The Sixers didn’t look like a team full of stars in their season-opening win. And it was a lot of fun
Tyrese Maxey was the star, to such an extent that you can’t really say who was second fiddle. Everybody else played a role, and played it incredibly well.
NEW YORK — Nights like this, sometimes the basketball feels secondary. A let down, even. The story ends up being the color. It ends up being the scene. The vibes, as the kids would say.
You end up remembering the Garden crowd chanting “We don’t want you” as LeBron James stands on the free throw line. You remember James jawing back-and-forth with Spike Lee dressed in an orange suit with blue pinstripes that can only be described as a traffic cone crossed with a longitudinally challenged zebra. You remember the Larry O’Brien on display in a glass-paneled bus that turns onto 33rd Street a couple of hours before gametime and then disappears into the bowels of the world’s most famous arena. You remember the Knicks getting their rings and an entire city giving itself one last pat on the back.
This was not one of those nights. Not at all. This night, the story was the hoops. “Fun” is the word that Sixers coach Nick Nurse used to describe the weeks leading up to his team’s 106-100 season-opening win over the Knicks on Tuesday night. It was a fitting word, and one that we tend to lose our grip on when we talk about the potential of these Sixers and ponder their ability to reach it. Championships are great, and their success or failure in their quest for one will be their final judgment. But one thing that Game 1 of 82 showed us is that, no matter what happens, they sure are going to be fun.
David Murphy alerts
There is no better sport than basketball when played at a high level, and there were stretches of Tuesday night where the Sixers played it at its highest. This was true in particular of Tyrese Maxey, who opened the game with a couple of threes and finished with a team-high 28 points. But the bigger story of Game 1 lay in all of the stretches where the Sixers didn’t look especially great: When the open shots didn’t fall, and the rhythm was nowhere to be found, and the sum of their parts was total much lower than the resumes and hype would suggest. At halftime, you looked at the stat sheet and saw that the Sixers were 3-of-13 from three-point range and out-rebounded 27-19, with significant deficits in both second-chance points and points in the paint. And then you looked at the scoreboard and saw they were only down four points.
There was a reason for that.
“I think our guys were doing pretty good as far as being connected,” Nurse said. “I think our focus has been really good. And the intent and all that stuff that we’ve done has been really excellent as far as our mental prep. These guys are trying to speed that along as best they can, because they get it. You know, it’s like eight or nine new guys here.”
That was the story. The basketball, yes. But, specifically, the extent to which the Sixers played it in a manner that resembled a fully formed team. They entered the season facing plenty of skepticism from folks who’d seen the ugly side of a bunch of superstars sharing the same court. James, Jaylen Brown, Joel Embiid — these were names first and foremost. But in a weird way they were something less than that in Game 1. Maxey was the star, to such an extent that you can’t really say who was second fiddle. Everybody else played a role, and played it incredibly well, from Embiid making the right passes out of double teams to Brown finding James in transition to James finding pretty much anybody who was in a position to be found.
The Sixers were, first and foremost, a work in progress. But they were also the better team on the court in a game that featured the defending champs. This was particularly true on the defensive end, where Maxey and VJ Edgecombe set the tone with their frenetic will and where Embiid was the presence he always seems to be. That defense was the driving force in a third quarter that saw them outscore the Knicks 29-18 and seize an 83-76 lead on Brown’s buzzer-beating three-pointer off an inbound play.
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You could almost see the chemistry grow in real time.
Early in the third quarter there was a sequence of possessions that was bookended by a couple of Brown assists to a cutting James in transition. In between there was an extended scramble on the defensive end where Embiid somehow managed to have Jalen Brunson in front of him in isolation and Maxey crossed the court twice in opposite directions to cover up an open man. By the midway point of the third quarter, the Sixers had taken a 64-63 lead, the go-ahead bucket coming on another bucket by a streaking James in transition. Late in the third quarter, Andre Drummond looked like he was about to lay in an easy bucket after the Sixers lost track of him. But Maxey went flying into his shot radius, disrupting his rhythm as a rose up for a layup that rimmed out.
By the end of the fourth quarter, the tide had turned definitively. Karl-Anthony Towns knocked down a sprawling off-balance three-pointer with 2 minutes, 30 seconds left to cut the Sixers lead to 100-98. Edgecombe answered right back with a low-block dunk off a pass from a double-teamed Embiid.
It is a hard thing, living up to the hype. The hardest, some would say. Partly because the hype is easy. Partly because it comes like a wave. Mostly because the hype is a feedback loop that quickly outstrips reality’s potential to match it.
Yet, here were the Sixers, on a Tuesday night in October, in their first game together, amid a cloud of hype unlike anything their franchise has ever seen, in one of the craziest atmospheres in the NBA, against a team that was celebrating its first championship in more than 50 years, winning a game the way the best of teams must win them.
“As we continue to build, as we continue to build our offensive sets and our defensive sets, we’ll have some bumps in the road at times,” said James, who finished with 14 points, nine rebounds and seven assists in his Sixers debut. “Tonight, when we had those bumps in the road, which is what a good team usually does, you are able to use what happened previously and then make the adjustment. I think the biggest thing from tonight is that we knew we gave them some pick sixes in the first half and we knew we gave them some offensive rebounds where they had second-chance points, and we cleaned that up in the second half. That’s the sign of a good team.”
They were a long way from the team that was promised. Yet, somehow, that felt like promise.
