Down 3-2, Rivers says he still believes
Blow one double-digit lead in the second half of a playoff game and it’s an aberration. Squander two in consecutive games, as the Sixers have done, and doubt starts to creep in.
That’s where the Sixers find themselves heading into Friday’s Game 6 of the Eastern Conference semifinals against the Atlanta Hawks at State Farm Arena (7:30 p.m.). The Sixers are in a state of flux.
Are they the team that won Games 2 and 3 convincingly or the one that blew Games 4 and 5 in epic fashion? Only time will tell.
Head coach Doc Rivers is confident the Sixers can stop the bleeding. He predicted after Wednesday’s epic meltdown in Game 5 that there would be a Game 7 in South Philly on Sunday.
He stuck by that prediction Thursday. You expected otherwise?
“I believe in my team,” Rivers said via Zoom after the team’s film session in Atlanta. “You get to the next day and it’s a new game. Every game’s a single game. Like, if Tobias said he was tired or was out of it, does that mean he’s going to be out of it tomorrow? No.
“I trust my guys for the most
part. I believe they’re going to be there. If I didn’t I wouldn’t have said that.”
The Sixers are in a 3-2 series hole because they squandered an 18-point lead in a 103-100 loss to the Hawks Monday in Game 4 and then followed that setback with an even more monumental collapse, blowing an unheard of 26-point advantage in the second half to lose, 109106 at Wells Fargo Center.
Those back-to-back yak jobs put the Sixers on a list they surely don’t want to be on. They are the only NBA team in the last 25 years to surrender an 18-point or larger lead in consecutive playoff games, according the ESPN Stats & Info.
So now the top-seeded Sixers have to win twice in the span of three days, including once on enemy turf, to keep from hanging up the ‘Gone Fishin’ sign. That no easy task considering what transpired in Games 4 and 5.
The lack of ball and player moment that plagued the Sixers in Game 4, resurfaced in Game 5, especially in the second half. Joel Embiid (37 points) and Seth Curry (36) were the only Sixers to make a field goal in the second half. They were a combined 12-for-21. The rest of the team was 0-for-11.
Tobias Harris was 0-for-4 after the break. Furkan Korkmaz and George Hill both went 0-for-2. For the second straight game Ben Simmons did not attempt a field goal in the fourth quarter. He compounded that by going 4-for-14 from the foul line and is shooting a woeful 30.8 percent from the stripe (12-for-39) in the series.
Simmons said his struggles at the line are mental.
“It’s on me,” he said.
Getting out of a funk like that at this juncture of the season is tough, Rivers said.
“The one thing you have to do is keep working on him,” Rivers said. “You’ve got to keep trying to get a routine that maybe you can lose the mental part through the routine. It’s hard to do right now. And so we just have to keep working on it and that’s what he’s doing. He’s putting in the work. That’s all you can ask him to do right now. The mental stuff, it’s hard to get rid of easy so he has to
step up and keep shooting them and we have to keep supporting him.”
The bigger problem in Game 5, though, was on defense. The Hawks scored on 18 of 22 possessions. They shot 16-for-22 from the field (72.7 percent) and scored 40 points in the fourth quarter. Trae Young and former Sixer Lou Williams did the most damage with 13 points apiece in that final frame.
“We didn’t get any stops,” Rivers said. “They scored 40 points in the fourth quarter. We scored 19 and 40 points means we’re not running a lot. We can’t get into transition because they’re scoring. Our offense is tied to our defense.”
The second unit didn’t provide much help, either. The Sixers got just 13 points from the bench, two in the second half. Both of those points came on a pair of Shake Milton free throws. Rivers hinted that he could shorten his rotation, which could add to the fatigue factor.
Embiid and Curry were clearly gassed in the fourth quarter.
But when you’re down 3-2 and on the road, everything is on the table.
“We probably have gone over every thought that you can think of and we have,” Rivers said. “That’s what we do after every game whether we win or lose, so that’s no different. We had Tobias on the court with the rest of the bench guys and they didn’t perform well, so we want to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
“This one is going to hurt; it hurts. But we have to put it behind us, go to Atlanta and get a win,” Harris said after Wednesday’s game. “Our backs are against the wall right now and we have to play like it.”
Rivers believes the Sixers will do just that.
“They have proven to be a very resilient group so I have no reason to believe they won’t be (Friday),” Rivers said.