As a professional athlete, you just have too much pride to really accept losing. You work hard on your craft every waking moment of the year and to continue to have unfathomable losses pile up.
For the Philadelphia 76ers, they realized that a nine-game road losing skid was absolutely enough. The Sixers came together and they pulled out a much-needed 125-108 road win over the Sacramento Kings. The win is their first one on the road since January 20 over the Brooklyn Nets and it was a win to make a statement that enough was enough already.
“When you hear that date, you’re aware that we have not had the success we need to on the road,” said coach Brett Brown. “When you hear a date like that, you’re reminded of enough is enough. I think we just came out of Los Angeles playing a Clippers team that we felt like we could have won the game. I thought we played well.”
The Clippers and the Lakers are two of the top teams in the league, so it can be forgiven that they were not able to come away with wins in those games. Especially when one considers that they were down two of the best players in the league plus the team’s glue guy.
Still, for a team that has championship aspirations, moral victories do not count and Brown’s “enough is enough” message was clear to the team.
“He sure did,” said Tobias Harris confirming what Brown told them. “We really wanted to come out and fuel off of the last two games. Obviously, there are no more victories, but we took the level of physicality that we were playing with, we wanted to enhance it. We want to grow off some things that we thought worked in both the LA games and today, we just came out with great energy from the start. They made some runs and we were able to come back just with different guys making big plays and big shots. It’s a good win for us, especially on a road trip.”
The Kings were not a pushover. This is a team that entered playing desperate basketball as they are seeking their first playoff appearance since 2006 and they had come out of the All-Star break playing well.
“We’re coming into Sacramento to play against a team that has just won six out of their past seven and playing really good basketball,” Brown added. “Therefore, to try to find a way to win on the road, we felt a sense of urgency tonight. I’m happy for the guys. Their spirit and their physicality, I thought was excellent.”
Thursday was not only a big win in the standings as they were able to move up to the 5 seed over the idle Indiana Pacers, but it was also a huge win for their psyche. The Sixers could not afford a 10th straight loss on the road. They needed something to feel good about.
“Very important,” said veteran Al Horford who had an excellent performance. “We feel like we’ve been playing better on the road, we just haven’t gotten the result that we were expecting and finally tonight, we put one together and got a win.”
With this big performance, Philadelphia is now putting itself in a position to come away with a 2-2 road trip. Just a few days ago, that did not seem possible. Give credit to this group for pulling together for a big win.
The Sixers now need a similar performance on Saturday against the Golden State Warriors. [lawrence-related id=27184,27176,27166]