Round up: Celtics 101, Sixers (extra time)
One minute you are the toast to the city, the so-called Rookie of the Year and the most sensible of world basketball after winning your first circular series of playoffs and as one of the faces of the game’s long career. And the next, you’re the scapegoat, which is why Philadelphia’s 76ers are in a 3-0 gap in the East Conference semi-finals with the season on the brink of collapse.
This is the whirlwind in which Sixers rookie Ben Simmons has been caught lately. The brilliing of an epic rookie season is overshadowed by a series full of fights against the Boston Celtics. to take the lead in the semi-finals, did his confidence lead him to sink into the final moments of the third game?Mike Sielski of Phillynews. com believes:
Simmons has some of the greatest gifts of any Sixers player at any time, speed, vision, and a will to pass that permeates the entire Sixers team, with so much untapped potential, but he is still only 21 years old, far from being a much better player, far from being a finished product, and this series opposed to the Celtics and Saturday’s 101-98 loss in Game 3 were laden with Icarus moments for him, with too many bad decisions born of recklessness and overconfidence.
When Brown leaves him out because of the kind of verbal exchange a coach should have even with a player as soon as Simmons, a replay of the third game would already be better on the coach’s laptop. Simmons had been lousy and defeated at the time of the game. , scoring only one point in 31 minutes, in fact lost in his own head because he had nevertheless met a coach, Brad Stevens, who had figured out how to build a wall between Simmons and the basket. The numbers recommend Simmons was older on Saturday – 16 points, 8 out of 14 on the field, 8 rebounds, 8 assists – but those falsified stats don’t tell the full story of their fights.
There was an embarrassing dump with just over five minutes to play in regular time and the tied fit It was an undisputed attempt, Simmons as open as it would have been if the Wells Fargo Center were empty, and in his haste and preference for To demoralize the Celtics, he did not take care of his most sensible priority: to make sure the ball passed. The hoop. There was that pass of access in the last seconds of the extension, destined for Joel Embiid and stolen by Al Horford, who lacked the acuity and conscience that each and every pass must have in a tight and vital game.
And there’s Simmons’ ultimate serious and inexcusable night sin: with the Sixers holding a 98-97 lead with less than 20 seconds to play in overtime, Simmons grabbed the rebound of an Embiid fault and promptly returned the ball to the right baseline hoop. The stopwatch is off. There is no need, no clever reason, to take pictures, but instead of holding the ball or passing it on to a teammate, haggling for a few seconds or doing anything else that would have burned such valuable time, Simmons ignored the context of the match. game, received a mad coup d’or her glory and subsidized this discount. Worse, when asked about the sequence, he was provocative and insisted that he would do it again.
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