Warriors comeback leaves Sixers puzzled, yet admiring of champs
This was the acid test for PHILADELPHIA » the process.
Coming off a confidence-building West Coast road trip, the Sixers jammed the ball down the throats of the defending NBA champion Golden State Warriors in the first half Saturday night at Wells Fargo Center.
Everything was working. Robert Covington made four straight three-pointers. Joel Embiid kept the ball moving despite double-teams. Ben Simmons was a beast in the paint. Then the third quarter arrived. After an Embiid layup staked the Sixers to a 24-point lead, Stephen Curry and the Warriors outscored them, 47-13 the rest of the frame en route to a 124-116 Sixers setback that wasn’t nearly as close as the numbers suggest.
It was the second time in a week they stayed close to the Warriors, only to fade in the second half.
“You look at it and you say we can play with them,” coach Brett Brown said. “They are the clear-cut league’s best, in my opinion. And we feel good about how we played for large majorities of the game and then you just blink and you get hit in the mouth and you’re down 10, 12, whatever.”
Curry scored 20 of his 35 points in the third quarter. Kevin Durant added 27 points to go with tough defense that shut Simmons down in the second half. Embiid needed 16 shots to get 21 points while Covington and J.J. Reddick scored 20 points each.
Rough as the loss was, more troubling was the Warriors provided the blueprint of how to defend Embiid, who lit the Lakers up for 47 points.
“We can sit here and talk about how they made shots and their offense, how they moved the ball,” Embiid said. “But I’m more impressed by what they do defensively, especially with me. They double-teamed me the whole night from the top, from the baseline, from the post. They really had me guessing. I think that’s why they do well.”
The way Brown wants to play is to find the balance between going up-tempo and working the ball in to Embiid.
“And I thought in the first half we did that,” Brown said. “We played fast, we got him the ball. In the second half they made an effort to go double-team him and get it out of his hands. He’s going to be doubleteamed for the rest of his life. How do you handle that and the spacing around that? I thought in Los Angeles we did a really good job of spacing. It was mostly single coverage there. Tonight in the second half they came from all angles.”
The Sixers (8-7) have time to work it out now that they’ve got a handful of home games to work with. They can’t afford too many more games like this.
“We’ve got to play for 48 minutes,” Embiid said. “A basketball game is 48 minutes. So you’ve got to come out and play for 48 minutes. You just can’t be playing for 24 minutes. (Golden State) didn’t flip the switch. We were just bad in the third quarter. But you’ve got to give them a lot of credit. They were aggressive and they were physical with us, especially in the second half. And they did what they had to do and got the win.”
It’s up to Brown and his staff to find ways to do what has to be done to make opponents pay for doubling Embiid. They can’t afford too many more games like that, as well.
“I think that our team is fun,” Brown said. “We want to play fast, we want to play unselfish and what I hope mostly is we grow this into a consistently winning program. Right now we are just young and we’re moving forward. I think in good ways. But we all want stuff a little bit sooner, don’t we?”