Celtics-76ers Prediction: Jaylen Brown & Jayson Tatum outduel Maxey & Paul George w/ no Joel Embiid

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All right, welcome to Hoops tonight here at the volume.

Happy Friday, everybody.

Hope all of you guys are having an incredible week.

We are continuing our set of series previews today

with the Boston Celtics and the Philadelphia 76ers.

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Let's talk some basketball.

So the season series between the Celtics and los officers tied it

to but the first three games were all in the first month of the season.

In fact, the 76ers second win over the Celtics this season, drop them to five in seven.

Remember that poor start that the Celtics had this year.

The Celtics ended up turning their season around really right after that game.

They won 10 of their next 12 after dropping that second game to the sixers.

Then they played again on March 1st, several months later, obviously notate.

I'm no Paul George, no one beat, but the Celtics kind of dominated them.

The sixers took a little bit of an early lead as both VJ Edgecomb and Tyrese Maxi hit

some threes against drop coverage.

Definitely take that and file it away because it's going to be one of the main

kind of swing factors of the series.

But the Celtics just kind of methodically took over from there and really dominated that game.

Obviously no Tatum or no Paul George in any of the four games.

No Joe Ellen beat in all, but one of the games, a game early in the season,

where he looks terrible, super immobels very early in the year.

They got crushed when he was on the floor and then dominated when he was off the floor.

So we don't really have any good look at what a beat would look like in this matchup.

The series prices, again, all of our lines are provided by our partner Hard Rock bet.

The Celtics are a minus 900 favorite with the sixers at plus 550.

Another one where I don't really like the underdog line just because I think I have

a really hard time seeing the sixers winning this series.

Now, as of right now, we have basically no idea as to whether or not Joe Ellen beat

will play in this series.

I'm going to proceed today under the impression that he does not.

Now, if for whatever reason he gets announced as returning to the series at some point,

we will cover that when that happens.

My only thought as of right now is that how it could look in the event that he does

return is that it would both help and hurt them to be clear.

The numbers clearly show that the sixers are a better team when it beats on the floor

versus when he's off, including on defense.

I just think in this particular matchup, it gets a little more complicated,

especially now that he's older and more banged up and less mobile than he used to be.

This series in many ways is going to come down to attacking drop coverage looks for both teams,

but especially the sixers and Joel Ombi just gives you another side of the drop coverage

to attack.

The Celtics drop is designed to protect the paint.

We're going to dig more into that here in a minute.

They do concede pops.

That's something they've conceded all year long.

And so, Joel Ombi's ability to credibly pop out of ball screens and hit threes would

be a huge asset as well as just giving them an additional ability to attack outside of ball screen.

So, for instance, elbow, isos, post-ups, things along those lines.

Without him, it's pretty much just Paul George post-ups and isos,

which aren't going to be nearly as efficient as Joel Ombi post-ups and isos.

So, again, that's just my initial take on it on the offensive end of the floor.

He's going to be a help on defense, though.

I think it would dramatically downsize, like Philly's aggregate foot speed on defense.

I think that could be a problem, especially against a team that's going to put them in the

blender a lot, that's going to put them into rotation a lot with driving kick attacks.

I don't like to match up for Embi as much against Boston on the defensive end of the floor

as I do against some other teams in the league.

So, again, we'll dive deeper into that concept if it gets announced that he returns.

But moving forward in this episode, I'm going to just primarily focus on the idea of him

being outside of the series.

Let's start with the sixers on offense.

One of the biggest swing factors in the series is just going to be Tyree's maxi's ability

to hit the pull up three in pick and roll.

The Celtics run a ton of particularly deep drop coverage.

It's a big part of why they've been the best paint defense in the NBA this year.

And I'm not worried about maxi's ability to hit floaters in ball screen coverages and

the occasional midrange jump shot.

It's more the pull up threes where he's been very hot and cold this year.

He actually shot in the aggregate a pretty mediocre 34% this year on pull up threes in

pick and rolls.

But one kind of wrinkle that I would add to that is handoffs as an alternative way to

attack drop coverage.

But file that away will get to that in just a minute.

I would extend this to all their drop coverage attacks.

So let's include VJ edge comb.

Let's include Paul George in every method of attacking drop coverage, you know, trying

to draw some fouls at the rim, midrange jump shots, floaters pull up threes, everything.

