PHILADELPHIA — There were extra black shirts packing walkie-talkies and extra blue shirts packing sidearms and just before Ben Simmons jogged out of the tunnel, there were four dudes holding up a yellow rope across the baseline as if the half-empty seating bowl might suddenly surge onto the court. Whether or not the extra ounces of precaution were justified, they did make you stop and marvel at the ridiculousness of it all.
In a building where four of the NBA’s most entertaining individual scorers were wearing basketball uniforms, the only person that anybody seemed to care about was wearing a Louis Vuitton hockey jersey and a hilariously gaudy diamond chain.
Not that the scorn wasn’t understandable. Or even warranted. The city of Philadelphia had waited five months for Ben Simmons to show up for a game, longer if you count last postseason. The gate receipts go to the villains as much as they do the heroes, and the paying customers were not unjustified in their desire to get a few things off their chest. They’d bought the right to unburden themselves, and unburden themselves they did. At the end of the day, though, the whole reason to care about any of it in the first place was the basketball. And it sometimes felt as if everybody was forgetting that there was an important game to be played.
Turns out, this included the Sixers, and it did not include the Nets, and the result was one of those losses that was resounding enough to make you question everything that you’d seen prior. The official score was 129-100, but by the final buzzer it had been irrelevant for more than a quarter. They were down 17 at the end of the first quarter, 21 at halftime. They turned the ball over 20 times, were outscored 28-8 on fast-break points. They couldn’t hit shots. They couldn’t stop them.
“It was a wake-up call for us that we have a lot of work to do,” forward Tobias Harris said. “We have to get better in a quick period of time.”
If that sounds like a surprisingly urgent sentiment with a month of regular-season basketball left to play, consider what might await the Sixers on the other side. With the Nets currently occupying one of the Eastern Conference’s four play-in spots, five games behind the No. 6 Cavaliers, Brooklyn could easily end up being the team the Sixers face in the first round of the playoffs as either the No. 2 or No. 3 seed. As dysfunctional as the Nets have looked this season, anybody who is looking past them might want to rewind the tape from Thursday night.
What makes Brooklyn such a dangerous matchup for the Sixers is its ability to negate Embiid’s impact on the defensive end. In Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, they have a couple of elite scorers who each have the ability to score from wherever Embiid isn’t. Nearly half of the Nets’ 72 first-half points came from behind the arc, with Durant, Irving, and Seth Curry combining to shoot 9 for 16 from 3-point range. The inclusion of Curry in the mid-February trade that brought Harden to Philly looked particularly unfortunate on Thursday night. With Harden slogging through a miserable shooting night and struggling to create space off the dribble, the Sixers looked in desperate need of another player who could draw some defensive attention. Embiid did what he could, abusing Andre Drummond in the paint while scoring 16 first-quarter points, but it would have taken a perfect performance from the big guy just to keep the Sixers within striking distance. Absent that, they had no answers.
“Everybody wanted to win the game,” Rivers said. “But you have to play together to win the game. I think that’s a great lesson for us.”
That’s actually not the worst place for a team to be at this point in the season. The build-up surrounding Simmons’ return may have leant a playoff atmosphere to Thursday night, but this was a game with little practical meaning. Any student of Durant’s psychology could have predicted the lethality with which he stalked the court. Likewise with Curry, whose true emotions surfaced midway through the third quarter when he drained his fourth 3-pointer of the game and strutted so close to the Sixers bench that he might have stepped on a few toes.
Simmons may have been the focal point for the home fans, but it was the road players who clearly had the revenge factor working in their favor. The thoroughness with which they exploited the Sixers’ weaknesses could easily end up working in the latter’s advantage. Better to know your holes than fool yourself into thinking they are inconsequential.
And boy, do the Sixers have holes. Real holes. Holes that will require some serious patchwork on Doc Rivers’ part if the unthinkable happens and he finds himself staring at a first-round series with the team that ran his off the court on Thursday.
“Tonight was good for us,” said Harden, who shot 3 for 17 from the field and committed four turnovers. “We got our ass kicked and since I’ve been here everything has been sweet and we’ve been winning games. Tonight was good for us. We’ve got an opportunity to come down to reality, watch film, and just continue to get better and make sure we’re hitting our strides.”
The Sixers can certainly console themselves with the knowledge that the Nets are unlikely to make a habit of shooting 60% from the field, including 50% from 3-point range, and that Harden is unlikely to have another performance as abysmal as the one he turned in. But Durant and Irving have made their careers out of games like this, and the Sixers don’t have any obvious answers for combatting either.
Which brings us back to Simmons, whose return to Philadelphia was muted both by the fact that he could spend most of the game nodding in the direction of the scoreboard in response to the jeers and expletive-laden chants. Late in the game, with the Nets up 30, the Sixers’ one-time No. 1 overall pick made it a point to stand up from the bench and retrieve a loose ball that had bounded in his direction. As the half-filled seats erupted in boos, he slowly raised the ball above his chest and tossed it to one of the officials.
“What you want to do is play well at home and have your crowd cheering for you,” Rivers said. “We didn’t play well enough to get that done tonight. That’s what we missed tonight. And that was on us.”
