed everything in that matchup.
So, history repeated itself, except this time, it came much earlier. Maybe another Horford-Celtics reunion would prevent this from happening again next season, but that won't undo the bad taste this series left in the Celtics' fanbase's collective mouth.
Add us as a preferred source on Google