The 2020-21 NBA season has been hectic as ever and teams have had to deal with a wild schedule where they are playing four games in five nights and the games are coming at a rapid pace. On top of that, they are also having to go through the health and safety protocols as the league navigates through a pandemic.
The Philadelphia 76ers just finished up a 13-day and 6-game road trip and they returned home for a weekend back-to-back before heading back out on the road. After knocking off the Minnesota Timberwolves on Saturday, they have to turn around and host the rested Memphis Grizzlies less than 24 hours later.
“It’s gonna be a challenge, but this is part of the season this year,” laughed Tobias Harris. “It’s a hectic schedule night in night out, but it’s what we signed up for. For us, tonight (Saturday), there’s things that we can get better at and we have to show those things and we have to bring the energy. We got to get our minds and our bodies right to be able to play our type of basketball tomorrow night (Sunday).”
The Sixers were able to have Joel Embiid return on Saturday after he missed 10 games, but due to the back-to-back, there is no guarantee that the big fella plays on Sunday. That makes this an even tougher challenge against Grizzlies big man Jonas Valanciunas down low.
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“No different than the rest of the schedule we played,” said veteran Danny Green. “You got to be ready to play back-to-backs. We played some before, but guys recovered. Joel, hopefully, he’s not feeling too heavy from tonight (Saturday), playing some minutes in a month. Tobias did a great job leading us down the stretch, but we got to do a better job of staying locked in and hopefully we learn from that and tomorrow play a better game.”
The Sixers will have to make sure they realize that this is a different game with a different team and they need to come out with the right mindset. The big thing is, they will be at home and have the passionate fans of Philadelphia behind them.
“We gotta come back with a new mentality, a different mentality, a fresh mentality,” Green finished. “We’ll treat the game as a new one and come out with some new energy and have our fans behind us which will be nice.”
The Sixers and the Grizzlies tipoff at 7 p.m. EDT on Sunday.
This post originally appeared on Sixers Wire! Follow us on Facebook!
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