All the Sixers need to fix is everything after a brutal Game 1 blowout loss to the Knicks
This was an ambush, plain and simple. The only positive thing is that they got a firsthand look at a lot of things that didn’t work.
NEW YORK — You could say the Sixers ran into a buzz saw on Monday night, but then you’d be crediting them with running.
They didn’t even deserve that much on Monday night. Game 1 of this Eastern Conference semifinals was an ambush, plain and simple. Rarely will you find a game where a team was as thoroughly and unrelentingly outplayed as the Sixers were in a 137-98 loss to the Knicks at Madison Square Garden.
“We were just kind of stuck in mud at both ends,“ Sixers coach Nick Nurse said. ”They put it on us.”
» READ MORE: The Sixers’ latest blowout loss, Jalen Brunson goes for blood, and more from 137-98 Game 1 dismantling
Defensively, offensively, doesn’t really matter which. The Sixers need to fix it all before Game 2 on Wednesday. This was a game that defies diagnoses. Even the greatest of doctors needs to first find a pulse.
Things first unraveled on the defensive end. Knicks stars Jalen Brunson, Karl-Anthony Towns, Mikal Bridges and OG Anunoby entered halftime shooting a combined 23-of-33 from the field. It was equally as ugly on the offensive end, where Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey were a combined 6-for-20. That the Sixers were down 23 should go without saying.
The most charitable way to put it is that they looked like a team that was 48 hours removed from surviving a stretch of three do-or-die games in five days. That hardly qualifies as optimism, given that the next game is one off day away.
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“Just get settled in,” said forward Paul George, who was the only Sixer who looked relatively unaffected by a smothering Knicks defense. “Yeah, we had breakdowns tonight but they also shot the [crap] out of the ball. It’s a game of adjustments. We’ll make adjustments, see what we need to get better at. But again, same as last series. They don’t get any points [in Game 2] for going up big tonight.”
It’s the rallying cry they must cling to.
In order to write off the Sixers, we’d need to forget that we just saw them win a series where they lost two games by 32 points. Forty-eight hours isn’t long enough time to revoke the badge of resiliency we bestowed upon this team. The Sixers earned themselves some benefit of the doubt with what they accomplished against the Celtics. Unfortunately, they need all of it.
The list of problems is as long as it will be difficult to solve. Believe it or not, Brunson might be the least of their concerns. The former Villanova guard’s 35 points were a problem, no doubt. But the Sixers have shown they can be competitive in a series without shutting him down. When these two teams faced each other in the first round two years ago, Brunson scored 39-plus points in each of the last four games of the series. The Sixers won two of those games.
This time around, the big concern is that Brunson only needed to take 18 shots in his 31 minutes. That he made 12 of them was a credit to Brunson. The real problem was that Anunoby hit 7 of 8 shots, and Bridges 7 of 10, and Towns hit 7 of 11. As a team, the Knicks shot 63% from the field and hit 51% of their 33 three-point attempts. This was a disturbingly well-rounded effort from the Knicks.
Perhaps that can be fixed. Maybe they can worry less about Brunson if that helps them ensure everybody else is neutralized. The good news is that if the Sixers can somehow figure out the defensive end, all they’ll need to do is figure out a way to score.
Which leads us to what might actually be the biggest conundrum facing Nurse and his team. The Knicks dominated Maxey. And they somehow did it without conceding anything to Embiid.
Maxey didn’t make his first shot from the field until 6 minutes, 58 seconds left in the second quarter. And it wasn’t for a lack of trying. Thanks in large part to some strong on-ball defense from Bridges and some creative double teams, Maxey rarely had a clean look at the basket. He finished the game with just 13 points on 3-of-9 shooting. Meanwhile, Embiid managed just 14 points on 3-of-11 shooting. They only played 52 minutes combined, thanks to the early garbage time subs. Still, 20 combined shots from those two isn’t going to come close to giving the Sixers a chance.
“I think I shot it once in the first quarter, and it wasn’t a real shot, the ball kind of came out of my hand,” Maxey said. “I’m just trying to read, figure it out. I’m not too worried about it. I’m an aggressive basketball player. We’ll figure it out. Get a chance to go back and watch it and see how they were guarding us and guarding me in general and all of us as a team. I’m not too worried about it.”
The only positive thing is that they got a firsthand look at a lot of things that didn’t work.
Nurse said it several times before and after the Sixers’ Game 7 win over the Celtics on Saturday. Each round of the NBA playoffs is a sequence of one-game series. What happens between the tipoffs can matter as much as that which happens between the whistles. The Sixers showed that in Game 2 against the Celtics, dominating the last three quarters to claim a 111-97 win two days after getting blown out in the opener.
At the very least, they know it can be done. The difference now is that they’ve just played a series where they had to expend a lot of energy to do it.
“I won’t use that as an excuse,” George said. “But emotional roller-coaster, you go from a Game 7 and one day off and you are right back into another matchup. I think there was some carryover trying to get up and get prepared for this next matchup. But we should have done a better job.”
The job that they did was best illustrated by the lineup they sent to the court for the start of the fourth quarter.
Dalen Terry.
Trendon Watford.
Dominick Barlow.
Adem Bona.
Quentin Grimes.
Ninety seconds into the final period, Bona headed to the bench after picking up his fifth foul. He’d played four minutes total. Thus ended the Sixers’ most efficient individual performance of the night.
