Paul Pierce has produced very little, the Celtics rare get to the line and they often turn over the ball. (AP)

All sorts of crazy things happened in the last five minutes or so of Philadelphia’s huge Game 2 win in Boston on Monday, and I’ll get to them in a second. But first let me say this: I am astonished on a daily basis by how many fans, both in Boston and elsewhere, think the Celtics are a good offensive team, and are thus surprised they have struggled to score against the Hawks and the Sixers. The misunderstanding seems to come from the fact that a) Boston has very famous players on its team; and b) the Celtics rank fifth overall in field-goal percentage and eighth in three-point percentage.

So let me put this as clearly as I can: The Celtics are a bad offensive team. They were so-so last season and in 2009-10, and have been in continuing decline on offense for three seasons now. It’s wonderful that they shoot with great accuracy, especially from three-point range, but accurate shooting does not alone make a team good at scoring points. Field-goal percentage is no way to judge offense. It does not account for how many shots a team generates, how often it gets to the foul line and what sorts of shots it attempts. And in news that broke three years ago, this is where Boston fails.

The Celtics get to the foul line at a below-average rate, meaning they don’t generate many of the game’s easiest points. Only six teams attempted fewer three-pointers than Boston, rendering the Celtics’ very nice accuracy from that range not-so-meaningful. No team in NBA history has ever rebounded fewer of its own misses, which is a fancy way of saying Boston — mostly by choice — gets almost no second-chance points via offensive rebounds.

And for the fifth straight season, the Celtics have been among the league’s worst teams at turning over the ball. The result: Boston ranked 25th in points per possession, in a virtual tie with the Wizards. Toss in some serious health issues, and no one should be surprised Boston is playing low-scoring slugfests against a Philly defense that was neck-and-neck all season with Boston and Chicago atop the points-allowed-per-possession rankings. Read More…

After another epic between the Grizzlies and Clippers on Monday, every remaining first-round series stands at 3-1. And in a weird scheduling quirk, four teams have a chance to close out 4-1 victories tonight, a scenario that would leave us with one fait accompli in Miami and one remaining hope for real on-court drama in Memphis. Here’s one key factor to watch in each of the four games:

PACERS VS. MAGIC

Indiana has outscored the Magic by 55 points in the 158 minutes that David West has logged in this series. (Fernando Medina/NBAE via Getty Images)

The power forward matchup: We knew going in that Orlando lacked the size to match up with the behemoth Roy Hibbert, but David West’s old-man game has been just as big a problem — and perhaps a bigger one — for Ryan Anderson, Earl Clark and (in fewer chances) Glen Davis. Indiana has outscored the Magic by 55 points in the 158 minutes that West has logged in this series, while the Magic have won the remaining 39 minutes — with West sitting — by a mammoth 19-point margin.

This all peaked in the third quarter of Game 4, when the Pacers built a huge behind West doing a little bit of everything — slipping screens to create penetration, drawing double-teams in the post, ducking in for post-up chances behind Hibbert pick-and-rolls and firing solid passes to open shooters. He overpowered Anderson and Clark, and his play, coupled with Anderson’s disappearance, has been perhaps the largest swing factor in this series. It got so bad that Stan Van Gundy went small in the second half of the fourth quarter, with Hedo Turkoglu at power forward, a move that seemed to unnerve the Pacers for a short stretch.

But in the long run, or what’s left of it, the Magic need Anderson to make this matchup something close to a wash. He’s just 10-of-31 from the floor so far, and the secondary skills he brings — offensive rebounds, two-point shots, the occasional free throws — have vanished in this series. Orlando has a huge speed advantage at the big-man positions, and it can (and has) hurt Indiana by running West in multiple pick-and-rolls and targeting Hibbert as the last man in quick-hitting, staggered screen plays, knowing Hibbert will sag back and concede a jump shot. Anderson needs to make some of those jump shots, and the Magic need to find a way to limit West on the other end without compromising themselves fatally elsewhere. That’s a huge challenge given the roster limitations here, but Van Gundy, working what might be his last game in Orlando on Tuesday, has coached his tail off in this series. Does he have some tricks left? Read More…

The Sixers hit Chicago with a two-way beat-down in the second half on Tuesday, shutting down the Bulls’ offense and scoring at an unusually efficient rate against the league’s best defensive team. Jrue Holiday went crazy from all over the floor, Evan Turner bullied Richard Hamilton on the block and the Sixers’ motion-based half-court offense just had a bit more spice than usual.

