The Boston Celtics hold off a Sixers comeback and take a 2-1 series lead to reclaim homecourt.
PHILADELPHIA — Over the last three months of the regular season, the Boston Celtics only once lost two straight games, and those were road games against the two best teams in the league, the San Antonio Spurs and Oklahoma City Thunder.
So it should be no surprise that the Celtics had a response after losing Game 2 of their first-round series with the Philadelphia 76ers at home. And they took back home-court advantage with a 108-100 victory in Game 3 on Friday.
The Celtics lost a double-digit lead and trailed with a little more than seven minutes left in the fourth quarter, but took back control with an 8-0 run and held on for the win by scoring on their final seven possessions of the game.
Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum each scored 25 points for Boston, with Tatum adding seven assists and Brown blocking three shots. The Sixers’ Tyrese Maxey led all scorers with 31, but needed 31 shots to get there.
Here are some notes, quotes, numbers and film as the Celtics took a 2-1 series lead:
1. The 3s are flying again
Last season’s Celtics took 53.6% of their shots from 3-point range, the highest rate in the 47 years of the 3-point line. This season, they still ranked fourth, but saw the league’s biggest drop in 3-point rate and took only 46.7% of their shots from beyond the arc.
The playoffs are a fresh start, and the Celtics are taking more than half of their shots from 3-point range again. On Friday, 47 (58%) of their 81 shots came from beyond the arc, the highest rate for any team in these playoffs, topping their rate (56.2%) from Game 1.
This has been a make-or-miss series, with the more accurate team from 3-point range winning all three games. In Game 3, that was the Celtics, who made 20 (43%) of those 47 attempts, including three down the stretch to put the game away.
The Celtics didn’t get to the basket much on Friday. They were outscored by 20 points (34-14) in the restricted area and by four at the free throw line. But they were a plus-24 from beyond the arc.
Eight of the 10 Celtics who played make at least one 3-pointer, with Tatum and Payton Pritchard hitting five apiece. And those were the two guys that closed the door on the Sixers, with Pritchard beating the shot-clock buzzer to put Boston up six with 1:17 left and Tatum putting them back up six with a pull-up from 29 feet in the final minute.
2. Switching has gone out of style
It’s pretty surprising how few switches we’ve seen in this series. Through Game 3, the Celtics have switched only 10.8% of the Sixers’ ball-screens, while the Sixers have switched just 11.4% of the Celtics’. Those are the second and fourth lowest switch rates in these playoffs.
Instead, we’ve seen a lot of drop coverage, with the defense prioritizing rim protection and challenging the ball-handler to making shots off the dribble.
On one end of the floor, Tatum was happy to step into a pull-up 3-pointer. On the other end, Paul George did the same.
The Celtics didn’t even switch screens between two perimeter players. Late in the game, George set a screen for Maxey and Tatum didn’t switch or even contain the ball. Maxey got downhill, drew help from both corners, and hit Andre Drummond for a wide-open 3 that kept the game close:
A few possessions later, Brown was working hard to stay with George, but finally lost contact after a third consecutive screen from Drummond. That brought Nikola Vučević up to the ball and allowed Drummond to roll cleanly to the rim:
On the Celtics’ end of the floor, the Sixers’ lack of switching created a lot of wide-open pick-and-pop opportunities for Vučević, who shot 3-for-9 from 3-point range and took just one shot inside the arc.
But the Sixers finally did give up a switch down the stretch. With the Celtics up three in the final minute, Adem Bona switched onto Tatum and stayed in front of him, forcing a kick out for Vučević’s final 3-point attempt. It missed, but Derrick White grabbed the offensive rebound in a crowd and we got the Tatum-Bona matchup again.
This time, Tatum took the space that Bona gave him and drained the dagger:
A series with such little switching seems novel, but we could certainly see some adjustments going forward.
3. White struggles from deep, but still makes an imprint
This hasn’t just been a rough-shooting series for White. It’s been a rough-shooting season. After shooting 38.7% from 3-point range over his previous three full seasons with the Celtics, White shot just 32.7% from beyond the arc in 2025-26. That was the worst mark, by a wide margin, among the 26 players with at least 500 3-point attempts this year.
The playoffs haven’t exactly provided White with a fresh start, and he’s just 5-for-25 (20%) from 3-point range in this series after going 1-for-8 on Friday.
He keeps shooting, though. The Celtics want him to keep shooting, and they want him on the floor. Obviously, he’s one of the best defensive guards in the league. And he made two huge offensive plays down the stretch of Game 3.
With the Celtics up two and a little more than four minutes left, Vučević missed a corner 3. But White snuck around Maxey on the baseline and tapped the rebound out to Tatum. The Celtics got a second chance and Brown made a pull-up jumper over Maxey to put them up four.
And in the final minute, White set up Tatum’s dagger with another offensive rebound of a Vučević miss, this one more impressive than the first:
Boston was one of the league’s most improved offensive rebounding teams this season, and the guy with their third-most offensive boards was a 6-foot-4 guard. The two in clutch time were White’s only offensive rebounds on Friday, but the Celtics won the battle on the glass and outscored the Sixers (22-17) on second chances.
“If anybody ever doubts D-White, then they don’t really care about winning,” said Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla. “He’s not defined by his shot-making.
“Those two rebounds were big-time rebounds, and he can impact winning in so many different ways. So I’m always going to double-down on his competitive character, who he is.”
It’s kind of amazing that the Celtics had the league’s second-ranked offense, despite White shooting less than 33% on more than eight 3-point attempts per game. And if those 3s start falling, they could be impossible to stop.
“D-White is an unreal basketball player that still has an imprint on the game,” Tatum said. “When he’s open, we’re going to pass it to him. We want him to be aggressive, never turn down a shot. The law of averages … he’s going to start knocking ’em down.”
4. Tatum matches Maxey’s minutes
We’re still 18 days away from the one-year anniversary of when Tatum tore his Achilles at Madison Square Garden, and this was just his 19th game back from a 10-month absence.
A lot of us assumed that if he came back this season, his minutes would be limited, maybe capped around 30 in any given night. But Tatum played less than 30 minutes in only the first three of his 16 regular-season games. He almost hit the 40-minute mark in the Celtics’ big win back in New York in the final week of the season and again in Game 2 on Tuesday.
On Friday, Tatum played 42 minutes and 24 seconds, including the entirety of the fourth quarter.
STILL FIRED UP 🔥 pic.twitter.com/e2zNK1m88a
— Boston Celtics (@celtics) April 25, 2026
Maxey led the league at 38.0 minutes per game in the regular-season and unsurprisingly played 42:28 in Game 3. And the guy who tore his Achilles less than a year ago only played four seconds fewer.
Oh yeah, he also shot 4-for-5 in that fourth quarter, hitting the dagger 3 from 29 feet.
Game is 4 on Sunday (7 ET, NBC/Peacock).
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John Schuhmann has covered the NBA for more than 20 years. You can e-mail him here, find his archive here and follow him on Bluesky.
