Celtics show complete team effort in win over Philly, 106-99

Shorthanded Boston Celtics ride collective effort to beat Philadelphia  76ers, 106-99 - CelticsBlog

BOSTON — On a night where injuries infested their entire lineup, it took a whole team effort from the Boston Celtics to escape with a win Wednesday night over the Philadelphia 76ers, 106-99.

Marcus Smart, Al Horford, and Robert Williams were all out of the lineup. Jaylen Brown went down in the second quarter due to a collision with Jayson Tatum. Brown was listed out for the rest of the game with a facial fracture. He’s expected to miss time.

Tatum, being the 30 points scorer a night guy he is, struggled. However, everyone else on the Celtics roster stepped up big with making 3s. Hitting a combined 19 made shots from behind the arc on 54% deep shooting. Blake Griffin hit the most with 5 3s and finished with 15 points in 18 minutes.

Derrick white hit a big three with the shot clock winding down at the end of the fourth to extend the C’s lead to double digits. White finished with 19 points, sharing the leading scorer title with Malcolm Brogdon.

With under a minute left, Tatum (12 points) drove down the middle of the lane to hit a floater to put the game away. Helpful shooting from Sam Hauser (14 points) and Grant Williams (15 points) was also a boost. Nobody on the Celtics team scored 20 points or more, but they didn’t have to. However, their 13 total turnovers did hurt them.

The game was close for much of the game, but the C’s were able to simply make the winning plays down the stretch. Philly tried to rally behind the play of their two stars in James Harden (26 points, 11 assists) and Joel Embiid (28 points, 7 rebounds).

De’Anthony Melton was the only other Sixer to score in double figures (12 points). Everyone else struggled to find the net.

The C’s will stay at home Friday when they’ll go up against the Charlotte Hornets in an eastern conference matchup. Boston will try to put together a three game win streak.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s