The Celtics were far from perfect on Friday, but they were good enough to claim a 114-102 victory over the 76ers as well as a 2-1 series lead.
Here are the takeaways.
1. There’s a lot to like from Game 3 for the Celtics, and we’ll get to a number of encouraging factors that feel like they might have some staying power for the rest of the series.
But maybe the biggest overarching takeaway was that the Celtics — who have had trouble closing games at times during the postseason — missed a couple of knockout opportunities, most notably when leading by 10 at the start of the fourth quarter with the newly crowned MVP Joel Embiid on the bench.