I'm just specifically emphasizing maxi because he takes a ton of them and he's going to have

to take a ton of them in this series as a matter of fact, in the four games against

the Celtics, he took 16 pull up threes off the dribble and did not shoot well on them.

He shot just four for 16.

So he's going to have to shoot better.

But he was three for three on threes against Boston's bigs and drop coverage off of dribble

handoffs.

This has been kind of a wrinkle with tires maxi throughout his career.

He's always been a better shooter off the catch than he is off the dribble for whatever

reason.

He's trying to connect those two.

Once he really connects those two, that's when this guy is the limit for him, especially

with how fast he is driving the basketball to the rim.

He hit one on Vousavitch off of like a double drag action in Boston off the left wing.

And then he hit two of them on Xavier Tillman early in the season.

But in general, that's a way that I would look to try to counter that issue with maxi

scoring and drop coverage from the three point line without having to worry with some

of his struggles off the dribble.

He's going to have guys like a Dumbona and Andre Drummond just start at the top of the

key with the dribble handoff and have, you know, maxi come off of like Chicago action

out of the corner.

So I'm sort of action that gets him sprinting up into the basketball to catch, get his

one, two down without even having to put the ball down and he could just shoot it quickly

off the catch.

That was something especially earlier in his career before he really became a dominant

on ball player.

He was just a really gifted movement shooter and he used to kill teams with him be off of

those dribble handoffs.

And so that's something that I'd love to see a little bit more over the course of this

series.

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But unfortunately, the Sixers don't have a lot of options to attack the Celtic's defense.

Like all their perimeter defenders are pretty good.

I think we're gonna see some Paul George Isos and Post-Ups on Boston's guards.

We're gonna see Tyrese Maxi do some ISO work, especially against some of the bigger slower

guys.

Like he had some success against Baylor Shireman, for example, getting really good separation

on just hard drives into pullback dribbles and things like that, although he wasn't making

the shots.

But I think we'll also see the occasional attack from Kelly Ubreh against a smaller Boston

guard or just ripping a closeout trying to get to the basket.

But I don't expect them to be super efficient on those.

And they'll do some work on the offensive glass.

They've been a pretty good offensive rebounding team this year, but Boston was literally the

best defensive rebounding team in the league.

Post-All Star break.

In large part, because of the return of Jason Tatum and the way he anchors them on the

defensive glass.

It really does come back to that drop coverage battle.

On the Celtics front, if the Celtics perimeter defenders can do a great job of staying

attached, chasing over the top, funneling Maxi and Edgecomb and Paul George into tougher

pull-ups in the mid-range, lower percentage, lower value shots, because the rim will

be shut off, it's gonna be tough sledding for Philly.

But if they can shake free of those guys, at Dumbona and Audra Drummond set really good

screens, they could get some good looks at pull-up threes and some cleaner looks in floater

and mid-range territory, which could allow them to have hotter nights attacking the drop

coverage.

That's basically going to be the swing factor of the series when Philly's unoffice.

How successfully does Philly score against Boston's drop?

I think they're going to attack a lot, two on two, Boston I don't think is going to over

pursue in terms of helping and digging in those situations.

I don't think Philly's going to get a ton of quality three point shots on kickouts.

That's not a huge part of their game anyway.

I don't think we'll see Tatum guarding centers in this matchup, just because of the circumstances.

I don't think they'll need to, first of all, just by the way, they kind of match up.

But secondly, I wouldn't want Tatum banging with the guy like Audra Drummond and just

burning his legs out and wearing himself out in a first round series.

Now, where it gets interesting again is if Ambid comes back, it puts more emphasis on

Kada and Vouch's ability to guard at the elbows, more emphasis on like dig downs and doubles,

that Ambid can struggle with.

But again, let's just pile that away and if Ambid gets announced that he's returning,

then we'll have an episode where we cover that concept probably in one of our game reactions

or one of our adjustment episodes.

Moving to Boston on offense, they just simply have far more actions that they can attack

Philly's defense.

For starters, the way that Philly defense is very different than the way Boston defends

and this has kind of been a Nick Nurse philosophy forever.

They run more aggressive pick and roll coverages, they bring the big up higher, they use more

digging and they use more tagging, meaning they're having guys from off the ball sink

into the lane more as the guys trying to work downhill in that drop coverage.

So that's just a way Nick Nurse has been playing coach and ever since he was in Toronto.

He wants to make life harder on the stars.

He wants to try to force turnovers and he wants to try to spark his transition attack.

