The most revealing aspect of Joel Embiid’s performance Tuesday night against the Celtics wasn’t the 52 points he scored or the 13 rebounds he grabbed but the truth he told.
The 76ers had needed every one of those points and boards, every one of Embiid’s six assists, every bit of his top-to-bottom excellence, just to hang on against Boston, 103-101. They needed Embiid’s most persuasive case that he should be the NBA’s Most Valuable Player just to avoid a soul-crushing collapse in the game’s closing seconds, just to keep themselves from going 0-4 this season against the opponent they’re likely to face in the playoffs.
They needed to win to shake off a bad loss in Milwaukee to the Bucks two nights earlier and to show that they actually could beat the rival that has bedeviled them for the better part of six years now. And afterward, only Embiid was honest enough to admit what was obvious: This one mattered more, and even in winning it, the Sixers hadn’t given anyone much reason to think that a matchup against the Celtics would end in anything other than another springtime disappointment.
“We’ve struggled this year against them, obviously, being down oh-three,” Embiid said. “So [Tuesday] was much needed. A win is a win. It doesn’t matter what we did wrong out there, and like I said, we found ways to basically lose that game. But a win is a win, especially going into the playoffs. If they end up the number-two seed, we might see them in the second round if we make it there. You’ve got to be ready for every scenario. I just wanted to see where we’re at, where I’m at, where we’re at as a team. I think if we can correct a lot of the mistakes that we made, we’ve got a pretty good chance.”
After the Sixers hired Doc Rivers and Daryl Morey, after they acquired James Harden and reshaped their roster, after they went all-in, that’s the best that they can hope for against the Celtics, still: a chance. And if what happened at the Wells Fargo Center was any indication, it won’t be much of one.
Ever since Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown became their centerpiece players, the Celtics have kept the Sixers at arm’s length in the Eastern Conference, beating them 13 times in 23 regular-season games since the start of the 2017-18 season, booting the Sixers from the playoffs in five games in 2018 and four games in 2020. Little about Tuesday suggested that the Sixers could shake off the burden of that hard history. To watch them pretty much throw up all over themselves in the final 10 seconds was to wonder why anything would be different if the teams were to meet again in the conference semifinals.
“We were trying to give them the game back,” Rivers said after a seven-point lead melted to two and nearly vanished when Tatum back-rimmed a jumper at the buzzer. “I mean, we really did try.”
Apparently, no one wants Embiid to win the MVP award more than his teammates do. Harden had 10 assists and didn’t turn the ball over, and P.J. Tucker drilled those three late three-pointers. But the rest of the Sixers were committed to proving that they can’t function as a competent and competitive team without Embiid’s greatness. Again and again, they showed how lost they’d be without him.
Tobias Harris, Tyrese Maxey, De’Anthony Melton, Georges Niang, Paul Reed: Each was more of a liability than a contributor to a key victory. And all the elbow jumpers that Embiid swished and all the spin-move dunks that he delivered only made it easy to forget just how shorthanded Boston was. Brown missed the game with what the Celtics called “lower back pain” — pain so debilitating that he will probably play Wednesday night against the Toronto Raptors — and center Robert Williams sat out with “injury management.”
So whatever psychological relief the Sixers might have gained from finally beating Boston was cut with the understanding that the Celtics could have won the game anyway and will likely be at full strength come the postseason. Hell, Joe Mazzulla, their coach, was pleased with how they played, and he should have been. Like a swordsman in The Princess Bride, the Celtics can wait until the perfect moment to reveal that they’re not left-handed, and how will the Sixers react when they do?
“If you look at the box score,” Mazzulla said, “any time we miss threes and lose, it’s a thing. But we got 13 more shots than they did. We got seven more offensive rebounds than they did. They only shot 16 free throws. We forced them into 12 turnovers, and we only had eight. So I thought we did a lot of good things throughout the entire game. You have a special night by a guy, and they made some big shots down the stretch.”
Mazzulla was right to be so confident. The Celtics had nothing to lose even in losing, and they forced the Sixers to take a good, long look at what it will take to win a seven-game series. They will need Joel Embiid to be every night what he was Tuesday night. They will need him to be something close to superhuman, and that’s no way to win a championship.
