Two losses in Boston will test Sixers’ ample confidence
BOSTON » From the moment Game 1 of their second-round playoff series was over to just minutes before Game 2 was to begin, the 76ers would keep a death grip on a belief.
Brett Brown said it first.
Others said it later.
Ben Simmons waited until it was time to stop making promises and start making plays.
“I was just talking about it to J.J. Redick,” he said in the locker room before the game. “I said, ‘That just wasn’t us.’”
It was a theme, as it was a motivating force. But Thursday night, it was anything but a fact. The Sixers, despite an inner confidence that had begun to look like a superiority complex, were again what they were in that first game. Though they were better early, they were just as unable to rotate out on Celtics 3-point shooters late. That led to a 108103 loss in Game 2 of their Eastern Conference semifinal series and threw them into a position where they must win four of five to advance to another round.
If they had a point to prove, they did not do so. Three days after stumbling around at the defensive end and forgetting to make proper switches, they were unable to stick to an early game plan and wasted a 22-point lead and a chance to earn the home-court advantage in their series.
During the week, Joel Embiid had called them, “Special. Championship special.” And that’s what they believed they were. They were never outwardly bothered emotionally by an unsightly loss in Game 1. Rather, their confidence only grew.
“I love it,” Brown said. “And I liked it coming into the series. If you had told me how the first game would go, I would not have understood why. In the light of day, I’d give the Celtics credit for exposing some things.
“But that’s not us. What you saw in the first game was not the Philadelphia 76ers. That’s not how we play defense. And I think the spirit leading up to that game and the spirit the last few days is one in the same. I do like their attitude. And I have liked their attitude. They are a great group to coach.”
There is something valuable about a team that can lose a playoff game by 16 to a good team and dismiss it as a one-off. But dismissing what happened Thursday as a two-off will be more difficult.
Because they had been the only team in the history of the NBA to finish a regular season on a 16-game winning streak, and because they had recently won 20 out of 21, the Sixers were certain they would never be easily dismissed in a basketball game. Though they acknowledged some defensive mistakes, understood they shot poorly and worked through a couple of high-sweat practices and a useful morning shoot-around after Game 1, it was all just to prove to everyone else what they already believed.
The only risk: That they had been lured into the false belief that the whole NBA thing had become easy.
“It’s really a weird situation,” Dario Saric said. “We had 16 wins in a row. After that, we lost one game against Miami. Those last 20, 25 games were amazing. But because of that, it was a little bit dangerous. Everybody has to realize we cannot come in after 16 wins in a row and beat Miami, four-zero, and beat Boston, four-zero, and beat Toronto or Cleveland, four-zero, then win the next round, four-zero. It’s not going to go like that. We have to stay patient and execute our game plan.
“It would be hard winning four in a row. So we have to fight every game. Every game is special. And we have to be ready to play every game.”
Not that the Sixers would be so inconsiderate or anything, but from time to time, NBA teams will approach seasons with less than peak seriousness, all the better to win higher draft picks. True story. So it was this season. And so it was that, relatively early, it was possible to advance-handicap the end of the Sixers’ regular-season schedule and project it as favorable. It was. And the Sixers frolicked, draining 3-pointers against awful teams while so far from any defender that they almost needed lifeguards to whistle them back in. But they thumped good teams, too. On a night the Bucks needed to win for playoff seeding purposes, the Sixers had them down by 41. They were great. They were.
But earlier in the season, they were a team with a chronic problem of wasting leads, much as they were Thursday.
“In the first third of the season, we would get leads but we couldn’t hold them,” Brown said. “Leads would evaporate quicker. And as time went on, we learned to close games out.”
The Sixers became a different team, a more experienced team, with the trade-deadline additions of Ersan Ilyasova and Marco Belinelli. And, almost at once, they all looked less like a rebuilding team than they had in years.
With that, they had themselves convinced of their excellence. The only question: Where they fooled by a stretch of basketball that was not sustainable?
“I get that question asked a lot, and it’s a fair question,” Brown said. “And maybe it’s because I personally don’t even come close to even thinking about that that it is hard for to wonder, ‘Am I naive thinking that my players don’t think like that?’ Maybe they did or maybe they do.
“But there is nothing in the messaging that we talk about. People are people. And young people are perhaps more vulnerable to that type of illusion. And there is no comfort level that, personally, I feel. And I hope that’s extended to the players.”
It does. But it doesn’t extend to the scoreboard, whether the Sixers choose to believe that or not.