Celtics vs. Sixers finally gets scrappy, and the series is alive

PHILADELPHIA -- The one thing this series had lacked, other than a Sixers win, was an element of nasty. Sure, there had been a handful of little scrapes and scraps, along with an elbow here and a mean word there. But if anyone was hoping the Celtics and Sixers would recapture the bloodsport vibe of the early 1980s, they’d been left wanting.

Well, wait no more. On Monday night in Game 4 of Celtics - Sixers, a game the Sixers finally one to pull back the series to 3-1, Terry Rozier and Joel Embiid mixed it up late in the second quarter with both players getting double-technicals, which was definitely not an option in the 80s.

“He tried to punch me twice,” Embiid said of Rozier. “But too bad he’s so short he couldn’t get to my face.”

To which Rozier offered: “To set the record straight, I wake up every morning not worried about nobody, no man on this earth. We were out there having fun. It’s just part of a basketball game. That’s all it is.”

Later Embiid and Marcus Morris got into a little back and forth with Morris reminding the big fella of the series score.

“Because it’s reality,” Morris said when asked about the 3-0 gesture he made toward Embiid. “It’s hard, because I know I wouldn’t say a damn word if I was down 3-1. But, hey, we’re all different. So it is what it is.”

Yes, yes. More of this please. At stake is the future of the Eastern Conference and a sweep would have been highly inappropriate. One doesn’t have to squint too hard to see these two teams making this an annual rite of spring, and it was only a matter of time before things got heated.

Photo by Mitchell Leff/Getty Images

To be sure, this wasn’t the same as Cedric Maxwell jumping into the Spectrum crowd to go after a heckler and we didn’t have Bird-Doc throat grab for tomorrow’s early edition. Times change, for the better, all things considered. One shudders thinking about the fallout from either incident in today’s hyper-charged climate.

To the extent that things can get chippy/physical in today’s NBA, Game 4 finally gave us a taste of the good old fashioned Boston/Philly rivalry with the Sixers staving off elimination in a 103-92 victory. Propelled by the insertion of plus-minus hero T.J. McConnell into the starting lineup, the Sixers played with the appropriate force of a team with its season on the line.

“I mean, the obvious is obvious,” Sixers coach Brett Brown said of McConnell. “That’s how he plays. There’s an injection of energy that you immediately know you’re going to get with him. And you heard me talk for the previous 48 hours, of making sure that our spirit didn’t take a hit. And there’s no better player to help catapult the start of the game with that mindset than T.J.”

McConnell brought more than just energy and spirit. He scored a postseason career-high 19 points on 9-for-12 shooting with seven rebounds and five assists, while flying around the ball as the Sixers employed an aggressive, trapping defense on Rozier.

While the margin continued to hover around in anyone’s-game territory, the final outcome was rarely in doubt. As Celtics coach Brad Stevens noted before the game, “If you don’t bring it, the game will be honest.”

The honest assessment was that the Sixers were a little bit faster to the ball, and a little bit tougher. They controlled the glass and forced 15 turnovers. This was a rockfight, basically, and the Sixers were the aggressors for most of the evening.

This was what we wanted to see from the Sixers. Forget talent, we wanted to see their fight and competitiveness. We wanted to see their spirit, as Brown has said repeatedly over the last 48 hours.

“You understand that there is no more wiggle room,” Brown said. “You lose, and then your season is done; that’s a daunting statement for all of us. Because the group is close, we feel like we have more to give, and we’re fighting. We want to stay alive.”

Photo by Mitchell Leff/Getty Images

An aesthetic masterpiece, this was not. Both teams shot in the low 40s and transition opportunities were essentially nonexistent. The closest thing to a run came late in the third quarter when Philly extended a seven-point lead to 14 in a stretch that featured technical fouls on Jaylen Brown and Stevens.

“At the end of the day, that run was waiting to happen,” Stevens said. “Thought they were very physical and tough, especially on the glass. We obviously didn’t run great offense with the turnovers and everything else. So that run was inevitable if we didn’t change the way we were playing. It had nothing to do with the officials, we just have to play better.”

So now we have the rough outline of a competitive series. Given that the Celtics haven’t lost at home in the playoffs, it may not have that much longer of a shelf life, but we have a Game 5 and that’s more than the Raptors can claim. Neither team is ready to let this go and that’s how it should be when the Celtics and Sixers meet in the playoffs.

“Shit, I’m ready to go now,” Morris said. “They had a lot to say in here. They did what they’re supposed to do. They got one. We did what we’re supposed to do. We got one. So, we’ll go back 3-1 and hopefully we put it away.”

Countered Robert Covington, “Philly unite, man. This thing can be done. We’ve done it before as far as finishing the season strong so why can’t we do this? We’re playing against history, but we’ve played against history before so why can’t we do something great?”

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