Boston Celtics
Queta had one of the best games of his life, while Jaylen Brown put up LeBron James numbers.
Neemias Queta and Jaylen Brown led the way for the Celtics, who pulled away in the fourth quarter to claim a 114-98 victory over the 76ers on Sunday.
Here are the takeaways.
Neemias Queta had one of the best games of his life.
Queta has been one of the most important stories of the season for the Celtics to date — he surpassed “viable placeholder” status long ago, which itself would have made his season a massive success — but even by his standards, his performance against the Sixers was superb.
Queta finished with 27 points and 17 rebounds, after a masterful first half in which he tallied 16 points, 12 rebounds and two blocks. Seven of his rebounds were offensive, part of a performance in which the Celtics rebounded 50 percent of their misses in the first half.
Queta also made a number of highlight plays that left the Celtics bench chortling, like this steal where he played far enough off Andre Drummond to pick off the opposing big man’s entry pass, followed by a perfectly timed pick-and-roll and a massive two-handed slam.
Or plays like this slithering layup, where Queta absorbed a hit from two different Sixers players and still powered his way to the rim to finish with finesse off the glass.
Queta was quiet in the third quarter after his first-half explosion, but he was instrumental late in the fourth, scoring eight straight points from 2:56 to 1:19 to turn off the lights.
Afterward, Queta told reporters, the game is “so much easier for me right now.”
“Just the amount of repetitions I’ve been having with these guys every day,” he said. “Kind of understand what they like, what they don’t like. The game is just slowing down for me, too. Once stuff like that happens, when they’ve got two guys on the ball, just me being able to go out there and be a threat for defenses makes us so much more dangerous.
“Whenever that stuff happens, I’m just trying to capitalize.”
Jaylen Brown, who was one of the players chuckling on the bench as Queta swooped through the lane in the first half, pumped the brakes slightly.
“You know, hey,” Brown said, and then paused and laughed. “We don’t want him to get too carried away with some of those. But he was converting them tonight and it looked good.”
The positives and negatives of Nikola Vucevic
Vucevic had a really solid second half, scoring eight of his 11 points, including a pair of 3-pointers, and grabbing seven of his 12 rebounds. He shot well for the second game in a row, and his floor spacing was a reminder of what the Celtics lost when they had to bid farewell to Al Horford and Kristaps Porzingis.
“As he continues to just get better and better, it’s just another piece that we can unlock and and you kind of saw that in the second half on both ends,” Mazzulla said.
Brown added that he thinks Vucevic should be getting 10 shots per game at minimum.
“Tonight he was at 9,” Brown said. “I’d like to see him get a little bit more shots, because he is a big threat for our team.”
On the other hand, Vucevic’s flaws are particularly evident against a team like the Sixers, who run everything they do through two very dynamic guards in Tyrese Maxey and VJ Edgecombe. Vucevic is not fleet-footed, so he plays defense primarily in the pick-and-roll, which gives Maxey and Edgecombe plenty of space to get off the shots they want.
Mazzulla praised Vucevic’s defense and noted that the Celtics need him to protect the rim and get deflections.
However, the Sixers may have been a perfect explainer as to why Queta remains the Celtics’ starting big man: Vucevic fits the team like a glove and is a deadly partner in the second unit alongside Pritchard, but at the risk of overstating a noisy and sometimes unhelpful stat, he was -4 in the box score while Queta was +20.
Here’s the larger, and far more important, point: If you told Celtics fans in September that they would acquire Vucevic at the deadline and that he would be the back-up big man because Queta was playing so well on both ends, there would be dancing on Causeway Street.
“It’s always a puzzle piece, so I’m very pleased with the last two games from our bigs,” Brown said.
Jaylen Brown’s passing was excellent.
Brown had a LeBron James-esque stat line with 27 points, eight rebounds and eight assists, but his passing was particularly noteworthy — Brown’s eight assists included several gems like this transition alley-oop he threaded to Hugo González.
So much of Brown’s improvement as a passer has been set up by the improvements he has made to his handle. He has turned himself into a shifty player even as he added muscle and strength over the years, to the point that now when defenses collapse on him, he can play slowly enough to pick out counterintuitive passes as plays develop.
“I thought he really picked his spots really well in looking to attack and looking to distribute, constantly creating 2-on-1s,” Mazzulla said. “I think his trust in Neemi also gave Neemi a good game, and his ability to make plays in the seam, and then playing off of Derrick and Sam and Baylor and those guys.”
The Celtics, apparently, are just be good at rebounding now.
Since the calendar flipped to 2026, the Celtics have the NBA’s second-best total rebounding percentage (54.2 percent, trailing only the Hornets) and the second-best defensive rebounding percentage (72.8 percent, trailing only the Hornets). They are rebounding 35.1 percent of their misses, which is good for third behind only the Hornets and the Rockets.
On Sunday, the Celtics grabbed 59 rebounds, 19 of which were offensive. Their two bigs accounted for 29 of those boards, but Brown grabbed eight, and Derrick White pulled down six.
The Celtics were supposed to be one of the NBA’s worst rebounding teams, but in true Joe Mazzulla fashion, he seems to have turned one of their weaknesses into a strength.
“When you play against a team like [the Sixers], and you lose two games in the margins and the difference is four points in three games, that’s what that stuff comes down to,” Mazzulla said.
Baylor Scheierman has a new celebration.
Scheierman suffered a fractured left thumb against the Nets on Friday (which is his shooting hand), but he was back in the starting lineup on Sunday wearing a big wrap.
His shot didn’t look particularly comfortable — Scheierman is shooting 37 percent from deep this year, but he was just 2-for-9 on Sunday.
Still, Scheierman was healthy enough to hit the final shot of the first half, and he had a perfect new celebration ready to go: A big thumbs up in the air, which his teammates mimicked.
Scheierman, it seems, is a master of hand-injury-related celebrations – he was also behind Jayson Tatum’s wrist-holding celebration after Tatum suffered a painful wrist injury against a Magic team that pushed the limits of decency in the first round of last year’s playoffs.
More to the point: Scheierman played a hard-nosed defensive game against the Sixers. He wasn’t perfect, but it’s hard to be perfect against the likes of Maxey and Edgecombe, and he is slowly but surely establishing himself as a very reliable role player. A decent 3-point shooter who rebounds and defends at a high level and pushes the ball in transition with Scheierman’s size has the potential for a lengthy NBA career.
Credit to everyone involved here
Maybe the most memorable play of the game had zero impact on its outcome.
Late in the fourth quarter, the Sixers were within two possessions when Maxey missed a 3-pointer. Edgecombe outhustled Sam Hauser for the rebound but tipped it toward the stands, and he dove into the second row, saving it off Hauser’s leg and out of bounds.
In the process, he kicked a woman sitting in the front row in the face.
Credit to Edgecombe, who not only made one of the best saves you will ever see on an NBA court, but who also gave the woman a hug in the aftermath and then caught her eye during the lengthy review process to apologize again.
Credit to the woman, who toughed it out with a big smile despite a kick to the face that appeared to draw blood.
Credit to the fans in the second row who caught Edgecombe and helped crowd-surf and deposit him back onto the floor.
Credit to the broadcast team, who were just a seat or two away from the incident, and who used their proximity to get the names of everyone involved and directed the woman’s attention to Edgecombe so he could apologize a second time.
All in all, just a wholesome moment of NBA hustle.
What’s next
The Celtics will play the second night of a back-to-back against the Bucks on Monday. On Wednesday, the surging Hornets will visit Boston before the Celtics take on Cooper Flagg and the Mavericks on Friday.
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