The Philadelphia 76ers had a golden opportunity to punch their ticket to the Eastern Conference Finals earlier this week. With a 3-2 lead in their series against the Boston Celtics, Philly had the chance to land a knockout blow at home in front of their raucous fans. Instead, they fell down by double-digits in the first half before rallying and leading with less than five minutes to go in the game.
And then, their offense stalled out, Jayson Tatum came to life, and Boston was able to force a Game 7 in their own building with a 95-86 win. The game was there for Philly to take, but a number of missed shots that you’d normally expect the Sixers to make just did not go in.
Fast forward to Doc Rivers’ pregame press conference ahead of Sunday afternoon and this came up, with Rivers getting asked about Tatum’s incredibly cold beginning to the night where he kept missing good looks. He explained that the team needs to keep mixing up the defense that is played on him, and then said that depending on the metrics you use, Philadelphia should have won the game.
“Analytically we won the Game by 20 or whatever. No comment.”
Doc Rivers had some things to say about the officiating in Game 6 & how he hopes to defend the Jays in Game 7
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— Celtics on NBC Sports Boston (@NBCSCeltics) May 14, 2023
“They had some good shots last game, as well,” Rivers said. “We missed more open shots — analytically, we won the game by 20 or whatever, which, no comment. Having said that, we can’t bank that they’re gonna miss the shots that they had. They had some good shots.”
The argument, basically, is that if Philadelphia simply shot what it normally does on the looks that it generated, it would have won the game comfortably. It is a way to argue for your process, even if your results don’t necessarily work out, which makes sense from the perspective of a coach whose team missed a bunch of open looks in a basketball game they lost. Having said that, you’d be hard-pressed to find too many Sixers fans who thought the result was acceptable because of this, and our hunch is they’re willing to lose Game 7 analytically by 20 points if the scoreboard indicates they scored more points than the Celtics.