Standings put strain on No. 1 achievement
PHILADELPHIA » The 76ers were about to play the New Orleans Pelicans Friday, which meant sometime between 4:59 and 5:01 the inevitable would become official.
So … wait for it …
Zion Williamson would miss the game with a finger injury. And there it was.
This time, unlike too many other times, the injury was the kind that should keep a professional from reporting to work. The finger was broken, the healing could take a while, and the Pels tried to cite every multisyllabic test known to the medical industry to support the finding.
The fracture to the finger was real.
The NBA standings are in a sling, too.
Soon enough, the Sixers are going to officially win the No. 1 seed throughout the Eastern Conference tournament. Since they don’t waste Wells Fargo Center ceiling space on flags commemorating such intermediate achievements, they will not overstate the achievement. That’s for the best, anyway, in a season when the standings lack their usual integrity.
What can they really mean when it was so clear so often that too many teams barely cared if they won basketball games?
“I don’t know,” Rivers said. “Honestly, every year there’s injuries with teams.
And you get through it. The team I coached last year (the Clippers), I think P.G. (Paul George) and Kawhi (Leonard) had one practice together the whole year and missed 30 games, yet I think we ended up as the second seed. So I don’t know the answer.”
If ever there were a season when sports scientists were justified recommending down time for players, it was this one, with 72 games rushed to completion, beginning in late December. The off-day practice was close to extinct. Backto-back situations were plentiful. Teams often played twice in a city on one trip. Exhaustion was understandable.
Nor were the Sixers above it all, often willing to rest Joel Embiid, working through
Seth Curry’s early-season COVID-19 scare, playing without Tobias Harris and Ben Simmons for considerable lengths late in the season. The questions, though, haunt as the reality of that No. 1 seed nears: Were the Sixers really the best team in the Eastern Conference in 2020-2021? Did the Nets, who rarely have their best players simultaneously available, care? And are the Sixers being properly challenged and conditioned late in the season, with so many opponents using the 5 o’clock injury report as a white towel?
When Brooklyn was at the Wells Fargo Center less than a month ago for a late-season confrontation that should have given the Eastern standings definition, coach Steve Nash approved Kevin Durant, James Harden and Blake Griffin to take the night off. Naturally, the Sixers won, 123-117, not that the Nets likely dwelt on it much longer than it took the team bus to swing past the Turf Club on Packer Ave. on the way back to New York.
Then again, the Sixers rested Embiid in a backto-back in Milwaukee and were bombarded by the Bucks, who maintain an outside chance to steal the top seed.
No one seemed to care about the standings when they were being formed. So is it going to take a licensed bracketologist to interpret them once completed?
“I don’t look at the No. 1 seed as being this great achievement,” Rivers said. “I just think it is great to have because of home court. The ‘achievement’ is winning it. That’s the achievement. Everything else is what you do to try to win it.”
Friday, the Pelicans played without Brandon Ingram, their top scorer, who had an ankle injury, and Williamson, their second leading scorer and franchise face. And that’s a team a game and a half out of a playoff spot with six to play.
Shouldn’t the paying customers have been treated to cotton candy as consolation?
Rivers was right to stress that the only real goal is an NBA championship. But exactly how many coaches, players, general managers or owners in Philadelphia history could get away with dismissing a first-place finish as no “great achievement”? Brett Brown, who was tormented for seven years in the most difficult job in the history of basketball coaching, literally set finishing with the top spot in the East as the season goal two training camps ago.
Times change. And this season — for reasons understandable, for reasons not— put a strain on the relevance of the standings.
“Every year there’s injuries,” Rivers said. “And at the end of the year, the teams at the top are usually the right teams. That’s what I would say. The Lakers right now would be the only exception with all the injuries they have and as defending champions. Give them their due. But other than that, I think it is what it is.”
The 15th-seeded Pistons will be in Saturday. Most of them, anyway.