Tyrese Maxey torches Celtics’ defense as 76ers beat Celtics on Christmas: 9 takeaways
A lackluster defensive effort caused the Celtics to come up short.
Tyrese Maxey gave the Celtics more than they could handle in a Christmas Day showdown on Wednesday, as the 76ers earned a signature 118-114 win at the expense of their defending champion rivals.
Here are the takeaways.
The Celtics’ defense was awful.
The Celtics’ defense has not been nearly as good as last year through Christmas, and that trend continued on a huge stage Wednesday.
We saw glimpses of the Celtics’ ceiling. Their first steal of the game came with just under four minutes remaining in the fourth quarter, but the defense kicked up at times as they rallied back from two double-digit deficits – one each in the third quarter and late in the fourth. After essentially being allowed to do whatever he wanted for much of the game, Tyrese Maxey turned the ball over repeatedly against a significantly stronger defensive stretch by the Celtics in the closing minutes.
But the worst play of the game by the Celtics may have come with 1:09 remaining – after putting in the work to rally back, the Celtics had the Sixers down to 1.1 on the shot clock, inbounding the ball on the sideline. Maxey swooped around a screen and caught a pass streaking to the basket completely uninhibited. Jaylen Brown took a half-hearted step toward him at the rim, but Maxey finished off the layup and gave the Sixers a seven-point lead with just over a minute remaining, which put the Celtics in desperation mode the rest of the way.
“We just came out too casual,” Brown said. “I just think we were walking to our spots. Nobody was sprinting down the floor, just kind of hanging around, just trying to veer back to get the ball instead of just pushing it down the court and just being aggressive. I feel like we just started off the game just slow, and they took advantage of that.”
Brown added that he thinks the recent struggles look worse than they are, and Joe Mazzulla agreed.
“We had two 25-point quarters last game,” he said. “It was our offense [that struggled] because of our live-ball turnovers. This game, it was the inconsistency in our effort.
“So I think it’s small samples. We need to play harder. But if you look at the 30-game sample size, it’s about where we’re at. But yeah, definitely moments where we have to play harder.”
Wednesday’s game was the first time the Celtics lost two games in a row all year, and they held that two-game losing streak at bay longer than anyone else. This little downturn probably won’t mean much in the long term, and we have ample evidence that the Celtics are better than the team that handed signature wins to both the short-handed Magic and the Sixers.
But the defensive slippage is starting to become a little more noticeable than it was previously, and showing that they can nip it in the bud might instill some needed confidence.
Kristaps Porzingis took a weird step and missed the second half.
On one of the game’s first possessions, Kristaps Porzingis took a very weird step, slipped, crumpled a bit and came up limping.
The TD Garden crowd made a weird noise of obvious concern, but Porzingis played the rest of the first half and knocked down three 3-pointers.
On the other end, however, Porzingis looked very limited as Sixers players ran right around him, and he started the second half in the locker room. A closer look showed that he twisted his left ankle uncomfortably, and the Celtics ruled him “doubtful” to return the rest of the way (which, given the emphasis the Celtics place on staying healthy for the playoffs, and Porzingis’ injury history, was as good as ruling him out).
“I asked him how he was,” Mazzulla said afterward. “He said he was okay, and then he got re-evaluated at halftime, but I haven’t heard anything.”
Tyrese Maxey might be the Sixers’ best player now.
The Celtics appeared to be on the verge of reasserting control and taking over the second half after a strong third-quarter performance, and Joel Embiid and Paul George started the final frame on the bench.
But rather than taking and extending a lead against the shorthanded Sixers, the Celtics – who had their full complement of stars on the floor at the time – slipped thanks to a strong stretch by Maxey. The speedy guard tore apart the Celtics in the pick-and-roll and punished them for Sam Hauser’s minutes, barking at the bench after one particularly smooth spin and finish around the taller wing.
For years, the Celtics had a great answer for the Sixers because Al Horford could deal with Joel Embiid, and that caused a Sixers team built around Embiid’s singular physical dominance 1-on-1 a lot of issues.
Maxey solves a lot of those issues by being the kind of explosive guard with a deadly jumper who can make the Celtics’ defense scramble, especially when that defense is in a compromised state.
“It’s on our individual matchup, and it’s on our team as well,” Mazzulla said. “We just have to take his tendency. Some of those he’s going to make, but the stuff that we gave him to his right hand in the first half, the Maxey minutes in the second quarter where he kind of got loose in transition, he got loose going to his right hand, you have to take some of those away.