One prong of that two-way blowout figures to be sustainable. Philly has long established itself as a defense-first team that struggles to score against top-shelf defenses. Its offense will regress, but if it can defend the Derrick Rose-less Bulls the way did in the second half of Game 2, Philly should be in every remaining game of this series in the fourth quarter. Remember: The Bulls were a very good offensive team with Rose and an average one without him. If the Sixers can knock “average” down to “below average,” they will have a shot, even if their own offense fails to produce.

With that in mind, keep an eye on how Philadelphia defends the various sets in which the Bulls have a shooter — Hamilton or Kyle Korver, usually — curl off one or two screens on one side of the floor as other player movement happens on the weak side. The Bulls don’t have the most complicated offense in the league, but they are very good at the basic things they do — running these sorts of plays, working high pick-and-rolls with Rose and spacing their two big men in ways that take advantage of their passing skills.

As Game 2 progressed, Philadelphia found a way to contain the Hamilton/Korver actions. Here’s a clip from the early part, when the Bulls were rolling:

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The Sixers are on track to finish with the lowest free-throw rate of any team since 1946-47. (Icon SMI)

When the Sixers bolted out of the gate sporting both a top-five offense and a top-five defense, my reaction was, essentially, “let’s see if this team can score efficiently over the long haul.”

Almost 40 games later, we have our answer: They can’t. The Sixers still have the league’s best defense by a pretty big margin, but they have fallen all the way to 17th in points per possession, and it’s clear they just don’t have enough scoring – in crunch time and otherwise — to compete with the best teams in the Eastern Conference. And that’s too bad, because the Sixers’ offense is a really interesting study in going to stylistic extremes as a way of maximizing talent and minimizing the lack of a consistent individual scoring threat capable of creating efficient offense.

The good extreme: Philadelphia rarely turns the ball over. The Sixers have coughed the ball up on 10.7 percent of their possessions so far this season, putting them on pace for the lowest turnover rate in the history of the league. They play a low-risk brand of ball built upon the idea that if all five guys move, pass and cut enough times over 15 seconds or so, a good look will emerge somewhere on the court. It’s a style that removes all the higher-risk parts of an NBA offense that most often lead to turnovers — pick-and-rolls in which the point guard gets into the teeth of a defense and tries a tricky interior pass, isolation drives into traffic and post-up plays that draw double-teams.

It also produces a bad extreme: The Sixers do not get to the foul line enough to survive. They make one free throw per every 6.5 field-goal attempts, for a free-throw/field-goal attempt ratio of .154, per Basketball-Reference. If that number holds, the Sixers will finish with the lowest free-throw rate any team has posted since 1946-47, when the NBA technically didn’t exist. (It was known as the Basketball Association of America and merged with a second league in 1949 to create the NBA.) Only two teams have finished with a ratio below .180 since the mid-1970s, and both of those teams came in well above where the Sixers stand now. The Sixers have attempted fewer than 10 foul shots in four of their last 21 games — the same number of games in which they’ve managed to earn 20 or more free throws during that stretch. The average team attempts about 22.8 free throws per game.

The net result is a failing offense. Over their last 20 games, the Sixers have averaged 98.9 points per 100 possessions, the rough equivalent of what Boston’s 25th-ranked offense has produced this season, per NBA.com’s stats database. Read More…

Andre Iguodala and the Sixers have struggled to score late in close games, a problem that doomed them Wednesday against the Thunder. (Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE via Getty Images)

One of the recurring themes at the annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which begins Friday in Boston, is the blurry notion of “clutch” — especially in basketball and baseball. Are there really clutch players, or would all NBA stars, provided they shoot the same sort of difficult shots, eventually end up with similar shooting percentages in crunch time over a large enough sample size?

