PHILADELPHIA — Nightmares from the Celtics’ Opening Night loss to the 76ers returned as Philadelphia erased more than half of Boston’s 24-point second quarter lead before halftime. The Celtics committed three and-one fouls, turned the ball over and allowed the Sixers to race past them in transition in moments eerily reminiscent of their first loss. By the halfway point of the third, Philadelphia tied the game on a 32-8 run.
Then, Payton Pritchard, whose early season shooting woes continued with a 1-for-9 night outside, grabbed an offensive rebound and fed Jaylen Brown for a go-ahead three. He stole the ball from Joel Embiid in the post on a sequence that ended with a Brown put-back. The Celtics never trailed , holding off another Philadelphia rally to win 109-108 by stopping Embiid’s last-second about like how the Sixers halted Pritchard on opening night before the buzzer at TD Garden.
“We did a good job in the second half of just playing regardless of the result of the last possession,” Joe Mazzulla said. “Whether it was offense or defense, I thought we had like five offensive rebounds on one possession and missed them and then we sprinted back. We just played with a great short-term memory and onto the next play and fought like hell, so credit to them.”
Friday’s win perfectly encapsulated the way the Celtics continue to overcome their disadvantages in talent and experience, scoring a third straight victory on the offensive glass, 16-9 with a 17-11 edge in second chance points. They turned Philadelphia over 18 times and only gave away nine turnovers themselves. Keying in on those battles made up for shooting slumps, rotation uncertainty and the much discussed offseason departures. The Celtics rank ninth in offense and eighth in defense through six games, even if the frenetic and sometimes frustrating appearance of their games doesn’t reflect that.
A Hugo González for Brown substitution improbably settled the Celtics down later in the third after Anfernee Simons laid in a three-point play to extend Boston’s lead to six. González’ defensive rebound secured the following stop and he snuck along the baseline to grab Luka Garza’s blocked floater and pass it back to him for a successful one.
“I think it’s the players that we have. The guys we got, they are able to handle those situations,” Simons said. “I think it started in training camp, where (Mazzulla) put us in high pressure situations in training camp, and we’ve been trying to, from then, build and gain a relationship through those moments.”
Mazzulla tracks the progress of this group through minutes played, approximating 36 good ones, a steady rise from 12-24 early in their losing streak. The Celtics led 64-40 after a 38-point first quarter in which Pritchard found his mid-range shot, Brown started a scorching 7-for-8 from the field and made all the right plays. Derrick White shook off his struggles to start 2-for-3 from three. How the Celtics handled the offense slowly declining from that point on into a 20-point fourth allowed them to win, Mazzulla believed.
That meant Simons getting up after getting blocked twice in rapid succession, stumbling to the floor in the fourth quarter underneath Adem Bona. It involved González diving to the floor along the sideline for a ball he had little chance at, then securing another he leapt at. Neemias Queta took a seat for Xavier Tillman Sr. in the closing lineup, who held Embiid without a field goal over the final seven minutes while adding five points across three straight possessions in the clutch where the Sixers forced him to shoot.
And when Minott missed three straight shots and a pair of free throws in the last two minutes that handed Embiid a long jumper for the win that he missed, González reached him first. He acknowledged the effort, like Mazzulla did for him earlier.
“(Minott) did a hell of a job and he’s played super, super good,” González said. “I think he’s one of the examples on the team of giving 100% every possession. So I basically just gave him, cheers up, we won the game and he took a great part of winning the game with him. So just cheering him up as he’ll do for me too.”
