At one point during Monday night’s throwback playoff duel between the Celtics and 76ers, Aron Baynes banked in a 3-pointer. Meanwhile, three of Philadelphia’s renowned shooters — Robert Covington, Dario Saric, and Ersan Ilyasova — didn’t hit a shot from behind the arc all evening.
The 76ers shot as if the rim was laced with repellent, hitting just five 3-pointers on 26 attempts during a 117-101 loss in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference semifinals. For a team that averaged 11 treys per game in the regular season, Monday’s struggle caused perplexed looks among the Philly ranks.
Was Philadelphia’s poor shooting the byproduct of rust, having sat for six days following its Round 1 clincher? Or perhaps it was the result of Boston’s top-ranked defense, a swarming, switching bunch that received but one memorandum from coach Brad Stevens: “No threes.’’
“I give the Celtics credit for getting to our shooters,’’ said Philadelphia coach Brett Brown. “We did have an off night shooting, but I think a lot of that you can attribute to their good defense and them getting to shooters.’’
Boston switched on almost every screen, closed out against briefly unattended Sixers with verve, and enjoyed a quintessential defensive effort from the recently reactivated Marcus Smart. Philadelphia midseason pickup Marco Belinelli was one of Smart’s many victims, hitting one of the Sixers’ five 3-pointers, but shooting just 3 of 9 from the field to go with some lethargic defensive play.
“[Smart] is a great defender,’’ said Belinelli. “Strong body. We just need to push him back [and] try to use the screens to move without the ball.
“They have a good team. We didn’t come ready to play. I think we didn’t really compete. They kicked our [butts] tonight.’’
The whooping began in the early going and never relented.
Celtics forward Al Horford spent a significant portion of the game guarding Philadelphia rookie Ben Simmons, with Baynes drawing the 7-foot wonder, Joel Embiid. The two Celtics expertly walled off Simmons at the top of the key on numerous occasions, preventing him from gaining steam downhill and collapsing Boston’s defense. Looks that usually present themselves to Philadelphia’s shooting brigade simply weren’t there.
After almost a week of lounging, the Sixers weren’t their usual dynamic selves in transition. In the rare moments that Philadelphia did exhibit an urgency to increase the pace, it was rewarded.
Usually efficient out of timeouts, Boston turned the ball over following a break with less than 10 seconds left in the third quarter. Simmons corralled the rock, advanced it to J.J. Redick, and watched the ball massage nylon as time expired, leaving the Sixers with a 12-point deficit.
Redick was one of the few bright spots amid an otherwise bleak evening for Philly. The Duke alum scored 20 points, hitting two threes and moving without the ball in creative fashion. Just seconds into the third quarter, Redick faked as if meandering into a dribble-handoff, then jutted backward, fooling Smart, who was too late to recover and fouled Redick for three free throws. Redick sank them all.
“They’re going to switch a lot of stuff,’’ said Redick. “They’re going to blow up dribble-handoffs. It’s not a secret how they’re going to defend.’’
In the eyes of point guard phenom Simmons, lack of ball movement was also to blame for Philadelphia’s woes.
“We were just trying to find a rhythm and we couldn’t find it,’’ he said. “We didn’t move the ball as we usually do. That’s one of the things that we need to look at and reassess.’’
Philadelphia will have ample time to do just that before Game 2 on Thursday evening at the Garden. Transitioning from Monday’s lackadaisical mind-set into a fiercer demeanor is paramount.
“Some of it was us being over here,’’ Redick said, motioning to the empty space above his head, “and the game happening right there.
“We weren’t there.’’
Owen Pence can be reached at owen.pence@globe.com.
