For a minute there, it was all good. The Sixers were about to nab a massive road victory at Madison Square Garden and even up their first-round series against the Eastern Conference's No. 2 seeded New York Knicks. The pieces were fitting into place, and then those pieces fell apart entirely.
Disaster struck for the Sixers in their heartbreaking Game 2 loss. The team did say afterward that it planned to lodge a complaint with the NBA about the officiating throughout the first pair of games of the series, but nothing substantive will come out of any complaint they file. They will return to Philadelphia for Thursday night's pivotal Game 3 in need of a win to avoid the vaunted 0-3 deficit that no NBA team has ever come back from to win a series.
The Sixers are not happy, but that is life. The masses are not happy. The least I can do is answer some questions from a Sixers fanbase that is losing its collective mind (stop me if you have heard that before).
Let's get to the questions...
From @hallublin: What reason is there to believe that Game 2 wasn't the closest [the Sixers will] come to a win? What do they need to improve on to even the series?
The Sixers were clearly the superior basketball team in Game 2, and they should have come away with a series-evening victory. But it is not as if all went swimmingly for them.
The most noteworthy area for improvement for the Sixers remains reigning NBA MVP Joel Embiid's scoring efficiency. Embiid's mobility appears limited due to him repeatedly injuring his left knee, and his scoring output has suffered tremendously because of it.
After aggravating the knee at the end of the first half of Game 1, Embiid returned quickly in admirable fashion but did not look the same. He made just two of his 12 field goal attempts after intermission on Saturday night, and entered Game 2 amid a ton of skepticism about his ability to be the best version of himself.
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In Game 2, Embiid was better offensively than he was in the second half of Game 1, but not by a ton. Embiid posted a shooting line that is extremely lackluster by his standards: 12-29 from the field, 2-9 from three-point range and 8-12 from the free-throw line.
Forgetting about the Knicks for a moment, the Sixers' championship aspirations are entirely reliant on Embiid looking like the player who was on his way to a third consecutive NBA scoring title before injuries took him out of the running. They can fix a lot of different issues between now and tip-off Thursday night, but ultimately they will not get to where they need to go unless Embiid is the one who takes them there.
From @joshesOK: What does Tobias Harris offer Nurse and the team that a younger, more athletic player cannot? Playoff experience is a given, but just having played in a few series doesn't equate to earning meaningful minutes, right?
It has become an extremely popular sentiment that Nurse needs to shake things up in his rotation and go with someone like spark plug scoring guard Cam Payne -- a player Nurse affirmed his trust in, predicted would "for sure" bein the rotation in Game 2 and called "a creator of offense" before not giving him a single minute of playing time on Monday night -- or the athletic rookie wing Ricky Council IV in the hopes that they can give the team a jolt that is more valuable than the production they are getting from Harris.
As far as Harris goes: the vast majority of the criticism he has received over the last few weeks has been warranted. His play has largely been brutal on both ends of the floor, his energy has often been disappointing and the fact that he is making $39.8 million this season -- 19th-highest in the NBA -- looms over it all as his infamous five-year, $180 million contract finally nears its end. But there are tangible benefits to playing him over someone like Council, even if the young rookie is a dynamic athlete and an exciting piece of the puzzle.
First of all, there is the three-point shooting. Regardless of whether or not Sixers fans believe Harris is more likely to make a big shot than Council, opposing defenses will. Nurse could try using the Arkansas product at some point, and maybe it would be successful to a degree, but just about any playoff defense will ignore Council entirely as a shooting threat, which could make the Sixers' floor spacing even more complicated than it already is.
And then there is the experience mentioned in the question. In general, I am of the belief that it is a vastly overrated concept; that the best and most deserving players in the current moment should be the ones who see the floor most, not the ones who have simply been there before. But coaching is a lot about trust, and it is easy to see why Nurse would have more faith in Harris -- who has started in all 432 contests he has appeared in as a Sixer across regular season, playoff and Play-In Tournament play -- than Council, who did not sign his first standard NBA contract until 10 days before this writing.Harris has played in 42 postseason games as a member of the Sixers, while Council has played in 32 NBA games in totality.
Not to mention, Harris' defense and energy were perhaps at an all-time high in Game 2. Forced to defend Knicks All-Star point guard Jalen Brunson on switches one-on-one repeatedly, Harris got stop after stop defending the NBA's fourth-leading scorer in 2023-24 until the Knicks finally decided to stop targeting Harris as a defender. He grabbed nine rebounds, several of them significant, and consistently boxed out effectively. Harris even won a jump ball against a seven-footer.
Harris' improved (yetimperfect) showing in Game 2 does not mean he gets to start and play upwards of 40 minutes in every game for the remainder of the playoffs. As he did in their Play-In Tournament victoryover the Miami Heat on Wednesday night, Nurse needs to remain ready to pull the plug on Harris when required. The first time he did, it led to The Nico Batum Game. But, despite all of his warts as a player, Harris is likely one of the eight best basketball players on the Sixers. His role diminishing is conceivable, but him being removed from the rotation entirely seems like it is not.
From @Eagle_N1nja: What the hell can this team do to get these role players going?
The Sixers have not gotten nearly enough offense from their role players so far in this series -- that includes but is not limited to Harris.
The Sixers' bench has given them a combined 17 points across the first two games of the series. That is not sustainable if the Sixers want to beat the Knicks or any other team.
It does not help that Buddy Hield has scored two points -- on one layup generated by a Harris offensive rebound and assist in Game 2 -- in the 26 minutes he has played in the series.
Kelly Oubre Jr. has done an absolutely outstanding job defending Brunson, who has struggled enormously through two games. But Oubre's scoring, typically his calling card, has mostly gone dormant thus far: he has scored just 14 points in 65 minutes in this series.
Batum has been okay across the first two contests in New York City, but scoring has never been his specialty. Batum's 20-point eruption against Miami last week was an anomaly; Batum himself admitted as much that very night. But between Batum and Kyle Lowry, who has largely been good in the series but missed two crucial free throws in the final minutes of Game 2 that helped spark the Knicks' furious comeback effort, the Sixers are incredibly reliant on two players who very rarely create their own shots.
The Sixers have developed a roster full of role players who mostly excel by playing off their All-Star duo of Embiid and Tyrese Maxey. That is reasonable roster construction. But at some point soon, someone on the Sixers other than their pair of stars will need to step up their scoring load.
It is nearly impossible to tell who that player will be. Finances suggest it will be Harris, recent history suggests Oubre should be the guy while playoff experience tells us that Lowry or Batum could once again arise in a big moment. Maybe it ends up being Hield, or even Payne. I do not think Nurse has much of a preference at this point. But it has to be somebody.
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