A related and perhaps more important question: Are there teams that do better in the clutch over the long haul? Are there teams that chronically falter?

In one sense, the answer is an obvious “yes.” Teams will play many close games during a season, and they will put up statistics in those games that are either good or bad, clutch or unclutch. But one season is a small sample size. It can be tough to suss out how much those numbers have to do with randomness and luck, and how likely they would be to reverse themselves over bigger sample sizes. The Mavericks have performed well in the clutch the last few seasons, a trend that peaked in the playoffs last season, but they are struggling this season, according to NBA.com’s stats database.

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Dwyane Wade had 26 points, five boards and four assists in Miami's win. (Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE via Getty Images)

PHILADELPHIA — Let’s start with the appropriate perspective here: Just as the Sixers’ blitzing of Chicago on Wednesday didn’t suddenly make them the team to beat in the Eastern Conference, Miami’s 99-79 white-washing of Philly here on Friday doesn’t make the Sixers also-rans. As the Sixers reach the halfway point of a brutal stretch of games, they stand right where they did two nights ago — as the strongest candidate for the No. 3 spot in the East, a young, growing team that has a chance to push the elite hard in the playoffs.

The Heat? They’re elite, and they had one of those games Friday that makes you wonder how anyone could ever beat them four times in seven games. Three things of note from Miami’s resounding win: Read More…

LeBron James tortured Evan Turner in the post in Miami's 113-92 win on Jan. 21. (Issac Baldizon/NBAE via Getty Images)

PHILADELPHIA — After wading through a mob of Temple University students to get a glimpse of the Heat after their morning shootaround, it’s time to preview their Friday night game against the Sixers. Miami and Philly are two of the top teams in the league and two of just four clubs that rank among the top 10 overall in both points scored and allowed per possession. This re-run of last year’s first-round series offers a ton of interesting matchups, despite Dwyane Wade’s insistence Thursday morning that, “I’m not into matchup problems.” I’m not sure any other combination of two teams contains the number of rangy ball-handlers we’ll see on the court Friday. Both will go to lightning quick small-ish lineups that present major matchup problems for any team.

A quick rundown on some things to watch:

1. The Jodie Meeks factor and the Sixers’ long-range shooting

Meeks is the Sixers’ only proven high-volume three-point shooter, though Jrue Holiday, Lou Williams and Andre Iguodala are all outperforming their career marks from deep this season. But Meeks is a potential defensive liability against any shooting guard who can brutalize you in the post, and Wade certainly qualifies. He attacked Meeks on the block during the playoffs last season, forcing the Sixers to send help and occasionally try Holiday on Wade.

Meeks provides valuable floor-spacing for a team that shoots a below-average number of threes, though the Sixers are scoring a hair less efficiently with Meeks on the court this season – a change from last season. Long-range shooting — or at least the threat of it — is doubly important against the Heat. Miami allows the most three-point attempts in the league, both in raw terms and as a percentage of total opponent shot attempts. That stems from both opportunism and desperation. Miami might be the league’s most aggressive defense, with early rotations designed to protect the paint and blitz ball-handlers back to mid-court. Early rotations leave openings elsewhere, and the Heat dare you to make the extra cross-court passes to open shooters, confident they can either tip the pass or sprint to those shooters in time. The Mavericks, with shooters and passers everywhere, were uniquely equipped to attack this kind of defense without running into too many end-of-shot-clock desperation threes.

Do the Sixers have the patience and shooting to score against Miami? What about when Meeks is out of the game? Read More…

Everyone expects the "Lou-for-one" with about 40 seconds left in a quarter. (Howard Smith/US PRESSWIRE)

PHILADELPHIA — Chris Paul does it more artfully and with a bit more point guard showmanship, but no one in the league is more committed to the two-for-one exchange at the end of quarters than Lou Williams. If there are around 40 seconds left in any quarter, every Sixer knows the drill: Get the ball to Williams so he can generate a shot fast enough that the Sixers get a second possession before the final buzzer.

