The Sixers this season have grown familiar with conjuring ways to win close games.
Sometimes they’ve played well until the final few minutes, something they haven’t. It hasn't tended to matter.
Tuesday night was a different story. The Sixers entered their game against the Pacers with an NBA-best 25-8 record in “clutch” situations — the last five minutes of games in which the margin between the teams is five points or fewer — and only scored two points in the final five minutes of a 103-94 loss to Indiana.
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After a Ben Simmons turnaround jumper with 5:26 left gave the Sixers a 92-88 lead, they didn’t score again until two Tobias Harris free throws with 55.7 seconds to go.
What went awry with the team’s execution?
“I thought the whole second half,” head coach Doc Rivers said. “It wasn’t late-game. We didn’t have any execution tonight. We really didn’t. The first quarter, we were brilliant. We were moving the ball, getting the ball in the right spots, running our stuff. I thought it was one of those games where we got tied into the players, to the refs — our guys did — and we lost our focus. So we had no execution tonight.”
Harris shared his coach’s view that the Sixers’ issues went beyond clutch jumpers not dropping.
NBA
“For us, the start of the third quarter and the fourth quarter were really defining moments of the game,” he said. “Shots weren’t falling for us, but we didn’t execute the way we wanted to in the start of the third quarter, mainly due to the fact that we were forced to take the ball out every single time. We couldn’t really get in transition, because our defense was non-existent out there. That makes the game even harder. In the fourth quarter, we just couldn’t didn’t get the shots to fall for us, really.”
The Sixers still sit in a strong position. They were bound to lose a game at some point — the defeat to Indiana ended a season-long eight-game winning streak — and it’s not surprising that it came with Joel Embiid sidelined by a non-COVID illness. Furkan Korkmaz (right ankle sprain), Matisse Thybulle (left hand soreness) and Shake Milton (right knee soreness) were also out.
It’s a game the Sixers should’ve won once they took a 16-point lead in the second quarter against a Pacers team missing six players, but it doesn’t erase all the good work that put them on the edge of clinching the Eastern Conference’s No. 1 seed. The team’s “magic number” remains at one heading into Thursday night’s game against the Heat.
If the Sixers win that game, they’ll have two low-stress home matchups left against Orlando. If they lose and results involving the Bucks and Nets fall their way over the next two days, they still could clinch.
The absolute worst-case scenario for the Sixers is the race for the No. 1 seed coming down to a weekend mini-series with a team that’s won four of its last 21 games. That wouldn’t be ideal but it wouldn’t be dreadful, either. However the final three games play out, the Sixers will have a long stretch away before their first-round playoff series begins, with the NBA's play-in tournament running from May 18 through May 21.
Though more important games loom, Tuesday’s loss bothered Harris. He thought the Sixers allowed themselves to be derailed.
“Just bounce back,” he said. “Honestly, this is a terrible loss for us as a group. … We lost our composure throughout the fourth quarter, which can’t happen for a team striving to be how good we want to be as a group. We gave too much energy to things that we couldn’t really control and things that were over and done with.
“That, over the course of a game, just added up. I think our mental focus just needed to be a whole lot better tonight in many different ways — just moving onto the next play. So that’s an area we can get better at. And then, on top of that, we’ve just got to go out and play how we know we can play, and secure a victory.”