The Sixers’ first chance to make new, better memories of Philadelphia playoff basketball will be Saturday night.
After the conclusion of its regular season, the NBA announced the schedule for each first-round postseason series’ Game 1. The Sixers will host the Raptors on Saturday at 6 p.m. ET. Dates and times for the rest of the series aren't set yet.
The team’s last home playoff contest was a second-round Game 7 loss to the Hawks in June. The 2020-21 Sixers went an Eastern Conference-best 29-7 at home during the regular season, but they lost three times to Atlanta at Wells Fargo Center.
Stay in the game with the latest updates on your beloved Philadelphia sports teams! Sign up here for our All Access Daily newsletter.
This year’s team led the East with a 27-14 road record but dropped from first to fourth in the standings. The Heat topped the conference at 53-29 and may very well be next up if the Sixers can get through Toronto. The Celtics, Bucks and Sixers all finished 51-31. Boston (division record) and Milwaukee (season series) earned tiebreakers over the Sixers.
In several ways, the Raptors project to be a difficult first-round opponent. Toronto won three of four regular-season games against the Sixers, has an All-Star guard in Fred VanVleet, and got a 37-point triple-double from Pascal Siakam on Thursday in a home win over Joel Embiid, James Harden and company.
The season series result doesn’t capture much about the matchup, though. Embiid was out with a serious case of COVID-19 on Nov. 11 when Tyrese Maxey scored 33 points in a tight loss. VanVleet hasn’t played the Sixers since.
An unavoidably large storyline heading into the series is Matisse Thybulle’s ineligibility for games in Canada because he’s not fully vaccinated. Danny Green, a member of the Raptors’ 2019 championship team, will surely have more on his plate because of Thybulle’s part-time status for the series.
NBA
Both of the Sixers’ previous playoff meetings with Toronto came down to buzzer-beating jumpers. Vince Carter missed his in 2001. Kawhi Leonard famously did not in 2019, sending the Raptors to the Eastern Conference Finals.
The Sixers don’t have Leonard to worry about, but they face a challenging opening series in Embiid and Harden’s first postseason together.