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The Philadelphia 76ers won't be pressing the panic button just yet after sustaining a convincing loss to the Boston Celtics in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference semifinals.
Despite one of Joel Embiid's better postseason games, the Sixers were unable to find the basket and struggled, shooting a ghastly 5-of-26 from deep, while the Celtics feasted off the 3-point line, making 17 of their 35 attempts from distance, led by a sharp-shooting Terry Rozier, who made 7-of-9 from deep en route to a team-high 29 points.
“You’re always studying how they scored and what might you have done better,” head coach Brett Brown said, according to Jessica Camerato of NBC Sports Philadelphia. “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.”
Brown's words were echoed by veteran shooting guard J.J. Redick, who noted the team would need to do better at both ends of the floor without being alarmed by a loss on the road.
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“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.”
Rookie Ben Simmons reflected on the loss, vowing to do better as a team, after he accounted for seven of the team's 12 turnovers.
“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.”
Both teams will meet again on Thursday at the storied TD Garden, writing yet another chapter in this decades-long Eastern Conference rivalry.