And so as a result, his opponents tend to be high three point attempts teams.

They tend to be high as a team, they tend to force a lot of turnovers.

They tend to get a lot of points off of turnovers and in general score a lot in transition,

especially with all the fee, all the speed that they have in their lineups.

The problem is, is this kind of basically plays directly into the strengths of the Celtics

offense.

The Celtics don't turn the ball over.

They're the third lowest turnover percentage team in the league.

And they'll burn you for helping.

And this, you know, the best example of this was their most recent game on March 1st.

The Celtics this season averaged 25 spot up opportunities per game, which is right in

the middle of the pack on a per possession basis.

They logged 37 spot ups in the game in March against Philly on March 1st.

They just absolutely torched them in terms of kicking out to shooters and those guys burn

in them with hitting threes and driving closeouts.

And so like we know that they're going to have other ways to attack too, but I think Boston's

going to be able to just run about any action, draw two to the ball in a ISO post up.

Like I think we're going to see plenty of Jason Tatum and Jalen Brown attacking Philly's

smaller guards and ISOs and in post ups as well, but regardless of what they run, whether

it's post ups, ISOs, ball screens were Philly's defending three on two or post ups, ISOs

were two on one.

They're going to draw multiple defenders.

The kickouts are going to be there.

And as long as Boston doesn't revert to some of their old bad habits of like forcing

the issue in traffic and that'll probably be what it looks like when Philly goes on runs

like some bad processing from Boston mixed in with good drop coverage scoring for Philly,

but Boston's evolved to pass a lot of that.

They've grown up.

There's a lot of growth in that offense like we talked about with Derek White when he

came on the show.

It's just a matter of just continuity and them just being in this system for a long time.

As long as they do their job methodically move the ball to the open man, they should consistently

get better shots than the sixers do.

The best way to look at it is just the difference in efficiency.

Like it's a bad combination of the Celtics on one hand are just a better, more talented

team, but the way they match up against each other, trying to score against each other

is where the bad matchup really shows up.

So for instance, like Philly is a good pick and roll scoring team, but not a great one.

They're 12th in efficiency shooting out of pick and roll with the ball handler.

Tyres Maxi.

He's actually very good.

He's 0.93 points per shot attempt when he's the ball handler and pick and roll.

It's very good, but it's not great.

And it's just going to be really hard to compete with the quality spot up opportunities

that Boston is going to generate on the other end of the floor, where Boston is all year

long, basically every year, but all year long been in that like top two or three in spot

up efficiency in the entire NBA.

So it's going to be drop covered shots versus high quality spot up opportunities.

And that's just going to be a very difficult efficiency gap for Philly to close.

So I think Boston wins relatively easily.

I'm going to pick the Celtics in five games.

Again, Philly's chance to keep things close comes down to Maxi going nuclear versus drop

coverage and getting good contributions from VJ Edge, come and Paul George on that front.

Controlling the offensive glass, just, you know, whether it's Dominic Barlow, whether

it's Andre Drummond, like just their forwards and their centers just crushing on the offensive

glass.

And then hoping for the Celtics to have bad processing games, bad processing stretches

versus their defensive aggression.

And like, again, like if you can get a couple games early in the series and maybe you take

it to your home court and you could put the pressure on them, that's their pathway.

But it's just really difficult.

Again, like when you start to look at those large sample size efficiencies, it's just

really difficult.

You're asking Tyrese Maxi to just hit a bunch of really tough pull up threes and really

tough mid-rangeers while you're getting, you know, clean looks for guys like Sam

Hauser and Baylor Shireman and Jason Tatum off the ball.

They're quite off the ball.

And like, it's just going to be really difficult for them to keep up with the shot quality

dynamic.

That's going to plague them over the course of the series.

All right, guys, that's all I have for today.

As always, I sincerely appreciate you guys for supporting us and supporting the show.

We have two more series previews.

We have three more.

We have the Cavs or actors one and then we have the two one eight matchups that are both

becoming out on Saturday morning and we're getting into it and we're getting into our

playoff live episodes at the final buzzer of the final game each night, starting with

the final buzzer of that Lakers Rockets game on Saturday night.

It's been a fun week.

I appreciate you guys for supporting us and supporting the show.

I'll see you guys.

The Toyota Tundra and Tacoma are built to keep going, backed by Toyota's reputation for

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Toyota trucks are built to last year after year, mile after mile.

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Toyota, let's go places.

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