According to Washburn, this is what happened vs. Philly:
Of the 27 field goal attempts from Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum, 17 were 3-pointers. The Celtics, completely intimidated by Embiid, just stopped attacking the rim. Embiid played 33 minutes and committed one foul, which occurred with 5:50 left in the game and the Celtics down 20.
So they didn’t make Embiid work on defense at all. They settled for 3-pointers or forced themselves into bad shots with indecisiveness. Defensively, the Celtics again fell for all of Embiid’s tricks. He attempted 20 free throws and single-handedly fouled out Robert Williams in 14 minutes.
What’s more, Ben Simmons attempted more free throws than Tatum and Brown combined, a sign of a lack of aggressiveness and lack of physicality.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/04/07/sports/celtics-symptoms-defeat-familiar-mistake-laden-loss-76ers/
I posted this last night in the game thread when Washburn (probably needing quotes for his article), kept asking Brad why the Cs sucked at drawing fouls:
Gary Washburn was just asking Brad at the presser why the Celtics didn’t do the same as Philly in terms of drawing fouls. Brad was defending his two All Stars saying that Philly play a much more physical brand of basketball than someone like Tatum and brown who are much more perimeter players and are less physical when they drive the ball, they are more finesse players, and just have a different style of basketball and are much less physical.
Gary kept pushing that Cs were getting killed at the free throw line and need to get better at drawing fouls, Brad was pushing back saying tatum and brown just have a different style of basketball to Simmons and Harris and they will prob never match Philly for drawing fouls. Said obv Embiid is in a different league when it comes to drawing fouls.
Maybe because we have a rep as a finesse jump shooting team, when we do drive the ball we don't get the calls from the refs. Whereas players like Simmons really try to truck people on the way so they get calls.
To your point I did a quick analysis on Pho's
a few numbers thread and Kemba's shot profile has changed since he became a Celtic. He's driving the ball less and shooting from 3 more as an overall % of his shot volume, and correspondingly his FTAs have dropped. Gordon had the same issue when he came to the Cs from Utah, albeit to a lesser degree, and with him going to Charlotte his FTAs have gone back up somewhat. So maybe it's a gameplan thing as well. I'd be careful to draw that conclusion at this point though.