NEW YORK – Three hundred and sixty-four days ago, the Philadelphia 76ers entered a road arena with a 3-0 lead in their opening-round series and a chance to advance to the Eastern Conference semifinals. with as little fuss, chaos or static as possible. . They didn’t do it: Joel Embiid, James Harden and Tyrese Maxey combined to miss 39 shots, Pascal Siakam scored 34 points and the Toronto Raptors won Game 4 to extend the series.
Five days later, Philly will finish the job. More plays took their toll, though — especially when Embiid found himself on the business end of an elbow to Siakam late in the Game 6 shutout, resulting in a broken collarbone. orbital knocking him out in the first two games of the second round. The Sixers lost two, and bowed out to old friend Jimmy Butler and the Miami Heat in six games.
The lesson Philly took from the failure to capitalize? Don’t play with your food. (Yes, Doc Rivers: It is “food.”)
When you have a chance to wipe out an opponent that’s unmatched — even one that’s playing with desperation in an attempt to save its season, and even with Embiid sustaining his now-daunting postseason injury – find a way to get the job done and improve. . The Sixers did just that in Saturday’s matinee at Barclays Center, ending a four-game sweep of the Brooklyn Nets with a 96-88 victory that allowed them to move on to bigger and better things — namely, the winner of series between the second. -seeded Boston Celtics and seventh-seeded Atlanta Hawks, with Boston holding a 2-1 lead.
The Sixers didn’t score many points in style in the process of eliminating a Nets team that made the postseason in large part on the strength of the cushion it built when Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving were still working the corner in Flatbush. and Atlantic. (Brooklyn went 13-15 with a negative point differential and a bottom-10 offense after the trade deadline.)
Game 4 has a clear MVP-shaped hole at center, reflected in the Nets’ strong start — 29 points in the first quarter, a 15-point, 7-rebound, 4-block first half for the center Brooklyn’s Nic Claxton — and Philadelphia’s constant struggle to put the ball in the basket. Through the first three games of the series, the Sixers scored nearly 120 points per 100 possessions with Embiid on the court and just 100 points per 100 without him; With him unavailable on Saturday, Brooklyn could abandon double and triple-teaming in the first three games and return to its switching defensive scheme, which helped limit Philly to 39.6% shooting.
But even as the misses piled up — Philly’s first 3-pointer didn’t come until nearly midway through the second quarter — and the Nets took a 48-40 lead into halftime, the Sixers remained confident that they able to change. environment.
“We got good shots, especially in the first half — I mean, we had 40 points, but I missed four layups, we missed open threes,” Harden said after the game. “We looked really good, and they only had 48 points, so at some point we knew our offense had to get going.”
“At halftime, we were down, we didn’t play well, and we felt like we were going to win,” Rivers said. “You can feel that in our group.”
The game tilted early in the third, as Philadelphia went on a 21-4 run that spanned more than eight minutes to erase a double-digit deficit. Harden dished out four of his game-high 11 assists in that spurt. Maxey scored 7 points, including a huge transition 3. Third-year center Paul Reed — who knew before game time that he was starting in place of Embiid, who prompt him to ask the coach who told him, “Ah, yes, really?” — grabbed four offensive rebounds during the run, extending possessions and putting even more pressure on a small, panicked and overmatched Nets squad that was beginning to feel the inevitability.
“It was like, ‘Look, let’s just find a way to get three stops in a row, and go out and try to get some quick baskets,'” said Tobias Harris, who often uses his size, strength and smooth midrange game. to find mismatches against Brooklyn’s smaller defenders en route to a team-high 25 points and 12 rebounds. “And I thought we could do that, get some buckets falling on us. But when we got our lead, we knew. Like, ‘Let’s get on with it.'”
They hardly exist. Brooklyn made a final push early in the fourth, taking a 72-70 lead on a turnaround jumper by Mikal Bridges, the role-player-turned-star ironman who finally seemed to run out of gas late in the series. , shot 6 of 18 in Game 4 and just 9 of 31 inside the arc in the last two games. From there, Philly powered the jets to cross the finish line, outscoring the hosts 26-16 in the final 8:38, with two-way energizer De’Anthony Melton — who was scoreless in the first three quarters — poured. 12 of his 15 points to help spark the final kick.
“He’s tough,” Maxey said of Melton. “And then he hit a lot of shots, man. I thought he hit two 3s in the fourth? I want to say – maybe I’m wrong – but two 3s in the fourth. And then he hit a middie! I didn’t remember the last time I saw him hit a middie. I was like, ‘That’s cool, dude.'”
Melton also provided a hit-ahead assist to Harris for a corner 3 with 1:55 left to send the Nets to an early summer vacation, and the Sixers to an extended break while the Celtics and Hawks duked it out before Round 2 began.
“Yeah, nice,” Rivers said. “We have to try to keep our rhythm, which is important, but we will recover, and that is very important.”
Mainly because it has to do with Embiid, the MVP finalist and league-leading scorer who Philadelphia desperately needs to have a chance to advance to the Eastern Conference finals for the first time since 2001. He was asked after the game if he had any feelings about what The possibility is that Embiid will be available for the start of the next round, whenever that comes, Rivers told reporters, “I would say now, probably the same percentage that I said before the game – maybe 50%, at best.”
If Embiid isn’t available, the concerns that have surrounded the Sixers all season — and that surfaced even in a sweep of a small team in Brooklyn — will become even more worrisome. Although Rivers and Harden continue to insist they’re not bothered by the former league MVP’s ongoing struggles to change close looks, the fact remains that Harden shot 7-for-30 ( 23.3%) in the paint against Brooklyn — a level of futility inside that Philly simply cannot sustain against higher-end competition. Especially if opponents are able to train more defensive attention on Maxey, who was brilliant in Games 2 and 3 against the Nets, but who shot just 6 of 20 from the field with one assist against three turnovers. when placed in a more leading role in Game 4.
The rebounding and second chance point advantages Philly enjoyed against Brooklyn — collecting more than 36% of their own misses and nearly 84% of the Nets’, according to Cleaning the Glass, both leading the league during the regular season — likely to lose against either a Celtics team that ranked ninth in overall rebounding rate this season or a Hawks squad that was top three in that department after Quin Snyder took over as head coach. Boston’s defense, with Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown leading a phalanx of dangerous wings, or Atlanta, with Trae Young and Dejounte Murray equally capable of breaking coverages, could be many it’s trickier without Embiid than limiting Brooklyn.
Ugly wins like the one Philadelphia collected in the last three games of the first round are still counted among the good ones. The process of collecting them, however, is about to become more difficult. Just ask the Sixers’ resident veteran forecaster, PJ Tucker.
“He said, ‘The playoffs are about to start,'” Maxey said after the game. “I don’t think they started this series. He said it was going to start.”