Be honest. Did you think the 76ers would blow it? Did you think Joel Embiid, bent over and clutching his shorts from exhaustion, nursing his latest injury, would fall short — that Lucy would pull the football away from him once again at the last moment?
It’s OK. You’re not alone. When the Sixers beat the Celtics in Game 7 on Saturday in Boston to overcome a 3-1 deficit and win their first-round series, it stunned a lot of people for a lot of reasons. No one expected the Sixers to give the No. 2 seed — the team with the best betting odds to win the Eastern Conference — much of a fight in the first round, let alone send them home.
The last time the Sixers beat the Celtics in the playoffs was 1982. The last time Embiid won a Game 7 before this was never. He was 0-3 in his previous tries. That he was even part of the proceedings at all was its own giant surprise. The man’s body has famously failed him. He has missed 150 regular-season games over the last three years. Right on schedule, just as the playoffs were set to begin, he had an emergency appendectomy while the Sixers were on the road in Houston. No way he’d be able to return in time to face the Celtics. Why even bother when the numbers and the history were so stacked against him and his team?
But then he and his team made their own history. Embiid, in 39 minutes, led all scorers with 34 points while adding 12 rebounds and six assists in a 109-100 road win. The whole thing has been so improbable that it’s hard to say who’s more floored by the events between the good people of Philadelphia and Boston. Even former Sixers general manager Sam Hinkie couldn’t believe it.
After Game 7, Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla — whose team became the first in franchise history to lose in the playoffs to a Sixers squad that did not have Wilt Chamberlain or Julius Erving — was asked what happened. His answer was simple.
“What changed in this series,” Mazzulla said in his matter-of-fact way, “was Joel Embiid came back and they were a completely different team.”
He isn’t wrong. In four games, Embiid averaged 28 points, nine rebounds and seven assists. Even more impressive: he played nearly 37 minutes per game. Embiid became the first player in NBA history to miss three games of a seven-game series and still go for more than 100 total points. And he did it all while toppling over and crashing to the hardwood like usual, leaving him to hold his right side and that still-healing scar tissue while the Sixers and their fans held their collective breath.
At one point in Game 7, after the latest nasty fall in a career full of them, he went to the locker room before returning and getting in some on-court side stretches that were so strange that they might as well have been art.
People had jokes about that, of course. They always do. But now it’s Embiid who finally gets to laugh. And it might not be the last one.
The Sixers still have work to do, and he still has things to prove. Embiid is the only MVP to never reach the conference finals. To pull that off, they’ll have to get past another longtime rival and beat the Knicks, who just smacked the Hawks in six and are the only Eastern Conference team that didn’t have to play a Game 7 in the first round.
But that is for later. For now, Embiid and the Sixers are moving on. It wasn’t all him, of course. He had help along the way. VJ Edgecombe — a pleasant surprise in his first season for an organization that is generally unaccustomed to such developments — went for 30 points and 10 rebounds in a Game 2 win, becoming the first rookie to do so in a playoff game since Tim Duncan. Paul George, who missed 25 games for violating the league’s anti-drug policy, was both available and useful in the series — two things that prompted a Celtics fan friend of mine to lament that Boston somehow had the misfortune of running into PG and Embiid both being healthy and good at the same time. Long odds, to be sure.
And then there was Tyrese Maxey, the All-Star who is likely headed for an All-NBA nod, who stepped up as the Sixers’ best player while Embiid was on the mend. He carried the team all year — then helped Embiid shoulder a playoff load against the Celtics franchise that had previously proven too heavy for the Sixers for more than four decades.
Maxey, like Embiid, was spectacular in Game 7, going for 30 points, 11 rebounds and seven assists. Together, they became the first duo in NBA history to each have 30, 10 and five in a Game 7.
Supreme efforts from their two stars. Three road wins against a team they never beat when it matters. That’s what it took for the Sixers to finally defeat the Celtics — history.
“Can’t let the same stuff happen over and over and over again,” Maxey said after Game 7. “At some point, we got to put a stop to it.”
At some point finally arrived. Earlier in the series, when Boston was up 3-1 and it looked like they would dispatch the Sixers the way they always do, some Celtics fans chanted “we want Boston,” mocking the Sixers and their supporters for daring to use the phrase in the first place.
That was Embiid’s first game back. The Sixers lost. He heard the Boston crowd that night and smiled.
You can bet he’s still smiling now.
