Sixers have a lot of work to do to beat the Heat, Game 6 blowout aside

You’re about to read the most on-brand take in the history of Philly playoff clinchers. Whine all you want about the joy of victory and the agony of reading about it, but two dominant quarters don’t come close to restoring enough faith in the Sixers to pick them in a series against the top seed in the East. To beat the Heat, they’re going to need more: from Joel Embiid on the defensive end, from James Harden in the paint, from Doc Rivers in between the whistles.

“We’re gonna go play grown men,” Rivers said after the Sixers halted a two-and-a-half game free fall with an explosive second-half performance that gave them a 132-97 series-clinching win Thursday in Toronto, “and we’re looking forward to the challenge.”

And it will be a challenge. Rivers used three words to describe the opponent the Sixers will face starting Monday in the Eastern Conference semifinals. He said they are good, and they are deep, and they are veterans. As opposed to the Raptors, who maybe could qualify as one of the three.

Toronto certainly wasn’t good. The Sixers showed that while taking a 3-0 series lead, and they showed it while outscoring the Raptors 70-36 in the second half of Game 6. The problem is the 10 quarters of basketball that happened in between, starting with back-to-back losses in Games 4 and 5 and running all the way up until halftime of Game 6. Against a team that was missing its leading scorer, had virtually no guard play, and featured one above-average three-point shooter, the Sixers needed more than a third of a series to figure out how to prevent their opponent from scoring at will. Just look at the first half of Game 6: The Sixers scored 62 points and still entered halftime with only a one-point lead.

» READ MORE: Sixers rebound for Game 6 win, won't become the first team to lose a series after leading 3-0

Credit where credit is due. The Sixers were exactly the team they needed to be Thursday night. Before the game, Rivers told the team that 120 points was their target, and they played with that mindset from the jump. Gone were the timidity and reluctance they displayed while fumbling through Games 4 and 5. They still fumbled at times, but they did it while on the attack. When Raptors defenders gave Harden his right hand, he took it, and took it all the way to the cup. Once upon a time, eight points in the paint would not be a headline, but these were four notable buckets: two layups, a floater, a dunk. When Tyrese Maxey had an opportunity to pull the trigger, he did not flinch. Of his 25 points, 15 came from deep. Combine this with a more recognizable version of Embiid — he was 4-for-4 on long twos, a critical part of his game — and the Sixers looked like a team that can at least hope to score its way to competitiveness in Miami.

But let’s not kid ourselves. To give the Heat a series, the Sixers will need every night to look like their best moments against the Raptors. More than that, they will need the edge that they showed in the second half of Game 6 and throughout Games 1, 2, and 3. In Jimmy Butler and Kyle Lowry, the Heat have one of the toughest, most in-your-face backcourts in the NBA. Lowry’s availability for the series is unclear after a hamstring injury cost him the last two games of the Heat’s series against the Hawks. But the Heat have plenty of other two-way grit for the Sixers to confront. In Bam Adebayo, and P.J. Tucker, they have a couple of long, switchable defenders reminiscent of Toronto’s. With Butler’s on-the-ball ability, and potentially Lowry’s, Harden and Maxey will need to fight to keep their right feet on the gas.

Really, though, it’s the defensive end where the Sixers will need to show us the most. The Raptors finished the series shooting just 59-of-197 (.299) from three-point range. The Sixers spent most of Game 6 conceding the long stuff in favor of packing the paint. That won’t be a luxury against the Heat, who have four players who shot 40-plus percent from deep during the regular season, none of whom were Butler, Lowry, or sharp-shooter Duncan Robinson.

“The guys they have on the floor, the way they execute offensively, shooting the three-ball, all the movement they do, we know that it’s going to be challenge for us,” Sixers forward Tobias Harris said after Game 6, “but we’ll gameplan for it and be ready for it.”

» READ MORE: Sixers need all the help they can get vs. the Heat. Sweeping Raptors in Game 4 is a start

The two big wild cards are the two guys with injuries. And those wild cards certainly can break in a way that alters the balance of power in the series. Even after Embiid’s 33-point performance in Game 6, it is still hard to expect him to be the triple-threat, ball-dominant player he was before tearing a thumb ligament in his shooting hand. He was 0-for-9 from three-point range in the last three games of the series, and he seems to be limited in his ability to get downhill and create space for himself with the dribble. That said, he looked more like that player in Game 6 than he had in the two previous games. As for Lowry, we’ll just have to wait and see. In his normal form, he presents a matchup problem for the Sixers on both ends of the court. Like Embiid, the question is how close to his normal form he will be.

The big thing for the Sixers to understand is the thing that they showed in Game 6. Their offense is their upside. They are not a team that is going to win many games while scoring less than 100. Rivers’ 120-point benchmark is probably the more realistic target. Harden and Maxey need to understand that. Embiid needs to do what he can. The Sixers are going to need to spend the next two weeks in perpetual attack mode. If not, they don’t have a chance.