It's Time to Start Prepping for Sixers-Celtics in the Second Round

Because the Sixers are not going to play the Milwaukee Bucks in the second round, they are going to play the Boston Celtics. And that's something we better all spend the next two months wrapping our heads around.

Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey As Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard. 

Andrew's writing is brought to you by Kinetic Skateboarding! Not only the Ricky's approved skate shop, but the best place to get Chucks, Vans, any apparel. Use code "DAVESILVER" for 9.1% off your order.

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Let's start with the doomiest part: The Sixers have the best team of the Joel Embiid era, and it's still probably not gonna be good enough. 

That's just the way it is. It stinks, but the Sixers are going to win somewhere between 60-70% of their games this year, with two superstars and their best supporting cast yet, and still end up the third-best team in the East. I would actually like their chances in a matchup with the Milwaukee Bucks in the second round -- we have the dudes to play Giannis well, they don't have the depth of perimeter playmakers to really torture us (especially if Khris Middleton remains compromised), and as tough a defender as Brook Lopez is, Joel Embiid is learning just in time he doesn't have to dominate inside to dominate the opposition. We've played Milwaukee close in all three matchups this year and actually won two of them; I really think we'd be at worst a 50/50 proposition in a seven-game series against them. 

You might disagree with that, and fair enough, but point is it really doesn't matter. None of this matters. Because the Sixers are not going to play the Milwaukee Bucks in the second round, they are going to play the Boston Celtics. And that's something we better all spend the next two months wrapping our heads around -- at least, if we're hoping to talk ourselves into this team actually having a chance of advancing to the Conference Finals for the first time since Prohibition. 

Now, fine, the stipulations: The Celtics and Sixers are not yet technically locked into the two and three seeds. The C's are only two back of Milwaukee in first with a game (and a tiebreaker) against them still undecided, while the Cavs are only 2.5 behind the Sixers, with a much easier schedule ahead and also one more game (and a tiebreaker) still to come. But whatever. I can't waste any more time rooting for the Celtics to get out of our way by winning back up -- watching them drop a double-OT game to the Brunson-less Knicks and then flipping from Sixers-Pacers in time to see Grant Williams miss two potential walk-off free throws to beat Cleveland was enough of that for one lifetime. And hoping for the Donovan Mitchell-led Cavs to pass us... not gonna happen. If either become realistic possibilities, I'll cross and/or jump off that bridge when we get to it. For now, it seems safer to just assume that Boston in the semis is an inevitability. 

(And yes, the Sixers will likely also face a scary first-round opponent, whether it be via the Mikal Bridges revenge series or Jimmy Butler slowly poisoning us from within or Jalen Brunson and Julius Randle shredding us for three out of four quarters every night -- but every year I freak out about our first-round opponent and every year we still win in five or six, so I'm trying to take it a little chiller there this year.) 

Anyway, this would all seem like bad news, since most of us agree that the Celtics are better than the Sixers, as evidenced by them winning their last four games against us (including all three so far this season), by them beating us by a combined 8-1 margin across the 2018 and 2020 postseasons, and by them seemingly having perpetually unlimited depth when it comes to playmaking wings, shooty bigs, and annoying-ass guards -- in addition to, y'know, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. And it is bad news! Very bad news. The worst news, some would say, forsaking some degree of perspective but not a whole lot. 

But it is the news -- and so we can either ignore it until we can ignore it no more, we can succumb to it, or we can try our damnedest to cope with it, and perhaps even persuade ourselves that it isn't so bad after all. For now, I'm going to do the latter, which is a lot easier to do after a feel-pretty-good three-game winning streak. (Ask me after we lose to the Blazers or Wizards this weekend and my white flag may already be 3/4 up the flagpole.) 

So, how do we start to talk ourselves into Philly actually having a prayer against Boston? At the moment, these are the five things I'm choosing to focus on. I'd advise all of you to start coming around on a couple of these sooner than later -- the second round may feel like it's a long way away, but with the work we've got to do here, it's gonna get late real early. 

1. The Celtics can't stop Joel Embiid. Duh. I mean, this has always been the case to at least a certain extent, but with Al Horford and Aron Baynes and Robert Williams III and Daniel Theis -- OK not Theis, he was always chopped brisket against Jo -- they've been able to make his life difficult, get under his skin, make him flustered enough to not do the things he generally knows he should be doing and vice versa. And maybe Horf and RWIII and Blake Griffin for 15 minutes why not will be able to do that for a game or two in this series; they're professional irritants and Joel is distinctly human. But otherwise, Embiid will wipe the parquet floor with them. The 41 he hung on them a couple weeks back wasn't a fluke; all year, he's been progressing as a multi-dimensional scorer, not letting early frustration zap him for the full 48, staying in the game until the shots come and draining them once they do. He averaged 30 against them in 2020 but it was a brittle, messy 30; it'll be much smoother and more smothering this year -- and possibly even bigger in number, too. 

