BOSTON — JJ Redick already had rewatched Game 1 twice before the Sixers met for practice Tuesday afternoon. In just over 12 hours, he’d digested their missteps multiple times to know where they went wrong, and where they can’t afford to err again.
“We messed up a lot of stuff,” Redick said. “We’ve got to be a lot better.”
The next two days for the Sixers are not as cut and dry as limit this one specific player or do this one thing better on offense. Their problems were widespread on both ends of the floor.
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The Sixers got burned by the offensive firepower of Al Horford, Terry Rozier and Jayson Tatum (see story). They struggled with pick-and-roll and pick-and-pop situations. Celtics guards “baited,” as Joel Embiid put it, the bigs away to get Horford and Marcus Morris open looks. Meanwhile, the Sixers could barely find the basket from long range (5 for 26).
“Defensively we were trash,” Embiid said. “They made a lot of shots. We didn’t. We’ve got a lot of good shooters. Everyone has off nights, so Thursday’s going to be a different story. We just have to correct a couple stuff defensively and we’re going to be fine.”
Correcting doesn’t mean completely changing. The Sixers are not of the mindset to erase everything they had strategized just because of one loss. Brett Brown noted there are “smaller things” to change and improve, but overall he still likes their approach.
“You’re always studying how they scored and what might you have done better,” Brown said. “The greatest challenge is to select a vanilla game plan and walk it down. When you have to start pivoting out of massive-type decisions, that’s when you end up chasing and I find you don’t win series that way.”
NBA
The Celtics are the Sixers' Eastern Conference semifinals opponent, but in a lot of ways, the Sixers feel they were beaten by themselves.
“I think it’s just self-inflicted,” Ben Simmons said. “We did a lot of things to ourselves and we’ve got to fix it.”
The Sixers are in unfamiliar territory after ending the regular season on a 16-game winning streak and beating the Heat in only five games in the first round. In Game 1, they looked rusty after a six-day layoff. There are just two days before the next game, enough time to prepare, not panic.
“We’ve got to be better. That’s the bottom line,” Redick said. “We’ve got to be better offensively, better defensively. There’s no overreaction on our part.”