In today's episode of The Sixers Beat, Rich and I bring on Jay King and Jared Weiss, who cover the Celtics for The Athletic to preview the Sixers versus Celtics series.

Enjoy the podcast. How you guys doing?

I'm hating life right now.

I'm in the process of a move.

I just moved my desk and my TV and had to take apart my desk and then put it back

together again in the new place. So life sucks. But playoff basketball is coming. Well, it's your own

damn fault for scheduling it during a playoffs. You had to know this was coming. Yeah. I mean,

who could have possibly predicted that the NBA was going to happen in August?

This is normally my month off.

This should be my month off.

But no, here come the playoffs.

All right.

So we have Sixers Celtics, six seed three seed, Sixers, Fourty, Boston 48 and 24.

I guess we'll just start off with you guys, since this is primarily a Sixers podcast. Listeners are probably a little more up to speed. Tell us why the Celtics are, you know, where they stand, how they're doing, and why they're a threat to make a run. Well, they're not the Sixers and that helps. That helps, man.

I mean, basically everything that they tried to do last year, they just needed another year to make it work and maybe replacing Kyrie Irving certainly helps a little bit.

But they finally have that interchangeable offense where they basically just run lots of actions

from up above the slots and they can do it with whomever they want on the floor pretty much any

time and their weakest link has been Marcus Smart who is one of the best pick and roll playmakers

from a statistical perspective and for some reason is in

the top five and pull up three point shooting in the NBA which is one of the great anomalous stats

of the century that's my favorite stat it's it's crazy the entire time i've been covering the Celtics

it's it's definitely the most unlikely thing i've seen happen in my life in any facet of my life as long as

...