Philadelphia 76ers fans who said ‘We want Boston’ didn’t sulk as they did after Game 1. The team delivered a performance filled with character and resilience. The 76ers didn’t just battle from a 13-point first-quarter deficit. Rookie VJ Egdecombe went to the locker room twice after a nasty fall. But heroes always rise. That’s what Philly’s dynamic backcourt of Tyrese Maxey and Edgecombe did tonight.

The tandem combined for 59 of the 76ers’ 111 points in a pivotal Game 2 win over the Shamrocks. Edgecombe led the way, with 30 points and 10 boards in just his second postseason game. He joined an elusive list of rookies to crack that stat line, last done by the Spurs’ Tim Duncan in 1998.

“He’s a rookie, but he can play. We’ve got to be better on him,” The Celtics’ Jaylen Brown said about Edgecombe’s fantastic performance at the TD Garden.

But in the playoffs, it’s all about defending home court if you’re the higher seed. The Celtics didn’t loosen the leash on this game. They had a run of their own, bringing the game to a 91-89 impasse in the fourth quarter. Brown was instrumental in the Celtics’ attempted fightback late in the game.

The Celtics’ top performer finished the night with a game-high 36 points, with 7 rebounds and 4 assists. His partner in crime, Jayson Tatum, had an inefficient shooting night, but came one assist shy of a triple-double. Maybe the Shamrocks would have completed a comeback had it not been for Tyrese Maxey.

The Philadelphia 76ers’ explosive scoring guard started and finished the game on a high note. In the fourth quarter, he scored 12 of his 29, hitting nylon on three of his four attempts from beyond the arc. All of his production came in the last seven minutes, after Brown made it a two-point game.

The series now shifts to Philly, with Joel Embiid’s status still in doubt. However, the 76ers just showed that they are just as dynamic as the Celtics, even without The Process.

The Celtics and their hot-cold relationship from beyond the arc

In the first game, everything went the way the Celtics would have hoped. They won every quarter of basketball and used their three-point mastery to blow the 76ers out of the water. That was the plan again in Game 2. However, even when things got tough, the Celtics just didn’t walk away from their volume shooting.

They attempted 50 shots from beyond the arc, making just 13. Even when Joe Mazzulla emptied the bench for the final minute, they exclusively shot triples. It proved to be a slippery slope, volume didn’t equate to rhythm for most of the players, and the patience to try something different never came.

Derrick White shot 2-for-10 from three. Tatum and Sam Hauser were both 2-for-8. But White’s struggles weren’t a surprise if you’d been watching the regular season closely. He finished 2025-26 shooting just 39.3% from the field- the worst efficiency of his career- and had scored no more than 12 points in ten of his last eleven games heading into these playoffs.

Payton Pritchard, meanwhile, clanged all four of his three-point attempts and finished with just four points. The two guards who are supposed to function as Boston’s pressure-release valves combined to shoot 31% from the floor and 16.7% from three across the first two games. That is not a number you can sustain in a playoff series.

On the other hand, the 76ers used the hot hand to inflict most of the damage. Eleven of their 19 made threes came between Tyrese Maxey and VJ Edgecombe- the only two players to attempt more than six threes for Philly. But reducing what happened to a hot shooting night understates what Philadelphia actually did.

The Sixers didn’t just get hot. They built their entire offensive game plan around exploiting a specific Boston vulnerability: the drop coverage. Boston’s scheme, where the center retreats off the pick-and-roll and concedes the perimeter shot rather than surrender drives to the basket, was used on 69.7% of possessions in Game 2, the third-highest rate of any team in a playoff game since player tracking data began in 2013-14.

Philadelphia came in prepared to feast on it. Maxey and Edgecombe ran pick-and-roll after pick-and-roll with the express purpose of pulling up for jumpers off the dribble, punishing the space created by the retreating Celtics bigs. The Sixers scored off 42.1% of their self-created three-point attempts- not because they were running hot, but because they were getting genuinely good looks.

The Celtics had an off night, which is fair. For the most part, they have lethal three-point shooters, averaging almost 16 made threes per game in the regular season and converting 36.7% of those looks, good for a top-ten ranking.

They also had Jaylen Brown, who put up 36 points largely on his own, scoring 13 points in the third quarter while his teammates combined for ten on 4-for-16 shooting. In the fourth quarter, Brown’s eight points were more than double any other Celtic’s output. The burden being placed on the Jays every time Boston’s role players go cold is a structural fragility that this series has already exposed twice.