In the end, Sixers are left to trust a learning process
PHILADELPHIA >> For seven games against the Atlanta Hawks, each one enlightening, the 76ers would be blessed with a valuable sports gift. They would be blessed with an education.
By Sunday night, it would come down to how they would best put it to use.
Were they to have won Game 7 of the Eastern Conference semifinals, the Sixers could have used every lesson they learned, and there were plenty, to continue a charge through a tournament that had become oh-so inviting.
With a loss, they would be able to use what they’d been taught as a foundation for what would be vital, necessary, franchise-defining changes. Either way, that was the deal. Either way, they would have been made to accept, if not embrace, what the Hawks had made them see. And they had been made to see plenty, with all of it packaged in handy takehome form Sunday during a 10396 Atlanta victory.
They saw the disintegration of Ben Simmons from an entertaining All-Star of multiple bas
ketball gifts into a confused, multi-position impediment to an offense, a non-shooter reduced to making the occasional kick-out pass or sturdy screen.
They found that their celebrated second unit, which they’d believed was something of the NBA’s hidden 31st starting-caliber lineup, was as imperfect as most pro-sports collections of understudies.
They found their eversore MVP candidate to be prone to alarming exhaustion, exhibiting every one of the maddening, lategame traits and turnovers that defined the early part of his career.
They found that they could be beaten at home, and often, regardless of how many times three overbearing PA voices would demand that the fans make noise.
They found that playoff teams, unlike too much of the injury-depleted crowds that regularly marched through the Wells Fargo Center all season, will not wilt when facing deep, late-game deficits.
They found that their second-team All-Defense player can and will make second-year pro mistakes at the defensive end, biting on shot fakes.
They found that their prized rookie can be spectacular but also play like a 20-year old.
To the credit of Doc Rivers, who has worked more Game 7s than any coach in NBA history, he did make whatever in-series adjustments he could. He had a feel for when to ask Tyrese Maxey to unload his many gifts, but also when to keep the rookie-risk to a minimum. He needed a six-game run-up to perfect it, but in Game 7 he had his players switching much better on gamechanger Trae Young, who was pestered by multiple defenders (including, at one point, Joel Embiid) into 1-for-12 first-half shooting.
To that end, Rivers tightened his rotations. He nicely removed Simmons from the game under the cover of foul trouble to minimize any scent of professional embarrassment.
For months, the Sixers often bordered on perfection, with Embiid once on a clear course for MVP, with Danny Green and Seth Curry releasing pressure on Simmons, with Rivers lending a new voice in the room. As much as the 72-game season was different, the Sixers won the Eastern Conference on merit.
Their season in peril Sunday, the Sixers were down by five after three quarters. But they settled to put themselves in position to win a series that was tougher than most expected. Yet in the stretch, they were quite similar to the troubled unit of the earliest Brett Brown era, with Embiid unable to dribble late in the game without important possessions collapsing.
A night earlier in Brooklyn, the celebrated Nets, a virtual All-Star Salute to rotisserie sports, were eliminated in overtime by the Milwaukee Bucks.
With that, it continued, a piece-by-piece clearing of a path for the Sixers’ first championship since 1983. LeBron James, gone. Steph Curry, gone. The top-seeded Jazz, gone. MVP Nikola Jokic, gone. Kevin Durant and James Harden, gone. Kyrie Irving, off the face of his flat Earth.
With their home-court advantage, the Sixers would have been favored to outlast the third-seeded Bucks and then play either Phoenix or the Clippers for a championship.
Instead, they must look back at a seven-game series, the lessons that were taught, and the adjustments that were made and not made.
They can’t continue to expect Simmons, who bothered to take four shots in an elimination game and settled for five points, to be a franchise face.
They can’t continue to trust Embiid to be reliable late in games.
They can’t continue to pretend that a shameful rebuilding process will some day work.
But that’s why the series was so valuable.
Educations always are.