Saturday, December 8, 2012

Sixers fall to Celtics in second game of home and home

By CHRISTOPHER A. VITO
cvito@delcotimes.com
BOSTON — The Sixers filtered from their locker room with four minutes remaining in halftime.

Did it really take 11 minutes to convey how desperately they needed to make shots? Probably not. In fact, the Sixers would’ve been better served having spent the intermission taking in some extra shooting practice.

In the long run, it wouldn’t have helped.

By the time the Sixers finally took the lid off the rim at TD Garden, Boston already had built an insurmountable lead. The Celtics came away with a 92-79 win Saturday night, despite a late rally from the visitors.

The Sixers enjoyed one of their most-productive 12-minute stretches of the season, shooting 14-for-20 in the third quarter to close a once 21-point game to eight points. But it didn’t cover over a bumpy first half in which they missed all but nine of 39 shots.

When the Sixers (11-9) cut their deficit to eight, at 65-57, the Celtics (11-9) responded nicely by making their next five attempts.


Sweeping any team in a home-and-home series is difficult enough, let alone doing so against a division rival, with the back end of the weekend two-fer on that team’s home floor. Couple that tall task with 23-percent shooting in the opening two quarters and, well, it’s practically impossible.

Before the game, Sixers coach Doug Collins said he didn’t expect his guys to come out with less fire than a much-older starting five from Boston. So much for that.

“I told our guys Kevin Garnett has played over 51,000 minutes in his career, Paul Pierce (has) I think 48,000, Jason Terry (has) 38,000, and Rajon Rondo (has) 15,000,” Collins said. “I’m sure the crowd is going to lift them.

“But if we’re looking out there, there’s no reason those guys should be fresher than us – not with the amount of playoff games and minutes they’ve put in this league.”

Those cold, hard facts – that Collins said he researched independently – didn’t pan out for the Sixers.

Their opening-half point total was a season low, outdoing the woeful 34 they posted against previously winless Detroit Nov. 14.

One of those nights, all right.

Making matters worse was an already-depleted bench that lost another healthy body. Damien Wilkins suffered a right calf strain in the first quarter and didn’t return. That meant the Sixers would have to complete their comeback bid without Wilkins, Kwame Brown, Nick Young or Royal Ivey, the latter two being scratches.

Perhaps one or more of those players will be ready by Monday, when the Sixers host Detroit.

The only saving grace of it all was that redeeming third quarter, in which Thad Young shot 6-for-8 for 12 points, Evan Turner was 3-for-4 and everything seemed all right in their world. Except, of course, for that monstrous deficit they couldn’t seem to close entirely.

The half-court offense out of which the Sixers tried to operate was putrid, often resulting in misses at the rim or bobbled passes in the paint. On one series, Lavoy Allen took a feed in the numbers from

Jrue Holiday and proceeded to clang two looks inside three feet.

It was a minor miracle that the Sixers were down by only 11, at 31-20, at the midway point of the second quarter.

The Sixers’ lackadaisical play wasn’t reserved for just the offensive end, either. The Celtics’ Rajon

Rondo ate Allen alive on a baseline move, on which he went under the rim cutting right to left, then backpedaled for an easy layup and a trip to the line. Rondo missed the free throw that followed

Allen’s foul, but Rondo grabbed the offensive board and Boston picked up two second-chance points out of it.

Ugly doesn’t begin to describe the Sixers’ play in the opening 24 minutes.

The Sixers, who rank 28th in the NBA in free-throw attempts per game, went 8-for-10 from the stripe in the first half. Imagine how badly the Sixers would have been losing at halftime, if not for those freebies.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home