NEW YORK — Three hundred sixty-four days ago, the Philadelphia 76ers entered a road arena with a 3-0 lead in their opening-round series and a chance to advance to the Eastern Conference semifinals with as little fuss, fuss or static as possible. . They couldn’t do it: Joel Embiid, James Harden and Tyrese Maxey combined to miss 39 shots, Pascal Siakam scored 34 points, and the Toronto Raptors won to extend the series.
Five days later, Philly would finish the job. The extra games took their toll, though — most notably when Embiid found himself on the receiving end of a Siakam elbow late in the Game 6 closeout, resulting in a fractured orbital bone that knocked him out for the first two games of the second round. The Sixers lost both, and wound up bowing out to old pal Jimmy Butler and the Miami Heat in six games.
The lesson that Philly took from that failure to capitalize? Don’t play with your food. (Yes, Doc Rivers: )
When you have a chance to eliminate an overmatched opponent — even one playing with the desperation of trying to save his season, and even with Embiid having already sustained his now depressing custom — find a way to finish the job and advance. The Sixers did that in Saturday’s matinee at Barclays Center, finishing off a four-game sweep of the Brooklyn Nets with a 96-88 win that allows them to move on to bigger and better things — namely, the winner of the series between the second -seeded Boston Celtics and seventh-seeded Atlanta Hawks, in which Boston holds a 2-1 lead.
The Sixers did not accrue many style points in the process of eliminating a Nets team that made the postseason largely on the strength of the cushion it built up when Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving still worked at the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic. (Brooklyn went with a and after the trade deadline.)
Game 4 had a distinctly MVP-shaped hole in the middle throughout, evident in both the Nets’ strong start — 29 points in the first quarter, a 15-point, seven-rebound, four-block first half for Brooklyn center Nic Claxton — and in Philadelphia’s consistent struggles to put the ball in the basket. Through the first three games of the series, the Sixers had scored; with him unavailable on Saturday, Brooklyn could abandon its double- and triple-teaming of the first three games and return to its switching defensive scheme, which helped limit Philly to just 39.6% shooting.
But even as the misses piled up — Philly’s first 3-pointer didn’t come until — and the Nets took a 48-40 lead into halftime, the Sixers remained confident that they’d be able to turn things around.
“We were getting good shots, especially in the first half — I mean, we had 40 points, but I missed four layups, we missed some open threes,” Harden said after the game. “We were getting really good looks, and they only had 48 points, so at some point we knew our offense had to get it going.”
“At halftime, we were down, we didn’t play well, and we felt like we were going to win the game,” Rivers said. “You could feel that with our group.”
The game tilted early in the third, as Philadelphia ripped off a 21-4 run spanning more than eight minutes to erase a double-digit deficit. Harden dished four of his game-high 11 assists in that spurt. Maxey scored seven points, including a big transition three. Third-year center Paul Reed — who found out just before game time that he was starting in place of Embiid, prompting him to ask the coach who told him, — grabbed four offensive rebounds during the run, extending possessions and putting even more pressure on a small, frantic and overtaxed Nets squad beginning to feel the inevitable.
“It was like, ‘Look, let’s just figure out a way to get three stops in a row, and get out and try to get some easy baskets,'” said Tobias Harris, who routinely used his size, strength and smooth midrange game. to hunt mismatches against smaller Brooklyn defenders en route to a team-high 25 points and 12 rebounds. “And I thought we were able to do that, able to get some buckets to fall for us. But once we got our lead, we knew. Like, ‘We just got to sustain this.’”
They almost didn’t. Brooklyn made one last push early in the fourth, taking a 72-70 lead on a turnaround jumper by Mikal Bridges, the ironman who finally seemed to run out of gas by the series’ end, shooting 6-for-18 in Game 4 and just 9-for-31 inside the arc over the final two games. From there, Philly turned on the jets to cross the finish line, outscoring the hosts 26-16 over the final 8:38, with two-way energizer De’Anthony Melton — who’d been scoreless through the first three quarters — pouring in 12 of his 15 points to help fuel that closing kick.
“He was tough,” Maxey said of Melton. “And then he hit some big shots, man. I think he hit two threes in the fourth? I want to say — I may be wrong — but two threes in the fourth. And then he hit a middie! I don’t remember the last time I ever saw him hit a middie. I’m like, ‘That was great, dude.’”
Melton also dished a hit-ahead assist to Harris for a corner three with 1:55 remaining to send the Nets off to an early summer vacation, and the Sixers onto an extended break while the Celtics and Hawks duke it out before the start of the Round 2.
“Yeah, it’s nice,” Rivers said. “We’ve got to try to keep our rhythm, which is important, but we get to heal, and that’s really important.”
Primarily as it relates to Embiid, the MVP finalist and league-leading scorer whom Philadelphia will desperately need to have any chance of advancing to the Eastern Conference finals for the first time since 2001. Asked after the game if he had any sense of how likely it was that Embiid would be available for the start of the next round, whenever that comes, Rivers told reporters, “I would say right now, it’s probably the same percentage that I said before the game — .”
If Embiid’s unavailable, the concerns that have surrounded the Sixers all season — and that cropped up even in the sweep of a lesser Brooklyn team — will become even more worrisome. As much as Rivers and Harden continue to insist that they’re not bothered by the former league MVP’s ongoing struggle to convert up-close looks, the fact remains that Harden shot 7-for-30 (23.3%) in the paint against Brooklyn — a level of interior futility that Philly simply won’t be able to survive against higher-end competition. Especially if opponents are able to train even more defensive attention on Maxey, who was brilliant in Games 2 and 3 against the Nets, but who shot just 6-for-20 from the field with one assist against three turnovers when placed into a more primary role in Game 4.
The rebounding and advantages that Philly enjoyed against Brooklyn — collecting more than 36% of their own misses and nearly 84% of the Nets’, according to , both of which would’ve led the league during the regular season — are likely to dissipate against either a Celtics team that this season or a Hawks squad that was after Quin Snyder took over as head coach. Defending Boston, with Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown leading a phalanx of dangerous wings, or Atlanta, with Trae Young and Dejounte Murray both capable of dismantling coverages, will be much trickier without Embiid than limiting Brooklyn.
Ugly wins like the ones Philadelphia collected over the final three games of the first round still count just the same as the pretty ones. The process of collecting them, though, is about to get an awful lot tougher. Just ask the Sixers’ resident veteran soothsayer, PJ Tucker.
“He said, ‘The playoffs start now,'” Maxey said after the game. “I guess that they didn’t start this series. He said it starts now.