Brown hopes Embiid can play in Game 5
PHILADELPHIA >> Having moved within one victory of the second NBA playoff round, the 76ers Sunday were treated to a day off.
Soon, Brett Brown will be confronted with a more difficult choice: When to rest Joel Embiid?
Bothered by continuing left knee pain, yet not so much that he couldn’t inject 31 points, 16 rebounds, six snuffs, seven assists and half a fight into a 112-108 Game 4 victory over the Brooklyn Nets Saturday, Embiid is likely to continue to require time off.
So with the Sixers leading, 3-1, and with the sixth-seeded Nets already grunting about how the playoff experience has provided its own value, the series seems to have hit its wind-down point. If so, Brown theoretically can steal as much as a week of bonus therapy time for Embiid by scratching him from Game 5, which will be Tuesday at the Wells Fargo Center.
Isn’t that one option the Sixers earned with recent dual victories at Barclays Center?
“The dynamics, the structure of the NBA playoffs, from a psychological standpoint, is fascinating,” Brown said. “And the notion of comfort scares the life out of me. I don’t ever feel comfortable. And I don’t even think like that. ‘ House money’ doesn’t even come into my vocabulary.”
With one more victory over the Nets, the Sixers will have advanced past the first round of the playoffs for a second consecutive season for the first time since 2001. So they are not inclined to start prematurely f iring of f their confetti machine.
Just the same, Brown has made it clear that he will listen to sports-science counsel, trying to maximize Embiid’s rest periods in order to assure his availability later in the tournament.
“My whole thing with Joel is and always will be, and it it’s dictated by the doctors more than the coach, is what harm are we putting him in?” Brown said. “What unnecessary harm are we putting him in? If the answer is none, well, you play him. Then you get down to whatever level it is, then you question it.
“But to hold on to him and use house money, I don’t see the world like that at all. And I am certainly not coaching that way.”
The Sixers will practice Monday in Camden, and it would be a major upset if Embiid participates. The center is almost certain to remain a “game time decision” up until the scheduled 8 o’clock tip Tuesday night. In the interim, there will be injury reports, not that they recently have ref lected reality. Listed as “doubtful” for Game 2, Embiid played. Upgraded to “questionable,” he was scratched from Game 3. Before Game 4, he was carried as “doubtful,” but had a spectacular game.
“That’s my job,” Embiid said, “to take things under control and get us to where we want to go.”
Yet it’s the job of the Sixers’ medical staff to advise him how he can get the most done. And in some ways, that’s Brown’s task too.
Through four playoff games, it has worked.
“Given the volume of playing time lately that he hasn’t had,” Brown said after Game 4, “it was just a dominating performance. What else can you say?”
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Nets general manager Sean Marks has been suspended one game without pay and fined $25,000 for entering the referees’ locker room after Game 4.
Jared Dudley and Jimmy Butler were ejected after a scuffle broke out following Embiid’s f lagrant foul against Jarrett Allen in the third quarter. The Nets were already angry about a f lagrant foul Embiid committed against Allen in Game 2, and coach Kenny Atkinson complained that the 76ers held Allen before he turned the ball over on the Nets’ last chance to tie the game.
The penalty was announced Sunday by Byron Spruell, the NBA’s president of league operations.
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On a three-game losing streak, the Nets are expected to continue to juggle their lineup.
For Game 4, Kenny Atkinson chose to go small, starting Jared Dudley and Caris LeVert. LeVert scored a team-high 25 points.
“We guessed it,” Brown said. “You never know obviously until it is rolled out. It’s always your job to think, ‘What can they do to change this series?’
“So you look at your crystal ball and try to figure out what they will do. They can go really small and they did. The reshuffling of the starting lineup I don’t think caught us off guard or affected us. I understand and respect them trying to change some stuff, but how it affected us, I thought was marginal.”
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To Tobias Harris, who scored 24 points in Game 4, the Sixers continue to be more of a growing team than a finished project.
“We’re at a point where we still have a lot of work to do in terms of the chemistry,” he said. “But night after night, we’re finding better ways to get it done.”
In Games 2 and 3, the Sixers combined for 276 points. They won Game 4 by limiting Brooklyn to 108.
“Defensively, once we lock in as a group and get out in transition,” Harris said, “that is our best offense.”