boston Page 44 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

The Philadelphia 76ers Should Blow Up The Team And Not Worry About The Short-Term Consequences
After half a decade under head coach Brett Brown and four years and two contracts into the career of star center Joel Embiid—the team’s only All-Star—the Philadelphia 76ers and their fans face a moment of reckoning. It’s a painful one, but it won’t get any less painful if we ignore it. The facts are...

Ben Simmons Was Bad But So What
Nobody needs it explained to them that it’s relatively normal for a rookie, no matter how talented, to play like ass for an entire series in the second round of his first trip to the playoffs. This is how things are generally supposed to go....

The Frail Celtics Still Took Down The Sixers
The Celtics are one more decently bad injury away from barely being able to field a full NBA-caliber rotation, but that didn’t stop the guys they have left from carrying their team to a 114-112 Game 5 win over the 76ers, clinching Boston’s spot in the Eastern Conference Finals....

You Check Ben Simmons The Same Way You Defend A Campsite
When I look at Philadelphia 76ers guard Ben Simmons, I see a very tall and extremely talented young basketball player with a resting dick face and no jump shot. When Boston Celtics coach Brad Stevens looks at him, he sees a curious foraging bear. For this reason, he is a basketball coaching genius....

It Has Come To This: Coach Orders Brad Marchand To Stop Licking Opponents
A request from the league didn’t do the trick. A sternly worded letter has been sent; an NHL bigwig also delivered the message to the player and his team’s manager. Now we are here: Bruins coach Bruce Cassidy ordering his player to stop licking the faces of his opponents before the start of today’s ...

Celtics Take 3-0 Series Lead After Sixers Choke Repeatedly
It’s not that the Sixers are dumb. They’re not. They are, in fact, quite tough and disciplined. But it is also true that their best players are children, and they are playing a series against one of the very sharpest, most wisely and meticulously coached NBA teams you will ever see. And the conseque...

Marco Belinelli<em></em> Buzzer-Beater Extends Game Three After Sixers Nearly Throw Season Away
Marco Belinelli’s fade-away buzzer-beater forced overtime against the Celtics after a J.J. Redick turnover left the Sixers looking at a 3-0 series deficit before the Italian’s heroics....

Holy Shit, Joel Embiid Dunked Aron Baynes Off The Face Of The Earth
Aron Baynes has to retire now, those are the rules....

Report: The NHL Tries, Once Again, To Talk Brad Marchand Out Of Licking People
Bruins dingus Brad Marchand was reportedly asked by the NHL to stop licking opposing players on April 26. The licking did not stop: Friday night, during his team’s eventual overtime loss to the Lightning, Marchand was spotted licking the face of Tampa winger Ryan Callahan. Hard as it may be to belie...

The Celtics Are In Control
In the most basic sense, there’s the 22-point comeback. There’s also the complete disassembling of Ben Simmons and Terry Rozier’s fearlessness and Al Horford’s craft and a whole host of other things that explain how a Boston Celtics team missing both its two best players and a full-strength Jaylen B...

This Sixers Have To Foul In This Situation
The Celtics were probably going to win Game 2 no matter what happened in the last 30 seconds. They’d already come back from a 22-point deficit and were ahead by three with half a minute to play. But the Sixers did something to lessen their already-small chances of winning late last night: They didn’...

The Sixers Blew It
With a little more than five minutes remaining in the first half tonight, Robert Covington drained a three, stretching the 76ers’ lead over the Celtics to 21 points. Philadelphia was in control here, with no signs of loosening their grip. And then they sent all of that to hell. Over the next quarter...

Meet Al Horford, Playoff Monster
Coming into this postseason, Al Horford’s playoff reputation never really stood out. He spent most of his career on a series of Hawks teams that were doomed to be steamrolled by LeBron James every spring. In the 17 times he met James in the playoffs, he only won one game, and that was on his 15th tr...

Dear Celtics, Please Unleash The All-Beef Lineup
Last night’s Game 1 between the Celtics and Sixers was a pretty good time. Terry Rozier looked like fuckin’ Chris Paul out there and Joel Embiid was unstoppable and Jayson Tatum did some cool whirly-bird moves that made me go, “Ooh! Nice!” But what I was most excited to see was the late-game introdu...

The Celtics Gave The Sixers A Game-One Beatdown
The 76ers had nearly a week off between closing out their easy first-round series against the Heat and kicking off their second-round one against the Celtics, and it showed. Against a Boston squad missing Jaylen Brown, who was sidelined with a hamstring injury, they couldn’t hang—getting beat down b...

Terry Rozier Is Maybe Not Quite Ready To Let Go Of His Beef With Eric Bledose
Surely Terry Rozier reminding the world of how badly he smoked Eric Bledsoe will terrify the Sixers. Or maybe he’s just a fan of the Drew Bledsoe-era Patriots....

Pour One Out For Joe Prunty, Who Turned A Bunch Of Shit Into A Pile Of Shit
Here’s a pretty remarkable stat: the Bucks used 16 different lineups Saturday night, in their Game 7 loss to the Boston Celtics; the five most used lineups of the bunch played about 35 minutes, and finished plus-11; the other 11 lineups played a total of just over 13 minutes, and were outscored by a...

A Cool Thing Jayson Tatum Does A Lot
One of the best ways for a basketball scorer to shake free from a committed defense is to catch the ball while on the move, instead of from a stationary position, so that his individual defender and the broader opposing defense don’t have time to get between him and a good look at the basket. ...

Report: The NHL Called The Bruins To Ask Brad Marchand To Stop Licking Other Players
The NHL called up the Bruins to let them know that Brad Marchand should not be licking or nuzzling his opponents, as first reported by SportsNet and later confirmed by ESPN. ...