“So it’s just a continued detailed effort on the tendencies, especially the ones in the first half. I’d say that the stuff in the first half that he got because of our transition and our [lack of] attention to detail are worse than some of the stuff during the second.”
The Celtics were without Jrue Holiday, which clearly matters quite a bit, but Maxey’s rise is a really important transition for the Sixers, and on Wednesday, he already looked like their best player.
Maxey finished with 33 points, four rebounds and 12 assists, and he was a team-high +20 in the box score. Embiid and Paul George, incidentally, were -18 and -16 respectively. Box score plus/minus isn’t always a particularly useful tool, but sometimes it perfectly reflects the eye test.
Joel Embiid stepped wrong in warm-ups (but he was fine).
In a bizarre moment before the game, Embiid took a turnaround 3-pointer and fell backwards, apparently stepping on a TD Garden security guard and falling to the ground, clutching his lower leg.
Embiid started and looked fine for much of the game, but he also tweaked his left ankle in the second half maneuvering around the basket in a non-contact step.
As injuries mount for Embiid, it’s hard not to wonder if the idea of him remaining healthy through the playoffs is realistic.
Still, he did score 27 points, and he grabbed nine rebounds despite his nicks and bruises.
Caleb Martin continued to torture the Celtics.
Celtics fans may remember – although they probably would rather forget – the 2023 Eastern Conference finals, when the Heat got unsustainably hot just long enough to eliminate them from the playoffs (but not long enough to mount a serious threat against the Nuggets, who cruised to the title that year).
Somehow, in all of those games, Caleb Martin never made seven 3-pointers, even though it felt like he averaged 13 or 14 per game. On Wednesday, Martin – who is shooting 30.5 percent from behind the arc this season – went 7-for-9 from deep, setting a new career-high for made 3-pointers in a game.
“That was the game plan,” Brown said. “We just stuck to the game plan. We trusted the game plan. Martin hit, what? Seven 3s. That’s tough. He’s done that before to us in the past. Going into it, we felt comfortable letting him take all them shots. He just knocked them down that time.”
If the Celtics and Sixers meet in a playoff series, limiting Paul George will probably be more of a priority for Joe Mazzulla, but Celtics fans might be more concerned about Martin – the absolute definition of a Celtics killer.
Jaylen Brown got going in the second half.
Brown’s first half was a confusing mix of off-beat and seemingly disengaged – he didn’t look like he had a good feel for the game or the 76ers, and as a result, he started 1-for-8 from the field with four turnovers in the first 24 minutes.
In the third quarter, however, Brown scored 16 points, spearheading the Celtics’ run back into the game. He got into the teeth of the Sixers’ defense repeatedly and scored around the rim with a variety of creative finishes before knocking down a couple of big 3-pointers that continued to cut into the gap.
“This game was just not a great game, wasn’t my best game,” Brown said. “But just trying to do whatever it took to help our team get a win and get us closer. […]
“We just didn’t put together a good 48. Not fully sure why. It felt kind of weird. But I guess we’ll look at it and we’ll break it down and go from there.”
Brown’s final statline – 23 points, 10-for-23 shooting – wasn’t particularly efficient, but he gave the Celtics some big minutes offensively and was part of the reason they rallied back in the second half (his first half defense, meanwhile, was part of the reason they fell behind in the first place).
The Celtics wasted a huge Tatum performance.
Tatum, meanwhile, put up MVP-esque numbers for his second showing in a row – 32 points, 15 rebounds and four assists. That performance came on the heels of his monstrous 43-point triple double on Saturday.
Tatum also got some love from Deuce during the Celtics’ first timeout.
If the players have to work on Christmas, letting their families participate in the timeouts seems fair.
Al Horford did his part.
As is so often the case against the Sixers, Horford contributed a lot – he was +22 in a game the Celtics lost by four. In the first half, he helped keep the Celtics afloat by bombing threes, and he finished with 17 points on 5-for-10 shooting from deep.
“You’ve got to give [the Sixers] credit. They played well,” Horford said. “When you’re coming over here, you’re playing here, we know that we’re getting teams’ best shots. Even if they haven’t been playing well, they were going to come out and play well. And I felt like we responded, but ultimately give them credit. They got the win and that’s that.”
The Celtics now have to bounce back.
The Celtics really don’t want to lose three in a row after dropping two straight for the first time. They’ll try to avoid that with a win over the Pacers on Friday at TD Garden – the first of two straight against Indiana in Boston.“We don’t like losing. We don’t like losing here at home especially,” Horford said. “So we just have to be better.”
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