BOSTON — Jordan Walsh spent the past few days going back over the film, talking with Jaylen Brown and picking apart Tyrese Maxey’s habits before the Celtics opened their first-round playoff series Sunday against Philadelphia. The 6-foot-6 wing had already shown Boston something useful once this season, and he arrived at the postseason with a clearer idea of how to use it.
Walsh guarded Maxey for 27 possessions in the 76ers’ Nov. 11 game at TD Garden and held him to 1-for-9 shooting in those matchups. Maxey went 4 for 8 against everyone else that night, but Boston had a different result when Walsh was the primary defender. “My focus was completely on him and his tendencies and how to stop him and how to make him mad and stuff like that,” Walsh said. “It was cool to have that opportunity, I guess, to have that level of trust, I think, was the biggest thing from Joe [Mazzulla] and the staff and everybody putting in extra hours and extra time to kind of walk me through the plays and how he’s effective.”
That mattered because the 76ers entered the series as the seventh seed against the second-seeded Celtics, and Joel Embiid was already out for at least Sunday’s Game 1 after an emergency appendectomy 10 days earlier. With Embiid sidelined, Maxey becomes even more central to Philadelphia’s attack, and Boston needs answers for the guard who hurt it in October. Walsh was not yet in the Celtics’ rotation when the teams met in two October games, when Maxey averaged 33 points and 10 assists while shooting 52.5 percent from the field and 61.1 percent from 3-point range, so those nights were mostly something he watched from the bench.
The November game gave Boston a different data point, and Walsh treated it like homework. He said he learned a lot from the work he has done the past few days and from conversations with Brown, adding that “there’s a couple things that I learned with talking to JB.” For a Celtics team trying to protect home court against a guard who has already put up big numbers against them, that kind of detail is the point: if Walsh can make Maxey work harder, Boston’s margin gets wider, even before the rest of the series starts to show its shape.
