INDIANAPOLIS — As the Philadelphia 76ers general manager Daryl Morey walked the concourse in the bowels of Gainbridge Fieldhouse, following a 106-92 loss to the Boston Celtics in Game 5 of the NBA Eastern Conference Finals, a look of frustration covered the face of one of the most experienced men in basketball. This is what the Celtics do. This is what they have been doing all season. They make opponents uncomfortable, and the 76ers, now trailing the best-of-seven championship series, 3-2, are as uncomfortable as they have been all season. Morey's 56-win juggernaut — the one so heavily favored in this series; the one we figured for a young and talented team — is two losses from the franchise's best season ending short of a championship. 76ers head coach Doc Rivers found all sorts of ways to describe this loss by his young team as "uncharacteristic," and he found even more ways to say, "They outplayed us the majority of the game." "The turnovers were uncharacteristic," Rivers said of his team's 15 giveaways, one shy of a season high. "Obviously, we're usually pretty clean there. I give them credit. I thought they played really well." The Celtics played phenomenally, mostly because the 76ers did not apply the defensive pressure they usually do. Boston had something to do with that, too, playing so fast Philadelphia could not settle into its defensive pressure. It is hard to be physical with someone when you cannot catch them. "Just the pace of their offense was sharper than our pressure and physicality tonight," said Rivers. "That's just what it came down to. They got the ball ahead of us more easily tonight than they did in the first two games. That led to a lot of the downstream effects of their offense and our defense tonight." Mostly, though, the 76ers were not themselves, especially in the fourth quarter, when the league's MVP, Joel Embiid, a dominant force, attempted only nine shots and failed to register an assist. "It felt like they won all the 50/50 plays," Embiid said of the fourth quarter. "They executed on both ends of the ball. When you give those two things up, no matter what quarter, you're probably going to lose the quarter, especially on the road in a hostile environment as the crowd is behind them." "Their overall tone was better than ours for the majority of the game," added Rivers. "Like I said, I thought we had some really good stretches, but we just made one too many mistakes and had one too many possessions on both ends of the floor where they were more tied to their identity than we were." Another point of evidence: The 76ers, the NBA's best free-throw shooting team, missed eight of their 24 attempts. All the coach could say to that: "It was an uncharacteristic night in a lot of ways for us." The question, then: Why was everything about this game so uncharacteristic for Philadelphia? Why did the real 76ers not stand up? Why, conversely, as Rivers said, were the Celtics "in character in terms of their physicality, their pressure on defense" and "in character in terms of their pace on offense"?
