If the Philadelphia 76ers were going to stick with their supersized starting frontcourt for their postseason matchup with the Celtics, somebody in Boston’s starting five was going to have a big mismatch.
More often than not, that player was Jaylen Brown in Game 1 on Monday night.
Josh Richardson split his time between Jayson Tatum and Kemba Walker (with mixed success), while Tobias Harris stuck with Gordon Hayward for much of the evening. That left former Celtic Al Horford stuck with Brown in an assignment the C’s needed to win decisively on a night plenty of shots weren't falling for Boston's other contributors.
Jayson Tatum (32 points) did most of the heavy lifting in the scoring department for the first three quarters of the C’s 109-101 Game 1 victory over the Sixers, but his offense dried up late in the third quarter as the C's blew a 10-point lead. Philadelphia started trapping and denying the All-Star more and stuck Richardson on Walker to limit ability to run and create offense.
All of a sudden, what was seemingly a comfortable 10-point lead for the Celtics dissipated into thin air. The Sixers took advantage of a five-minute Boston scoring drought at the end of the third quarter with a 13-0 run to take the lead, all while Joel Embiid rested on the sidelines for most of the run.
The Celtics looked desperate in the midst of this dry stretch, losing their offensive rhythm and momentum as the team missed eight straight shots in the lull. Nine straight ugly possessions were about to happen early in the fourth quarter once Walker was unable to shake Richardson on a flare screen, which forced Brown to improvise in a one-on-one matchup with Horford as the shot clock wound down.
Brown did not panic though. Instead, he got an Enes Kanter screen set up to use against Horford, but simply used it as a decoy, gaining the separation he needed to step back into a 3. The long-distance bucket with the shot clock winding down put a stop to the 13-0 Sixers run and jumpstarted arguably the best quarter of Brown’s postseason career.
That 3 was the first of Brown's 15 points in the final frame, nearly half of Boston's entire fourth quarter output as the C's rallied for a 109-101 victory. He added a game-tying one mere moments later that had Brad Stevens clapping from the sidelines before the shot even went down.
ALL TIED UP pic.twitter.com/OtO4MQ09JB
— Boston Celtics (@celtics) August 18, 2020
Al Horford gets a flagrant foul, and is very surprised by it.#Celtics on @NBCSBoston or streaming: https://t.co/Xmx7Whh8Zt pic.twitter.com/dj6dvalhxL
— Celtics on NBC Sports Boston (@NBCSCeltics) August 18, 2020
