NEW YORK — The Philadelphia 76ers came up short 111-104 to the New York Knicks in Game 1 on Saturday night. The Sixers led by 13, then trailed by 14, rallied to re-take the lead, and then weren’t able to execute down the stretch.
One can point to a number of issues for why Philadelphia lost. One is the huge rebounding deficit as the Knicks won the rebounding battle 55-33 and they had 23 offensive rebounds. Another issue for the Sixers is the minutes when Joel Embiid went to the bench.
The big fella was a plus-14 in his 36 minutes while the Sixers were a minus-21 in the 11 minutes he sat. When Embiid is off the floor, that’s when guys like Kelly Oubre Jr. and the bench pieces have to step up and produce.
“3-point shooting,” Oubre said. “They started hitting a lot of shots behind the arc. The crowd started getting into it and they had the momentum. It’s always tough when you’re away and the home team gets the momentum because the crowd gets into it, but at the end of the day, we gotta be mentally tough, man. Which we were. We still were able to come back so I think we were resilient and I liked our response in the second half.”
The Knicks received 42 points off the bench. Deuce McBride had 21 for New York while Philadelphia received only seven points from its bench unit. That has to change in Game 2 on Monday.
“We had another one of those second-quarter starts where we didn’t guard anybody,” added coach Nick Nurse. “We had a hell of a first quarter. Then we come out to start the second quarter and it’s bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. So the second quarter got off to a really bad start. How many minutes was he off the floor? Eleven? Probably most of that (negative) plus-minus that you’re talking about happened in about four minutes at the start of the second quarter.”
Nurse isn’t wrong. The Knicks received production from both McBride and Bojan Bogdanovic to begin the second quarter and Philadelphia wasn’t able to match it at all.
“Getting stops and getting out and running,” Tyrese Maxey added of the keys to winning the non-Embiid minutes. “If we’re taking it out of the net every single time and letting them set their defense up, it’s going to be difficult. We’re capable of getting stops. We got a few, and we got some scores after we got those stops. So we’ve got to just continue to work at it, know what we’re doing defensively, and know what we’re doing offensively as well.”
Game 2 is Monday from…
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