The Philadelphia 76ers were playing some excellent basketball to begin Game 5 with the Atlanta Hawks on Wednesday as they were able to build a 26-point lead. They were playing some terrific basketball as they were playing their style of ball and they built a 62-40 halftime lead.
Philadelphia had 12 assists, they held a 30-19 rebounding advantage, and they held the Hawks to 31% shooting and just 3-for-12 from deep in the first half.
Then, it all disappeared. The ball stopped moving, the Sixers were not able to get into any groove on the offensive end, and they were a mess on defense as the Hawks rallied to win it 109-106. It followed the same script as Monday’s Game 4 loss when the Sixers blew an 18-point lead in a similar fashion so there is a little deja vu involved here for Philadelphia.
“Very, a lot of the same stuff,” said a somber coach Doc Rivers. “You don’t need to be a brain surgeon to see that when the ball is moving and we’re playing, just sharing, we’re really good, then the ball got stuck. It got stuck, to me, for the most of the second half, the only movement sets we had going with the Seth (Curry) actions.”
The only players to make field goals for the Sixers in the second half were Joel Embiid and Curry. No other Sixer made a field goal as Tobias Harris and Ben Simmons scored two points each and those points came from the foul line.
“Those two guys had it going,” said Harris. “That’s the offense we went to right there. We got good looks up until I would say like the last three, four minutes. We the set. We were going with it and that was it, really.”
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The question then becomes, why can’t the Sixers hold onto a lead? What happens to their play from the first half to the second half?
“It’s a great question,” said Harris. “I don’t know. That’s a tough one to answer. The weakness right now is when we gain those leads, we kind of go away from what got us there and that was playing defense, moving the basketball, getting some good looks and that’s hurt us the last two games.”
The Sixers only had eight assists in the second half and they shot just 37.5% from the floor and then they had 11 turnovers. Philadelphia was not able to get into their offense as they were very slow on that end of the floor.
“We didn’t play the way we should be playing,” said Simmons. “We move the ball as much in the second half. We didn’t get as many easy shots and then defensively, too many lapses where we don’t communicate.”
Now facing elimination after dropping two games where they had the clear advantage, they now must go back to the drawing board and figure out how to hold on to these leads should the same situation pop up in Game 6 on Friday.
“We’ll see the way we played, majority of the game,” said Curry. “That’s pretty much it. We’ve stopped the way we were playing the entire game. It happens twice in a row so we just gotta figure it out.”
The second unit scored a grand total of two points in the second half as well from Shake Milton. Nothing was going right even when Rivers was just looking for a spark.
“The second unit started doing the same thing,” Rivers added. “They usually don’t do that. They were trying to attack matchups, which that’s not how you play. The matchup will find the matchup. Having to put the first unit back in with 10 minutes left, killed our rotations, but we had no choice. It was a tough loss.”
This post originally appeared on Sixers Wire! Follow us on Facebook!
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