Sean Grande, Boston Celtics Radio Play-By-Play Broadcaster

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$10 minimum per order. Additional terms apply. We're going to move from two games to two in this series, and this series will shift back to Philadelphia tomorrow evening. Let's head out to the guest line right now and welcome in the radio voice of the Boston Celtics, and that of course is Sean Grandy.

Sean, appreciate the time. All postseason long, the last few weeks we've been asking when are the Celtics going to show up and have that killer instinct? A lot of people thought it was going to happen last night with this series at two games apiece. That was not the case. Just how surprised were you that they weren't able to display that killer instinct that so many people are asking them to show? It was a bludgeoning. It was just a bad. The effort was obviously concerning.

Lack of urgency was concerning. And this team doesn't play its best until it has to. And that's been the case. And eventually your luck runs out like it did last year in Game 6 at Golden State. And the similarities between the finals and this series are pretty striking when you look at one through five in the second half of the season.

There's a series of the games that have been played in that they close games. The Celtics have badly outscored the Sixers. They've outshot them. They've out-rebounded them. They've done everything, but they didn't win those close games. And you knew a game like that, Zach, was coming.

There hadn't been through the first four. There wasn't a single night where you said, man, the Sixers were the better team tonight. Until last night. And that was due to happen when you have Harden and Embiid and that roster that Philadelphia has. People don't realize how good the Sixers are.

What a great year they had. When it comes to the mental side of this team, did they just overlook Philadelphia heading into this series? Because they've dominated. They've even asked Embiid. They've owned Philadelphia as of late. I think that plays in at some level.

It shouldn't at this point. But it probably does because the Celtics have always found a way to beat them. And the regular season thing is interesting.

And I know a lot of people. I think it's more a fan thing and a media thing. And people sort of miss handicapping the series. And yeah, I understand making the Celtics a favorite. They're a more talented team.

But I think people just dramatically overstated the difference between the two teams. Because there were some close regular season games that went the Celtics way. Like the close games in the postseason series have gone the Sixers way. And listen, I was pretty dead on picking the Celtics games during the playoffs last year until the finals.

Because I saw, here's the problem with the regular season. In March of last year, I called a game, I was doing a TV game when the Celtics were in San Francisco. And if you saw the Celtics and Warriors that night in late March, and it wasn't early in the year, it was game 70 of the season last year. If you saw those two teams that night, you would think there was no way Golden State could beat the Celtics four times. They were not on the same plane just a couple of weeks before the playoffs started.

Yet, times change. And the Celtics, by the way, lost the game here in April. And if you look at it one way and say, hey, they beat them 3-1 in the regular season series. You spin it another way, the Celtics hadn't beaten them since February.

And a lot of things changed since then. Sean Grandy here with us. I know the Celtics team was down 3-2 last year to Milwaukee and they come back to win that series. Is there any way to be confident that they're going to go win these next two games? I don't think you can rule it out. Listen, you get anybody on here that says, hey, I know exactly what's going to happen in these Celtics games. They have no credibility and they're outside their mind.

Because you just have no idea. We've never seen anything like these home road splits in the last two years. The Celtics are now in the last two years 9-9 at home. And they are 11-6 on the road, including 3-0 in closeout games. They've been historically one of the best road teams in NBA history over the last two years, particularly with the money on the table.

Which is why I expect there to be a big-time performance last night. But remember, to win Game 6 of Milwaukee last year, Jason Tatum played the game of his life. And he's probably going to have to do that again because the Sixers this year are playing better than Milwaukee was last year at that time. And Joel Embiid is a more dominant player when he's helped the knee braces off.

The Celtics, think about it this way, they put themselves in this mess by losing the game to Atlanta that extended the Atlanta series. And as a result, the series with the Sixers started two days later, which is two more days for Embiid to get healthy. So Embiid would have missed the first two games and then been shaky in Game 3. And given the way things happened anyway, the Celtics very nearly swept the series. They could have easily won those games 1-4 and taken Embiid out of another game and we might not still be playing it. So many people are crushing Joel Missoula and clearly they'll go to Emi Adoka and say this wouldn't happen if he was there. How much of this performance so far do you put on the coach? Well listen, everybody shares responsibility and the coach shares responsibility in that too.

