Celtics booed off the court during complete no-show in

BOSTON — It really wasn’t supposed to be all that difficult. Yet here we are.

Sure, the 76ers have the league’s most valuable player in Joel Embiid. But he entered this series injured. He missed Game 1. On top of that, the Celtics have had the Sixers’ number even at full strength for some time now. There shouldn’t have been any doubt.

But there was. An embarrassing Game 1 put Boston behind the eight ball to start things off. An absolute blowout win in Game 2 got things back in order. An impressive 12-point victory in Philly in Game 3 seemed to have put a bow on this one. Celtics over Sixers. As ever.

Yet … here we are.

Boston kicked away Game 4 in Philly, but with a chance to return home and reassert themselves as the best team in this series, the Celtics … didn’t even show up. 

The embarrassment of Game 1 was multiplied tenfold. To the point where the home fans who paid a pretty penny to witness the seventh of 16 Boston postseason victories rained boos down on the Celtics at the end of a dreadful third quarter.

The only reason the boos didn’t repeat at the end of the game was probably because so many fans left early, after it became clear that a comeback — or anything resembling a comeback — was not going to happen on this evening.

Now, instead of continuing to dream about that run to Banner 18, those fans have to worry about the entire season coming to an end on Thursday night in Philadelphia.

It’s a grisly place to be.

Nevertheless, it’s where all of Boston finds itself after a truly astounding performance on both ends of the floor on Tuesday night at TD Garden. 

“Everything. Everything went wrong for us,” Marcus Smart said. “They made every great play, they made every hustle play. Everything went wrong for us that can go wrong.”

Jaylen Brown summed it up quite simply, too.

“Dropped the ball tonight,” Brown said. “Couldn’t stay in front of nobody, couldn’t get a stop when we needed to, we missed a lot of wide-open shots, gave everything up that they wanted us to give up, and that was the story of the game.”

No one player was responsible for the dud. In fact … basically every player was.

Jayson Tatum finished with 36 points, which looks nice in the box score but came after another ice-cold start from the field. (He missed his first six shots and was 3-for-11 at halftime. He finished the game a team-worst minus-26.

Al Horford, not far removed from his “elite shooter” game, was 0-for-7 from the field, with all of those shots being threes. He’s now 4-for-26 on threes in this series, outside of that excellent 5-for-7 performance in Game 3.

Derrick White had seven points and zero assists in 34 minutes on the floor. Jaylen Brown had 24 points but also missed five free throws. Robert Williams had a very quiet 19 minutes off the bench (four points, two rebounds, zero blocks). Grant Williams didn’t score in his eight minutes.

As a team, the Celtics shot 39.8 percent from the field, and they allowed Philly to shoot over 50 percent from the field and exactly 40 percent from 3-point range.

Outside of some garbage-time threes from Payton Pritchard and Sam Hauser, there wasn’t much for anyone to feel good about.

Embiid got what he wanted. Tyrese Maxey hit six threes and scored 30 points. James Harden impacted the game (17 points, 10 assists, eight rebounds, two steals) without ever needing to get out of second gear. Danuel House Jr. scored 10 points off the bench, more than any Celtics reserve.

“That was the first game in the playoffs that we didn’t play well, in my opinion,” head coach Joe Mazzulla said. “And so we can’t lose our perspective of we played really good basketball, and that was our first really, really bad game of the playoffs.”

Mazzulla added: “I thought our intentions were good. I thought we tried to play hard. I thought we tried to play the right way, especially on the offensive end. I thought we got a lot of good looks early that didn’t fall, and theirs did. And then I think when you’re in that situation, you’re just trying to win it back.”

It’s not as if the Celtics weren’t aware of the circumstances. Sure, they lost Game 5 in the second round last year and still moved past the Milwaukee Bucks. But the players have also spoken about the toll that the extra games took on them by the end of the Finals. They promised to work harder to save themselves that trouble this year. Yet they needed six games to get past the Hawks, even losing when Dejounte Murray was suspended, and now in a series that they could have won in five games, they risk outright losing before even getting to a Game 7.

Malcolm Brogdon wasn’t part of last year’s team, but he still expressed the level of intensity the Celtics planned to bring for Game 5.

“Focused, locked in. This is a must-win for us,” Brogdon said at the Celtics’ shootaround on Tuesday. “It’s a desperation mindset for us tonight. We have to have this one.”

That might have been the thinking in the locker room, but it did not translate to the court.

“I think we had the right intentions to play as hard as we could. Absolutely, yeah,” Mazzulla reiterated. “I think when you have the intention of really, really wanting to win, it doesn’t work out for you a little sometimes. And so I thought we had intentions of really, really wanting to win and trying to win. And sometimes when that happens, it has a negative effect. And so I think we just have to play with a freer mind, take a deep breath, and regardless of the situation, we’ve gotta be ready to play.”

On the one hand, we’ve all learned enough to not go too far overboard when the pendulum swings so wildly in this direction for the Celtics. They overcame plenty of self-inflicted wounds last spring, so it’s theoretically possible they can do the same this time — even though the Ime Udoka-for-Joe Mazzulla exchange can’t be discounted.

But the situation is, in short, a nightmare. The Celtics were one bucket away from taking a 3-1 series lead. More accurately, the Celtics were twice just one bucket away from taking a 3-1 series lead. Yet now they’re down 3-2, and they’ll be entering a fully charged Wells Fargo Center on Thursday night needing their best game of the year to keep their season alive.

The Celtics heard boos on Tuesday night. A lot of them. If they don’t force the home fans to respond in kind on Thursday, it’ll be a noisy offseason for a Celtics team that was supposed to accomplish a whole lot more than this.