Sixers closer to goals, but still need to close games
CAMDEN, N.J. » Whenever the 76ers start a season slowly, and they are onto their fifth annual early stumble, they have made a plea for trust.
The first four times, it was a process that would require such faith.
This year, they recommend trusting the eyes.
It’s different, they say: Just look.
“I think we are so much further along than any slow start we’ve had,” Brett Brown said Friday after practice. “We’ve played Top 10 teams in the league. And you have games that we should have won. We feel like we should have won them. But we didn’t. And that resonates the loudest. That’s what you remember the most.”
That left the Sixers at 1-4 and heading to Dallas, where Saturday night at 8:30 they will play the similarly struggling Mavericks. In 2013, the Sixers were 7-13. Then they started seasons at 0-17, 0-18 and, last year, 0-7. So the fans’ guard, naturally, is up.
But it does look different this time.
“Among that discomfort, you go back and you watch the tape,” Brown said. “And whether it’s the large majority of the Boston game, the large majority of a Wizards game, the large majority of a Houston game against elite, Top 10 NBA teams, there’s lots to be excited about.” Why not? “It’s different than in previous years,” Brown said. “We are playing some legitimate teams and short of the Toronto game, you are in there to win games.”
In three of the Sixers’ four losses, they have led in the fourth quarter. That included their 105-104 loss to visiting Houston Wednesday, when they were up by eight in the final two minutes. And they were outclassed only once, in Toronto, in a game Joel Embiid did not play.
They have been losing basketball games to good teams. They haven’t been losing their professional dignity on some back road to a better draft position. After that Rockets game, an exasperated Brown tossed the word “luck” into his explanations. And it is early enough that, perhaps, the usual 82 games’ worth of breaks have yet to balance out.
Brown, though, put himself at risk of criticism for not finding more touches for Embiid during that meltdown.
“We have Joel Embiid,” Brown said. “And how he and we handle his skill set is a responsibility on both of our parts. And so in growing Jo to where he is comfortable — he hasn’t played much basketball — we don’t put him in position where he can turn it over, and make sure he has proper spacing that he can have his outlets around him.
“I lived this life deep with Tim Duncan. For 12 years, it was an advanced course on post spacing, and the multiple ways that teams would guard him, different cat-and-mouse things that teams would so. So I feel excited about the responsibility of getting Joel the ball.”
While not a precise replica, the Sixers have tried to borrow from the Spurs’ plan to become legendary. Spotty play allowed San Antonio to acquire Duncan, who became an all-time NBA great. Brown, from the Gregg Popovich coaching stream, is trying to parlay years of losing into greatness for Embiid. Trouble is, the Sixers keep starting seasons slowly … then not recovering.
“It’s a new year, so obviously it is going to feel different,” T.J. McConnell said. “We obviously think we should have more wins than one. My first year, starting out, we were 0-and-18 or whatever. It certainly doesn’t feel like that. And it certainly feels like we are better than last year. So we’ve got to find out better ways to close out games and stay in games.
“It’s frustrating,” McConnell added. “But you look at some of the teams we’ve played so far, and they’ve been at the top of both the East and West, except for a few. And we were in every game except for Toronto. And when you see how we competed against those teams, and that we were in those games and had a chance to win, it’s a positive.
“But we can’t look at it as a moral victory. We have to win.”
Over are those years when Josh Harris could claim huge success because a process had been moved forward through losing. So the 76ers will have to win to settle the growing fan discomfort. But Embiid’s minutes restrictions have quietly become few. Ben Simmons is playing at a Rookie of the Year pace. J.J. Redick has provided reliable outside shooting. They are competitive.
There is something there, something different.
“I think we learned last year that we improved dramatically on walking games down and closing games out,” Brown said. “Right now we could have done a better job doing that. We didn’t. We will learn from that.”