But I kind of phrase it this way. Let's say Jason Tatum at the end of Game 4, for all the mistakes that were made and everything that had Jaylin double teaming Embiid to get the card in the Open 3 in the quarter, let's just say Jason Tatum goes earlier. Not 10 seconds earlier, not 5 seconds earlier.

Let's say he goes a half second earlier on his drive. Marcus Smart and he makes the pass a half second earlier to Marcus Smart and Marcus Smart shoots it a half second earlier. Then the Celtics are up 3 games to 1 going into last night and nobody is saying a word about Joel Missoula.

I've heard obviously the same conversation. Doc Rivers has made all these adjustments and Joel Missoula hasn't. Well up until last night, the Celtics had outscored them by 41 points in the 4 games. Doc Rivers had to make adjustments because they were getting dominant even though it was a 2-2 series because they won the clutch minutes and they won those late games with James Harden clutch.

But territorially, point differential, net rating wise, how many adjustments do you need to make if you're the Celtics and you've outscored a team you're playing that you beat them 3-1 in the regular season and you played 4 games against them and outscored them by 41 points. I wish The Honest was on Doc to make adjustments. He did. He was great.

And now we'll find out. But listen, rookie head coach, as the owners like to say, it was a battlefield promotion and nobody talked about it during the year because even though the Celtics were supposed to crumble under this inexperienced youngest head coach in the league, they had the best body of work in the league. They finished the game behind Milwaukee. Best scoring differential, net rating in the league and nobody thought about it until it became a talking point in the playoffs. So everybody's got to kind of grow up tomorrow night.

Sean Grandy here with us. You're right about game 4. But with them taking so long to get going, it's like okay, they have that in them with what they showed in the fourth quarter. What surprised me last night was being in their building with that crowd and how great those fans are. How you don't show up in that first quarter at home, that to me is something that I just don't understand.

You're not alone. And I think it's why it looks identical to last year going on the road in game 6, but it doesn't feel that way because of the way the game went. Now, as I said, if you had said to me through five games, there's going to be two games that the Celtics look like the best team, there's going to be one game that the Sixers look like the best team, and there were going to be two games that are toss-ups, that would have sounded about right to me. When you match up the Rosses, and B was going to have a game like that.

He absolutely was. But there's no question that the effort and the crowd, when you do that on the road, as the Celtics have done repeatedly the last two years, you can sort of turn the crowd against the home team, particularly when they're not bringing the effort or the urgency. And it's puzzling, it was disturbing, and I think whatever is going on in all the talkie-head shows and everything that the Celtics have gotten today, and are going to get until the game tips tomorrow, there's no other way to say it than they earned it with that performance last night. If they don't go on to come on back, or they don't find the way to get to the Finals and win it this year, I know Jalen Brown has a year left on his contract. Will this be his last season, what we're seeing right now with the Celtics?

Well, it's funny we're talking right now, because the answer to that question may change in about an hour or two when they release the All-NBA teams, because Jalen Brown makes All-NBA. That changes the dynamic of what he's eligible for if he were to stay in Boston. And essentially, not to give anybody a popsicle headache with the CBA, but essentially Jalen Brown can go Supermax earlier in Boston and make a lot more money essentially by staying. So that dynamic is an immediate reaction to a painful loss for people who had already filled out their brackets and had the Celtics go to the Finals, and then not underestimating Philly, you're going to be angry and you're going to want to say, oh, this isn't going to work, you're going to blow it up.

Well, when you're the second best team or the third best team or the fourth best team, whatever the Celtics have been the last couple of years, including this year if they don't win, blowing it up is a real dangerous thing to do, because there's about 25 or 26 of the teams that want to be where you are that would do anything to get Jalen Brown and Jason Payton together. Jalen's done a lot of interviews, had a lot of conversations. He said, I'm going to go where I'm needed, I'm going to go where I'm wanted, and he's pretty wanted and needed in Boston. And I think grass can look greener until you realize, I've seen a lot of, you know, Intel linking him with E. May Wright and Houston. How many years is Houston away from sniffing the altitude where the Celtics are currently flying and would be in the next couple of years if he chose to stay?