NEW YORK–The Philadelphia 76ers were able to finish off a sweep of the Brooklyn Nets on the road on Saturday afternoon and now they have some time to rest.
The Sixers will face either the Boston Celtics or the Atlanta Hawks in the Eastern Conference semifinals and the earliest that series can begin is April 29, so Philadelphia has to take advantage of these days off. This allows them to rest from the bumps and bruises from this series with the Nets.
Joel Embiid is dealing with a right knee sprain and his status is unclear as the Sixers move on to Round 2. This week off will give him and the rest of the Sixers some needed rest.
Coach Doc Rivers
“Yeah, it’s nice. We got to try to keep our rhythm which is important, but we get to heal, and that’s really important. This has been a physical series. Guys were on the floor lot. Give them credit, Jacque (Vaughn), I thought his preparation in this series was tremendous. I thought he did the right thing, in my opinion, by trapping Joel and living with it. That’s hard to do as a coach. They stretched us, they pushed us, a lot for us to learn though, too. Stuff that we can prepare for moving forward.”
PJ Tucker
“Just get healthy. I’ve been struggling with that. Jo’s out, just need to get everybody back healthy. That was the message today (Saturday) from me ‘Guys, let’s lock in today’. We got a window here to be able to get a few days. Hopefully, we’ll get some days, time, some work in, the rest of us get healthy, to be able to lock in and get ready for the next series.”
James Harden
“We value it. Obviously, today was big for us so we can get big fella healthy. That’s priority number one and then just making sure that we keep our individual skill set working right and then I guess we got to wait and figure out who we play next, but both teams are gonna be a challenge. For us, I think just making sure we’re healthy as a whole.”
Tobias Harris
“We need some rest, but now it’s just about recharging. Playoffs are all about recovery, recovering mentally and physically. So it’s one game, you can’t get too high, you can’t get too low over it. It’s a great job of us as a team finishing the series, but our next opponent is on the doorstep for us and we’ll be ready for whoever that is, but we do have to recover physically and mentally and understand that we still got a lot of work to do.”
De’Anthony Melton
“I think the biggest thing for us is gonna be physically. Getting dudes back healthy. Getting dudes mentally right, too so I think it’s gonna be a huge week for us. Especially, other guys over there, that already switched, so we got another extra day.”
Story originally appeared on Sixers Wire