winning 123-91 at TD Garden<\/a> to take a 1-0 series lead.<\/p>\nMaxey lamented that the game didn\u2019t even feel like playoff basketball for Boston, which led by double digits for the final 37 minutes.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think this is my fifth playoffs, so losses, whether you lose by seven, 12, 100, they all hurt. They all don\u2019t feel good,\u201d Maxey told reporters. \u201cBut this one, it sucks. We didn\u2019t expect this at all. But we\u2019ve just got to play better. You know, Paul (George) said something that kind of registered in my mind: They didn\u2019t feel like it was a playoff game. We did, but they didn\u2019t. You know what I\u2019m saying?<\/p>\n
\u201cThey just did us easy. I feel like it was an easy game, and that\u2019s not OK. We\u2019ve got to make them more uncomfortable.\u201d<\/p>\n
George, the Sixers\u2019 nine-time All-Star wing, said Philadelphia didn\u2019t offer nearly enough resistance, especially on Celtics drives. Boston went 17-for-19 on shots at the rim, with Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown making nine of their 11 attempts inside the restricted area.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think we matched the physicality, the toughness,\u201d George told reporters. \u201cEssentially, they had a lot of possessions where they just walked to the rim for easy layups. There was just no resistance at a lot of times throughout the game, and that\u2019s not playoff basketball.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maxey agreed.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think most of the immediate stuff is, like, if you see somebody driving to the rim, step in front of them, no matter what their scenario, especially if it\u2019s Jaylen or Jayson,\u201d he said. \u201cStep in front of them, make them kick the ball out, then rotate off of that. But they got like, wide-open, walk-down-the-lane layups, walk-down-the-lane dunks, I think Payton Pritchard got one, too. Those are the ones we can\u2019t give up. It\u2019s going to be tough regardless, and we\u2019re capable of doing it, but we can\u2019t give those types of plays up.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Celtics also bottled up Maxey, the NBA\u2019s fifth-leading scorer during the regular season. The All-Star guard scored 21 points but shot 8-for-20 from the field and generated just five free-throw attempts. George added 17 points on 4-of-8 shooting. The 76ers were playing without their third veteran star, center Joel Embiid, who has been out since undergoing an emergency appendectomy earlier this month.<\/p>\n
Brown called the win a great example of \u201cCeltics basketball.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve been a hard-playing team all year,\u201d he said. \u201cThat can\u2019t just change now that the playoffs have started. But then it\u2019s just focusing in, honing in on the details and just winning the fight. Being the harder-playing team and just guarding. Our offense can win us this series. I mean, our offense is important, but we\u2019ve got to make sure we guard. I thought (on Sunday) we did a great job.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tyrese Maxey didn\u2019t expect Game 1 of his team\u2019s first-round playoff series to be that noncompetitive. The Celtics,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":714630,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3769],"tags":[679,7,75,46,56795,1207,78,6,526,678,207,3817,1263],"class_list":{"0":"post-714629","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-philadelphia-76ers","8":"tag-76ers","9":"tag-basketball","10":"tag-boston-celtics","11":"tag-celtics","12":"tag-celtics-76ers","13":"tag-celtics-playoffs","14":"tag-jaylen-brown","15":"tag-nba","16":"tag-paul-george","17":"tag-philadelphia","18":"tag-philadelphia-76ers","19":"tag-philadelphia76ers","20":"tag-tyrese-maxey"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116437578924767506","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/714629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=714629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/714629\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/714630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=714629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=714629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=714629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}