An improbable Boston Celtics season has come to an improbable end. The “Gap Year” Celtics spent the season stealing the hearts of fans and making them believe -- hearts they wound up breaking when they blew the first 3-1 series lead in franchise history.
Saturday’s loss to the Philadelphia 76ers, though not representative of what brought this series to a Game 7, sealed its fate. The group that let the two-game advantage slip with five horrid quarters didn’t show up to the finale.
The team that overachieved for 82 games did.
They weren’t perfect, but the Celtics played hard. Boston fell down by double digits in both halves, and both times dug themselves out of the hole.
The Celtics played the stay-ready guys
Joe Mazzulla even made the adjustments that the fanbase spent the week clamoring for. He dove back into the rotation. Ron Harper Jr., Baylor Scheierman, and Luka Garza joined Jaylen Brown and Derrick White in the starting lineup. Jordan Walsh and Hugo Gonzalez saw playing time off the bench.
With Jayson Tatum out, Boston leaned into the gritty, next-man-up mentality they’d built the season on, it just didn’t work.
Unfortunately, as hard as some of the above rotation players played, especially Gonzalez and Scheierman, who each had important stints in this one, none of them could knock down threes.
As a team, the Cs shot just 13 of 49 from beyond the arc. The above group was 0 of 11.
To their credit, many of those were clean looks. They got shots they wanted, didn’t make them, and the outcome reflected that. Not only that, but they didn’t score in general. Only Brown, White, Payton Pritchard, Sam Hauser, and Neemias Queta put the ball in the basket for Boston with the season on the line.
Were there positives to running the bench guys in this game?
Absolutely. They hustled, played physical, locked in defensively -- all things that contribute to winning, all things that they showed in the fourth quarter of Game 6 when they ripped off an 11-0 run against Philly's starters.
They may have played the stay-ready guys at the wrong time
The drawbacks were just as impactful. As Philadelphia parked Joel Embiid in the paint, none of them could make them pay for it. In hindsight, it’s pretty difficult to expect players with little to no playoff experience to perform at a high level in a winner take all game.
Maybe starting them wasn’t the call, but leaning more heavily on those players, giving them an opportunity to show whether or not they can impact the game earlier in the series could’ve stopped the 76ers from turning it on its head.
Perhaps without the pressure they would’ve been able to make the Sixers pay for leaving them on the perimeter.
“I wish we played that style and trusted that style more, even throughout the playoffs, even through wins and through losses,” Brown explained postgame. “You know, obviously it's not it's not always the easiest decision, but I wish that that style for our team was how we empowered the rest of our group, and you saw tonight how everybody came out and they played their tail off.”
As Brown said, the energy that Scheierman, Walsh, and Gonzalez gave in this game helped keep the Celtics afloat. It was just their inability to convert that partially sunk the ship. Their inability to deliver on both ends forced Boston to rely on Pritchard, White, Brown, Queta, and Hauser for almost the entirety of the fourth quarter.
At that point, it was clear that tired legs came into play. Boston failed to sink a field-goal over the last five minutes (until the game was out of reach), despite the 76ers holding the door wide-open for them to step through.
The adage “too little, too late,” rings true for both the series, and its deciding game.
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