Sometimes, less is more. As others were sledding or shoveling on Saturday while the blizzard rocked the Delaware Valley, Brett Brown was staying warm and watching more film of the Boston Celtics.
He came away more confused.
“I think Boston is very capable offensively and Brad [Stevens] does a really good job of putting them in clever offensive situations,” Brown said before the game. “And it makes them really hard to guard.”
Hit the pause button right there. Brown kept on talking, but I want to break up what he said. He continued…
“I still think the key to out game is going to be, ‘How much do we turn it over?’ They turn people over, and I feel like we’re going to come back at the end of this game and talk a lot about that.”
Both of those things came true in the Celtics’ 112-92 win over the Philadelphia 76ers on Sunday night. Boston rang up 112 points and shot 11-25 from three-point range, while also turning 24 Sixers turnovers into 25 points.
As Brown would say after the game, “That was a bad NBA game from our standpoint.” He wasn’t wrong.
Let’s start with the turnovers, because they seem easier to explain. Boston, with aggressive pre-rotations the quick-handed guards, is a bad matchup on paper (or Basketball Reference): The Sixers give the ball away more than any other team in the league, and the Celtics are in the top five at turning their opponents over. There will be blood.
Stevens has built the second-best defense in the NBA — In a league with the inhuman San Antonio Spurs, it’s basically the best — and the Sixers predictably coughed the basketball up in traffic against it. Every member of the Celtics starting five recorded at least one steal, and Marcus Smart (or, as they say in New England, Mahcusss Smahttt) chipped in with four off the bench.
“At the end of the day, we got to show up and do our jobs, and we didn’t do that tonight so we’re going to forget about it and move forward,” Nerlens Noel said.
The turnovers are an obvious problem, and on a brutal night from Ish Smith (7 points, 3-12 FG, 4 assists, 3 turnovers, and a MINUS-36!), it was likely that they would be a factor. But changing focus to the defense (where this game was lost in the first half), I have a half-baked theory that, for whatever reason, the Sixers struggle more against against teams that rely on ball movement.
| W-L | PPG | |
| Top 6 Ast% | 1-8 | 109.6 |
| Bottom 6 Ast% | 2-8 | 102.4 |
Those numbers probably don’t mean much (especially because the high assist teams are generally better offenses), but a team like Boston is doomed in the playoffs (if they make it!) because they won’t be able to consistently generate quality looks in halfcourt situations. Against the Sixers’ inexperienced defenders, all of that ball movement leads to confusion and a whole bunch of open shots.
“We knew they could shoot, but they shot way too many open jump shots the whole game, but especially in the first half,” Noel said. ”They did hit some tough shots, but it’s on us to really make them earn them.”
“We couldn’t come up with stops, couldn’t come up with loose balls,” Robert Covington said. “That’s what was hurting us really, loose balls and they were finding shooters.”
Covington was the Sixers’ lone bright spot (offensively, at least) with 25 points on 6-15 shooting to go with 8 rebounds. Confidently bombing contested threes from a couple of feet beyond the arc, this looked more like 2014-15 RoCo.
The 25-year-old swingman also thought the snow day messed with the team’s rhythm a little bit.
After the game, the Sixers gave off the vibe that they wanted to turn the page quickly. With the reeling Phoenix Suns coming into town on Tuesday, they have an excellent opportunity to pick up their seventh win of the season.
Nobody embodied that message more than Brown, who spent roughly 80 seconds at the post-game podium.
“We just didn’t come with the energy, for whatever reason,” Brown said. “I love them, and we’re going to get after it tomorrow. Have a nice night, thanks.”
Then Brown turned for the door, but it was locked. Pretty much nothing went right for the Sixers.
Follow Rich on Twitter: @rich_hofmann