ESPN’s Brian Windhorst: How the 76ers Forced a Game 7 vs the Celtics

ESPN's Brian Windhorst joined The Rich Eisen Show with a perfectly chosen backdrop. He picked a photo of Boston, Massachusetts, in honor of the Game 7 looming between the Celtics and the 76ers.

Rich asked the obvious question. Why is there a Game 7 in this series at all?

Windhorst started with the conventional wisdom. Underdogs sometimes steal a game at home. A player gets hot from three. A team catches lightning. None of that, he said, was what happened to Philadelphia in the most recent win. The 76ers didn't shoot the ball especially well. They just played better fundamental basketball than the Celtics.

And that's where Windhorst's diagnosis of Boston gets pointed. "When the Celtics miss three-pointers, Rich, they are a shell of themselves," he said. He called it not becoming of a champion, and not the way they played during the regular season. When the threes go down, Boston is unbeatable. When they don't, the Celtics look more like a 500 team that wins on the margins, on offensive rebounds, on possession. None of that has shown up the last couple games.

Windhorst then identified what he sees as a bad habit creeping back into the games of Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum. They keep hunting mismatches. Set a pick, get the smaller defender switched onto them, and then try to win one-on-one. Occasionally that's a useful weapon. As a steady diet, Windhorst said, it's no good.

He pointed to a telling moment in the most recent loss. Joe Mazzulla, with the game already out of reach in the early fourth quarter, pulled his starters and went to the bench. Then something interesting happened. Boston's reserves immediately ripped off an 11-0 run against Philadelphia's starters.

Windhorst was careful with the caveat. Some of that surge was probably a Sixers team letting its guard down with a big lead. But the bench did something the starters had stopped doing. They moved the ball. They ran the actual Celtics offense. And open shots followed.

His suggestion was almost a coaching note. It might not be a bad idea, Windhorst said, for Mazzulla to show his stars that clip before Game 7. A reminder that Boston doesn't have to play isolation basketball.

On the other end of the floor, Windhorst gave Joel Embiid the credit. Philadelphia, he said, has gone back to the MVP version. He recalled that during the season Embiid won MVP, James Harden was constantly feeding the big man in position to score, and the Sixers played a steady inside-out game. That's exactly what's happening now. Embiid has 16 assists across the last two games. The ball goes inside, defenses collapse, and Philadelphia generates the same outside looks that everyone on the court has been hunting all series.

The upshot, Windhorst said, is that all of these momentum threads are real. Boston's identity is wobbling. Philadelphia has stumbled into an old-school answer. And a Game 7 that nobody on either coast saw coming a week ago is now the only thing that matters.