The Philadelphia 76ers were right there at the end of a Game 1 loss to the Boston Celtics. Despite not having Ben Simmons out on the floor, they still had a chance to win the game late.
However, there were two main culprits for this loss, and coach Brett Brown went straight to them after it was over.
“The story of the game to me isn’t difficult, you start looking at their offensive rebounds, we did a better job in the second half with turnovers, but if you just go straight to the volume of points, 21 points off our turnovers, 16 off the rebounds,” said Brown. “Really Alec Burks makes a free-throw, it’s a three-point game with 30 seconds left and Jo (Joel Embiid) missed a tip-in which would have made it to a two-point game, and so you can’t minimize the fact that losing stinks, but I feel like there are answers to the questions of why.”
Embiid contributed to the high number of turnovers as he committed five of his own and Boston forward Jayson Tatum had a few big rebounds late for the Celtics.
“We know what we have to fix,” said Embiid. “We had too many turnovers starting with me. I got to take care of the ball and they had too many offensive rebounds. We only lost by six points and we had a lot of turnovers and they got a lot of second opportunities so we got to fix that.”
How does that get fixed though? At some point, somebody has to step up and make a difference in this situation. The team has to come together and realize that this can’t keep going the way it has been.
“It’s easy to fix,” Embiid added. “I feel like sometimes we try and do too much. We just got to let the game come to us. Our philosophy is basically move the ball and whoever’s open, let it fly. That’s what we got to do.”
Too many times in Game 1 did Boston send double teams at Embiid and he was not able to make the right read. Not only was that a major reason for the turnovers, but the team also had problems getting him the ball in the post as well. There were too many times they had issues there and they will have to find new ways to get the big fella the ball and to have the success they need on offense.
“I think that part of our turnovers came from getting stood up and trying to post,” Brown said. “Part of our turnovers came when we did post, we weren’t crisp passing out of the post. I think that there’s no doubt that we want to get Jo the ball in different floor spots. It doesn’t always have to be bully ball at the nail where it’s just a fistfight and everything gets stuck in mud. It can be at a nail, it can be at a pick-and-roll, it can be putting Alec Burks and Joel in a two-man game and getting him out of the roll.”
Clearly, Brown and the rest of the team have to back to the drawing board in order to be ready for Game 2. [lawrence-related id=36914,36906,36903]