The Boston Celtics Jaylen Brown informs Philadelphia 76ers fans that there will be a Game 7 in the … [+]
There is only one guarantee in this Game 7: the team that loses it will face a potentially franchise-altering offseason. Neither the Philadelphia 76ers nor the Boston Celtics can afford to have their season end today, but the current NBA playoff format ensures that one of the two will have to confront a painful offseason at the game’s final buzzer.
Let’s start with a 76ers squad that knows that they shouldn’t have let the Celtics hang around this long. They were poised to win Game 6 after three quarters, particularly after limiting Boston star Jayson Tatum to just three points. Then, as if risen from an extended slumber, Tatum began hitting his shots, outscoring the entire Sixers roster in the fourth quarter. The Celtics held on to a 95-86 victory that ensured the series would head back to Boston’s TD Garden.
The stakes for this one should be higher for the Sixers than the Celtics. Philadelphia should be sick of failing to get past the second round of the playoffs at this point: the last time they made the Eastern Conference Finals was back in 2001.
This feels like the team to break that streak. The Sixers have the newly crowned MVP in Joel Embiid and, last year, made the move to trade for James Harden in the hope he would be the final piece that would complete the radical rebuild known as the Process and turn them into a legitimate championship-caliber team.
The Sixers are still trying to prove that they are true contenders, having not won a title since 1983. The Celtics are not that desperate, having won their last back in 2008. Still, that was the first year after they brought in Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen with the hopes of building a new dynasty. This was, after all, the height of the Golden Age of Boston Sports, soon after the Boston Red Sox had won two World Series after an 86-year drought and while the New England Patriots were penciled-in to at least reach the Super Bowl every season. Hopes were high, perhaps irrationally so.
However, the Celtics have yet to win another title since and—in the meantime—have seen the Los Angeles Lakers tie their record of 17 NBA championships. It may seem greedy to other basketball fans, but continued success in sports never satisfies the diehard fan, it merely raises their expectations. In very few cities is that more apparent than in Boston.
So, in the Jayson Tatum-Jaylon Brown era, the Celtics regularly get deeper in the postseason than the Sixers, but this might make their inability to win it all even more frustrating. What exactly will it take for this team to finally break through? How many chances will they get before this group’s window closes, either via decline or departure? With Brown only under contract for one more year, the team might be forced to make tough decisions very soon.
These Tatum-Brown Celtics have gotten desperately close last year, two wins away from a title. Then, however, bad habits and a resurgent Golden State Warriors team ended those hopes in the NBA Finals. It was a tantalizing “so close, yet so far” scenario that convinced ownership to increase the payroll and brought in (reigning Sixth Man of the Year) Malcolm Brogdon via trade and Danilo Gallinari via free agency.
The Celtics’ offseason moves were supposed to resolve the issues that kept them from going all the way last season and made them championship favorites for a brief spell. Then, however, came a series-ending injury to Gallinari, followed promptly by the revelation of personal indiscretions that caused head coach Ime Udoka to lose his job shortly before training camp. During all that, it was announced that center Robert Williams’s timetable for recovering from offseason surgery would be longer than expected.
Somehow, despite this turmoil, the Celtics started the season mostly resembling the team picked to dominate the Eastern Conference before the string of bad headlines halted the hype train. Then, as always seems to be the case, familiar bad habits—most notably increasingly frequent lapses in effort and attention—began to reemerge. In addition, abruptly promoted head coach Joe Mazzulla’s rookie struggles, easy to overlook when the team was winning, began to cost the Celtics games.
Boston’s struggles continued in the first round of the playoffs against the Atlanta Hawks. Despite being heavy underdogs, the seventh-seeded Hawks extended their series to six games, giving Embiid crucial time to recover from a knee injury suffered in Philadelphia’s sweep over the Brooklyn Nets.
Embiid ended up missing only one game. Even worse, the Boston Celtics were unable to make anything out of that Game 1 advantage, managing to lose at home to give the 76ers a 1-0 series lead. It was the first of three increasingly frustrating stumbles for Boston as it was followed by a painful overtime loss in Game 4 and an embarrassing no-show at TD Garden in Game 5. (Who knows how dystopian the discourse would be nationally had the Celtics folded in Game 6 after Tatum’s 0-for-10 first half, at the very least fans are being spared that.)
To make a long, strange story short, both teams know that they had plenty of chances to take over this series and didn’t. This is what makes this Game 7 one of the most difficult to predict in recent NBA memory: neither side can know which exact version of their opponent will show up now that the stakes are at their highest. The only certain thing is that whichever team fails to rise to the occasion will lament their failed opportunity for years, potentially decades, to come.