Are the Sixers and Flyers outclassed or out of gas? Or, gulp, both?
The Sixers and Flyers are 0-3 after their first playoff games in the second round. Both looked bushed and irritable - Joel Embiid is bellyaching about a bellyache after Mikal Bridges hit him.
Before we go any further here, it’s important to realize that all of this is a bonus.
The Sixers never were supposed to get past the first round of the playoffs without their Hall of Fame center.
The Flyers weren’t even supposed to make the playoffs two months ago, much less beat their cross-state archrivals who feature the most despised athlete for Philadelphians, Sidney Crosby. After the Flyers made it to the postseason they rocked T-shirts with “3.8%” on the sleeve, because that was the statistical likelihood they would play into May.
Marcus Hayes alerts
It also was probably the statistical likelihood that Joel Embiid would play again at all this year after a late-season appendectomy.
But here we are, in the second rounds of the winter sports’ tournaments. Huzzah.
Now that we’ve got that straight, we can address why the Flyers and Sixers look like they have no business playing the Hurricanes and the Knicks.
Uh-oh
Is it talent?
With the Sixers: No.
If the seven-game win over Boston showed anything, it showed that the Sixers can play with any team in the Eastern Conference if their principle players are fit and rested. Some, right now, are neither, unavoidably so.
With the Flyers: Sort of.
They’re both a year or two shy of having the sort of hardened players required for a two-month run to a championship, and the Flyers are at least a second-pair defenseman and a second-line center from having the necessary depth.
But at least they’ve got a goalie. Finally.
» READ MORE: Mike Sielski: There’s no shame in the Flyers’ Game 2 loss. The Hurricanes are just better.
The Flyers got shut out, 3-0, in Game 1 on Saturday, then blew a 2-0 lead Monday and lost in overtime, 3-2, a game in which Dan Vladař stopped 40 shots; he stopped 42 in a Game 6 shutout of the Penguins. They return from Carolina trailing 0-2, and played both games without Owen Tippett, their leading goal scorer in the regular season. He’s been ground to a pulp, with no points in the last three games of the first round.
The Sixers looked worse. They needed seven games to beat the Celtics in the playoffs for the first time in seven tries, and they’re tapped.
They got blown out of Game 1 in New York on Monday by 39 points, the second-worst margin of defeat in their history. And yes, the margin of defeat matters. Why? Because the Knicks’ best players destroyed the Sixers in just 36 minutes and took the last 12 off. They’ll be fresh and confident — confident that, when the teams resume Wednesday, they can again minimize Embiid and Tyrese Maxey, who looked exhausted.
With good reason.
Run down
Maxey led the league in average minutes this season and he leads playoff teams in total minutes after eight games, and that includes Monday, when he played just 27 minutes. He’d played more than 45 minutes just two days prior, on the road, before heading back on the road a day later. Maxey shot just nine times and made just three shots, both season lows and his second-worst playoff shooting effort since his rookie season in 2021, when he wasn’t a starter.
» READ MORE: David Murphy: All the Sixers need to fix is everything after a brutal Game 1 blowout loss to the Knicks
The most obvious reflection of exhaustion: He committed four turnovers Monday. He’d committed just four turnovers in the last four games against the Celtics. In 49 career playoff games he’s committed three or more turnovers just eight times. Four of those games were against the Knicks.
Embiid looked worse.
He collected just four rebounds, tied for the second-worst output of his 64 career playoff games. He made just three shots, the fewest in his last 37 playoff games.
He also bellyached about a bellyache, which sounds like a gratuitously cruel thing to say about a fellow just weeks removed from a surgery that usually requires a month of recovery. But, after getting dog-walked by almost 40, Embiid accused the Knicks’ Mikal Bridges of unnecessarily poking him in the tummy in the second quarter.
» READ MORE: Joel Embiid wonders if Game 1 hit to midsection was ‘dirty,’ providing early spice to Knicks series
“I don’t know if it was dirty or not,” Embiid told reporters.
It’s always something.
The Sixers should be exhausted. They’re not used to this.
Against Boston, they finally put in the level of work on both ends of the floor required to contend for championships.
If you looked away from the ball during the Boston series, you would’ve seen a level of defensive tenacity and voracious rebounding that has, in the past 14 years, shown up only occasionally. Yes, that is both a compliment and an indictment. This is the way they should play defense and the way they should rebound all the time. It’s the way great teams rebound and play defense all the time. It is the only reason a team with such pedestrian talent as the Knicks holds the No. 3 seed.
Maxey on Saturday mentioned that his improved defensive effort and consistency was one of the elements that have made him an elite player. Again, this was as much a compliment as it was a confession.
The other guys
The matchup for both teams is worse than in the first round, too.
After a frantic homestretch run to reach the playoffs, the Flyers needed every ounce of effort left in their tanks just to beat an indifferent and ancient Penguins team. So far, they’ve been flat-footed in Game 1 against a team that had rested for six days after sweeping the Ottawa Senators, and then they petered out after 78 minutes of hockey in Game 2.
» READ MORE: Travis Sanheim made a heroic goal-line save. But it wasn’t enough for the Flyers to even the series.
The Sixers can’t have much left, either.
The Knicks have less talent than the Celtics, but they have more size and lots more toughness, and that matters in May.
VJ Edgecombe is a 20-year-old rookie who has now played 83 games and averaged more than 35 minutes in both the regular season and the playoffs.
Embiid has now played five games in 10 days, something he’s done only a handful of times the past two years, and will play his sixth game in 12 days, which he’s only done once in the playoffs, and which he’s never done after spending 17 days recovering from surgery on one of his internal organs.
At least there’s the … Phillies?
Both Rick Tocchet and Nick Nurse this season displayed levels of coaching genius not seen in Philadelphia since the days of Larry Brown and Andy Reid.
Tocchet parachuted into a hockey franchise without an identity, with aging stars and difficult youth and no goalie. He brought them back from the dead in the dead of winter and won a first-round playoff series.
Nurse somehow managed to first salvage a playoff season with epic absences from Embiid, maximum minutes from Maxey, unforeseeable brilliance from Edgecombe, and consistent role play from third (or fourth) wheel Paul George, another Hall of Famer on his last legs.
Even with moving parts this offseason, both franchisees today have a far better outlook than they did even 10 weeks ago. They just look a lot worse than they did three days ago.
And that’s OK. At least you’ve got the Phillies.
This time last week, who’d have thought you’d be saying that?
