Doc Rivers believes Sixers can — and must — be desperate in Game 4: ‘We’ve done nothing’

NEW YORK — Doc Rivers said it’s easy to find motivation entering Saturday’s Game 4 against the Brooklyn Nets.

“We haven’t accomplished anything,” the 76ers coach said. “We haven’t won the series. We’ve done nothing.”

Technically, the Sixers have won the first three games of their first-round matchup. But a playoff cliché is that close-out games are the most difficult to win in any series. That can become even more mentally complicated while trying to finish off a sweep, when desperation skyrockets for an opponent with its season at stake.

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If Thursday’s rock fight at Barclays Center — which included two ejections, countless tumbles to the floor, and two strikes in the direction of a man’s nether regions — was any indication, the Sixers should not expect these new-look Nets to let up Saturday afternoon. Their task, which just became more difficult with MVP frontrunner Joel Embiid set to miss Game 4 with a sprained right knee, is to combat human nature by generating a similar sense of urgency to complete this step on their larger quest to contend for a championship.

“We can’t even think that we’re up, 3-0,” reserve forward Georges Niang said. “Because I feel like we kind of did that in Toronto last year. You come in and you think you can just coast to the win, but they have pride, too. They’re NBA players, too.

“We have to go in and [metaphorically] stomp them out. It sounds gruesome, but that’s really just how it essentially is.”

The Sixers’ last sweep in a best-of-seven series came in 1985 against the Milwaukee Bucks. They also had a 3-0 lead in their two most recent first-round matchups but lost Game 4 both times, to the Raptors last season and to the Washington Wizards in 2021.

That Toronto extended its series to six games now serves as a cautionary tale for the Sixers. Game 6 is when Embiid got inadvertently popped in the face by Pascal Siakam and suffered a concussion and orbital fracture. Those injuries kept Embiid out of the first two games of the Eastern Conference semifinals against Miami, which the Sixers lost, and put him in a mask for the rest of the series that ended their season.

Rivers and Niang brought up that Raptors series during Friday afternoon’s media availability before the Sixers’ film session, acknowledging they relaxed after going up, 3-0. And that was hours before Embiid’s absence for Game 4 surfaced publicly, underscoring the importance of time off before the next round.

“We kind of took that lightly, and it went two extra games and weird things happen,” Niang said. " … You don’t want to over-exhaust yourself, especially when you plan to have a team that’s going to go far. You don’t want to waste energy on games where you should have not have had to play.

“I think everybody felt what it was like last year, when you were like, ‘Damn, we’ve got to go play another game when we could have just closed this out.’”

Added Rivers: “Last year, I thought … [the Raptors] didn’t have any interest in that [Game 5] early, and then they looked at us like, ‘Oh, wow. You guys don’t want to play, either? Let’s go back to Toronto.’”

Overcoming human nature was uttered by Rivers even entering Game 3, when the Sixers led, 2-0, and expected the Nets to be reinvigorated in their return home. They were reinvigorated and chippy, injecting spice into a series that appeared to have lost the bulk of its story lines following the trades of Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving and Ben Simmons’ absence because of an ongoing back injury. Nic Claxton was the most outwardly brash Net on Thursday, drawing two technical fouls for taunting Embiid.

“They’re trying to get under our skin and make us retaliate,” Niang said postgame. “And that’s going to be even more of a thing next game. When you’re trying to win playoff games, anything really goes.

“The biggest thing for us is getting locked in and knowing this isn’t over. We still have to take care of business. Don’t look ahead.”

Sweeping a playoff foe has not only been challenging for the Sixers. The Houston Rockets never did it during the James Harden era. Neither did the Los Angeles Clippers while Rivers was coach from 2013-20. Rivers has only swept one opponent as a coach: the New York Knicks in 2011 when he was at the helm of the Boston Celtics.

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Extending a series also provides room for it to turn. Niang was a member of the Utah Jazz team that blew a 3-1 lead against the Denver Nuggets in the 2020 playoffs’ first round. Rivers has surrendered three 3-1 cushions in his coaching career, twice with the Clippers and once with the Orlando Magic.

The Nets have not looked like an opponent capable of climbing all the way back so far in this series. But they will be desperate Saturday to keep their season alive.

Rivers believes the Sixers can — and must — generate a similar mentality.

“The Nets have no more to play for than us,” the coach said. “That’s the point I keep making to our guys — we’re both desperate. We both want something, and that’s what makes sports great. …

“We have to come out with the same attitude as them. We’re desperate. We want to win.”