PHILADELPHIA — The Philadelphia 76ers were sitting pretty on Wednesday night at home. Tobias Harris drilled a triple to give the Sixers a 102-87 lead over the Boston Celtics with 3:44 left, and that should have been the final dagger in a comfortable win.
Instead, the Celtics didn’t make it easy. An 11-2 run pulled them within four. Joel Embiid had two turnovers and De’Anthony Melton also lost the ball once during the run.
In the end, Kristaps Porzingis’ game-tying attempt fell short, and the Sixers escaped with a 106-103 win. Embiid had 27 points and 10 rebounds on the night, but he wasn’t happy with the ending.
“A win is a win, but that was a bad ending,” said Embiid. “We didn’t take care of the ball and we just made it easy for them to score, so we just gotta do better, but yeah. We got a long way to go, but pretty much from at least the end of the first half, and going up by 10 at the end of that first quarter, we kept the lead for the most part just playing together.”
Embiid is not wrong about the lead. After the Celtics took an 11-point lead in the first half, the Sixers stormed back and led by as many as 12. They were comfortably ahead before the final run when things fell apart.
“We won, but the win wasn’t how we wanted to win,” said Tyrese Maxey. “Down the stretch we gotta be able to handle the ball. We gotta be able to take 3s away, but all in all, a win is a win. So we’ll take it.”
It looked like the Sixers grew stagnant down the stretch. The ball wasn’t moving at the same efficiency as when Philadelphia built the lead.
“We had a few bad turnovers,” Maxey added. “I think Jo had one. I had one and Melt had one so we gotta clean up those. When a team is down, they’re gonna play a lot harder. A lot more desperate and that’s what they did and then, we also can’t let them shoot walk-up 3s. The only thing that can beat you at that point is 3s. That can get a team back in the game. So we gotta do a better job of getting them off the line when you’re up late in the game like that.”
This was almost an ugly loss for the Sixers, but they put themselves in a good position to win due to the work they put in leading up to that Celtics’ final run. Philadelphia missed shots but got after it defensively.
“We missed a lot of wide-open shots,” Embiid added. “Just shots in general that we’ve been making, but I thought defensively, I like where we’re at. We were really good.”
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