The Philadelphia 76ers made a lot of mistakes down the stretch of their Game 3 loss to the Boston Celtics, but the biggest might have been by Ben Simmons.
With the 76ers holding a one-point lead and 19 seconds left in overtime, Simmons grabbed a rebound and went back up with the shot. If he would have taken the ball down, the Celtics would have had to foul and Simmons would have gotten a chance at two at the line.
Instead, Simmons went back up, missed and the Celtics were able to grab the rebound. The next time down, Al Horford made a two-pointer, and the Celtics later sealed the victory with free throws. After the game, Simmons was asked about the shot and he said it was “natural instinct.”
“It was just natural instinct. That's a shot I take every practice, every game,” he told Ian Bigley of ESPN. “Every day I take one of those, and I missed it. That's the game. You miss shots, and you make them. You win, and you lose.”
The 76ers are young, and after the game coach, Brett Brown acknowledged that sometimes the inexperience shows up at key times.
“Last thing I want to do is lean on youth. I don't want to do that. I give credit to the Boston Celtics,” he said. “I will think in many ways it is … Joel is going to learn a lot, Ben Simmons is going to learn a lot. Painful admitting that now, but there is some truth to that. There's a lot of truth to that.”
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