2. The Sixers can slow Jayson Tatum. When you hold a 30-point scorer to under 20 in back-to-back games, it's not easily brushed off. You couldn't say the Sixers completely shut down Tatum either game -- in the first one, he turned distributor and dished out nine assists that were mostly to wide-open three-point shooters; in the second one he still came alive in time to hit big late shots, including the game-winning triple. But they seem to have figured out a way to defend him with extra help, soft doubles, stuff to turn him into a pull-up jump shooter and passer -- and sometimes a very effective one, especially when that extra help lingers on him a beat too long and ends up leaving Al Horford with his 18th straight clean lock beyond the arc. Still, considering the way Tatum has shredded us in the past when given an inch of daylight, I'll take the approach that turns him into a playmaker; he may have had 15 assists across those two games but he also had nine turnovers. 

3. Harden's gotten his. Last year, James Harden would undoubtedly have been drawing dead against a team as big and athletic as Boston; he didn't have the speed to get past them, the lift to get over them, or even the jumper to counter them playing off him. This year's been a different story: In three games against the Celtics this season, he's averaging 27-6-9 on absurd 72% True Shooting. Even in the most recent game, with his shot not falling (2-8 from deep), he got to the line nine times and helped lead the Sixers' fourth-quarter comeback, still ending up with 21 points on 16 shots, eight assists and a +9 for the night. This isn't gonna be the Harden we saw last year against Miami, and it's certainly not gonna be the Ben Simmons we saw in 2018 against Boston -- it's a true offensive co-lead for Joel. (And one who will hopefully be flanked by a similarly potent threat in Tyrese Maxey, now that Maxey -- who's been up-and-down for most of the season, and largely underwhelmed in 2 of 3 Boston games -- appears to be scorching again.) 

4. Fewer minutes for dudes who can't play. Whether it was Marco Belinelli and Amir Johnson in 2018 or Matisse Thybulle and Raul Neto in 2020, the Sixers have always faced the Celtics with players in the rotation who simply couldn't hang in a playoff series. It might be naive to hope that won't be a problem this year -- one of Georges Niang and Danuel House Jr. is probably gonna have to get minutes at some point -- but Doc's shown a quick hook with Niang, Paul Reed appears to have fully supplanted Montrezl Harrell in the rotation, Maxey is toughening up on defense and we have at least eight guys we can generally rely on to not be complete zeroes on either side of the ball (at least assuming Harden remains defensively engaged). All our top guys will play more minutes than in the regular season (assuming that's still possible), and hopefully Boston's advantages in depth won't be quite as meaningful as they've been in the regular season. 

5. Boston hasn't dominated this matchup as much as we think. My jaw dropped when Godner mentioned it on the Ricky after the Boston loss, but it's true: The Celtics and Sixers are actually dead even over the last five regular seasons, having both won 10 games a piece. Even though it feels like the Sixers haven't won this regular season matchup since the Jimmy Butler jumper in 2019, the Sixers actually split the season series 2-2 as recently as last year, and even swept the three-game season series the year before that. They've kicked our asses in the playoffs twice, no question, but that was just as much about bad timing as anything -- if we'd caught them in 2019 and 2021 instead of 2018 and 2020, chances are much better that we'd be the team with the 8-1 record in the postseason matchup. The pendulum has swung towards Boston more recently, but not so much the last couple weeks, where the Celtics have blown a 28-point lead against Brooklyn and lost to the Knicks twice. In fact, since Harden returned from injury on December 5, the Sixers are 31-11 while the Celtics are 26-16. The gap is really not as big between the teams as it might seem. 

Or maybe it is. All this sounds pretty good until you remember that Boston has like eight guys in their rotation who are legit threats to hit five threes against us on any given night -- and another 2-3 on their bench -- which is why we couldn't beat them even with only one of their regular starters finishing the game against us in early February. And Boston has quite simply done it before: While the Sixers have gone 0-4 in the second round in the Embiid era, the Celtics have made it to the Conference Finals a whopping four times in the past seven seasons, with a couple guys participating in all four runs and a whole bunch of 'em coming back from the last one or two. They'll be favored and they should be. We will probably lose. And that's before we even know what freak injuries await Embiid or other key guys on this team on the path there. 

All the more reason, then, for us to get started early psyching ourselves up for this series. We gotta get through Boston one of these days, and this year seems as good a year as any; at the very least, while Boston has made the CFs four of the last seven years, they haven't gotten there in back-to-back-years since 2017-18. And man, if we do get through Boston, who the hell is gonna step us from there? MOC wrote about the potential era-ending decision that James Harden's free agency could represent this summer; it really might be now or never for the Embiid Sixers. It's time to put the past behind us, to exorcise the demons, to knock that door the fuck down. Are you feeling the blood pumping through your red, white and blue veins yet? Are you ready to curl Marcus Smart into a ball and dunk him from the free-throw line? Are you ready to make Process fucking history?? 

Good. Remember this feeling when the Sixers lose to the Celtics on April 4th to drop the season series 0-4 and clinch the two seed for Boston. We've still got a real long way to go to be ready.