“That is his 38-42 seconds,” said center Spencer Hawes.

“It’s in our scouting report, for sure,” said Chicago’s Derrick Rose.

“Just get the ball to Lou,” said Sixers swingman Evan Turner. “He might get you six points out of it.”

“Every single time,” said guard Jodie Meeks, with a laugh.

There is a joke going around that perhaps the thing should be nicknamed the “Lou-for-one.” The man himself endorsed that nickname, though he did so with a nonchalant shrug befitting of a player who cares not for your time concerns. “It’s just part of how we play,” Williams said. “If there are 30 or 40 seconds left, I pretty much want to shoot.” Read More…

The Sixers are 16-6 following a win over the conference-leading Bulls on Wednesday. (Porter Binks/SI)

PHILADELPHIA — Sixers president and top decision-maker Rod Thorn has a lifetime in the game as a player, coach and executive. He sat down with SI.com for about an hour this week to talk about leaving the Nets for the Sixers in August 2010, the ceiling of this Sixer team, the Jason Kidd-Stephon Marbury trade in 2001 and lots of other stuff.

SI.com: What do you think of this Philly team right now?

Thorn: I like our team. I think we have a good young team. We embody a lot of traits you like to see in a team. We play hard. We’re a good defensive team without having any shot-blocker. We can have one of eight guys be our leading scorer. We don’t have any bad apples — either guys who are too selfish, or guys who don’t have the team as their first priority.

SI.com: As this set of elite teams comes in — the Bulls, Heat, Spurs and Clippers — what are you looking for from the Sixers? What do you want to see?

Thorn: I’m looking for probably the same thing everybody else is. As the competition level rises, your margin for error shrinks. Most every game we’ve won has been a blowout. You have to think we’re going to be in a lot of real tough, close games. How are we going to react to that? I think we will be very competitive in this stretch, barring some kind of crazy injuries, because we were competitive the last 60 games last year, and we’ve had a top 10 record the last 80-some games. And that’s a pretty good indication. My feeling is we’ll play well against virtually anybody. I don’t care who we play. Read More…

Andre Iguodala put on an All-Star performance that included a massive dunk over Kyle Korver in the third quarter. (Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE via Getty Images)

PHILADELPHIA — There was one nagging question about the Sixers, even after they went 37-23 last season following a slow start, pushed the Heat in the first round and came out this season blowing the doors off everyone: Can they score against the best defenses?

They couldn’t last season, even amid their best stretches, and it proved their undoing. But in thrashing the Bulls 98-82 on Wednesday, the Sixers provided a template for how they might manage against elite defenses. The caveats are real — the Bulls were missing their best wing defender, Luol Deng, and the Sixers were playing at home for what seemed like the 22nd time in 22 games — but the model is there:

• Keep the half-court offense moving. Philly played a “C” game on offense against the Magic on Monday, with the ball and players stopping after one pick-and-roll instead of moving into actions two, three and four. With some inevitable exceptions, that wasn’t the case against Chicago. The Sixers were so active, with cuts and screens and simultaneous actions on either side of the floor that it was hard to keep up with everything they fit into a 24-second possession. The movement didn’t always produce good looks against a savvy Chicago defense, but it helped loosen things for a team that makes up for its lack of a transcendent offensive player by having its collection of good offensive players work in concert.

RECAP | BOX SCORE | HIGHLIGHTS

“The ball moves,” Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau said after the game. “[The Sixers] are so unselfish. When the ball gets swung and they move bodies, they have multiple players who can play pick-and-roll basketball.”

The Sixers scored the equivalent of about 112 points per 100 possessions, according to Basketball-Reference’s formula, a mark that would top the league this season. They had four players — Andre Iguodala, Evan Turner, Jrue Holiday and Lou Williams — record at least four assists each, an unusual feat. The ball moved so well despite the absence of Spencer Hawes, whom Collins labeled as essential against an aggressive defense like Chicago’s because of his passing and shooting skills. Read More…