CELTS DOWN SIXERS, 122-108, AS NEW ROUND BEGINS IN RIVALRY
HARTFORD, Conn.
The 76ers haven't met the Boston Celtics in the NBA playoffs in two seasons.
You would think that fact alone would have cooled the fires that heat the teams' rivalry and that it somehow would have diminished the trademark unpredictability of the series.
But it hasn't.
If anything, the rivalry gets hotter, if Boston's 122-108 exhibition victory over the Sixers last night at the Hartford Civic Center was any gauge.
Collisions? There were more last night than in an average Schuylkill Expressway rush hour.
Intensity? Sixers coach Billy Cunningham, rising in paroxysms from the bench, was called for a technical foul in the first half, just moments before his Boston counterpart, K. C. Jones, received his.
Boston, playing without unsigned veteran forward Cedric Maxwell and veteran guard Gerald Henderson, who are both locked in contract disputes, crushed the Sixers on nearly all fronts, even though this was the defending champion Celtics' first exhibition game of the season.
There were, in short, all the attendant sideshows to accompany the game.
But asked what significance this particular game carried, Sixers captain Julius Erving (7 points in 13 minutes) shrugged it off.
"Hopefully, none," he said. "It turned into a situation where Billy wanted to look at some of the rookies and use various combinations."
Cunningham concurred, though he was obviously disgusted with the team.
"We didn't play very well at all," he said. "If anything, it was good for me to see as a coach, to see just how far we have to go before the start of the regular season.
"I will say that our shot selection was atrocious."
Moses Malone led Philadelphia scorers with 19 points in 24 minutes; Kevin McHale and Larry Bird each scored 23 for Boston.
During only one segment of time - a 2-minute, 27-second stretch of the second quarter - did the Sixers, who had won their first two exhibition games, damage the Celts.
But the Sixers' second-quarter run - a 15-1 scoring burst - gave them only a one-point lead at 49-48 after Boston's early dominance. The Celtics led, 28-21, after the first quarter and had a 13-point lead, at 47-34, with 4:05 left in the half.
And it never got any better for the Sixers, who were without Bobby Jones, (who had a sore right knee) for the game and without Andrew Toney for the final three quarters. Toney sat on the bench so that Cunningham could look at his rookies.
Beginning the second half holding a 54-49 lead, the Celtics proceeded to blow the Sixers away with a remarkable scoring run that reached 39-20 with 2:12 left in the period.
That run, which included an opening spurt of 12-3, gave the Celts an 87-69 lead.
The Sixers, who were down by as many as 25 points, at 110-85, in the fourth period, then got worse as Cunningham, exasperated with his team's defense, went to a lineup largely dependent upon rookies Earl "Butch" Graves and James Banks, neither of whom looks to make the club's 12-man roster.
NOTES. The Sixers practice today before leaving on an 11-day, five-game Western swing. . . . Cunningham could cut the roster today. . . . Earl Harrison, the Sixers' rookie from Morehead State, led the second-quarter charge and looks to be in position to push Sam Williams for a job. . . . Rookie Charles Barkley fouled out after a 25-minute, 3-for-10, 6-point, 4-rebound effort.
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