PHILADELPHIA — The NBA preseason is over, and the Philadelphia 76ers have turned their attention to an opening-night road matchup with the Milwaukee Bucks on Thursday.
The Sixers seek to get off on the right foot amid the James Harden saga, and coach Nick Nurse looks to begin his tenure in Philadelphia with a win.
“We’re gonna study the last couple games and watch film for a little bit,” Nurse said. “We’re gonna do a pretty good study of where we think we need to kind of dig in and get better.”
When a team takes on the Bucks, the focus is on stopping Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo, but he has a new running mate, star guard Damian Lillard, who will make his Milwaukee debut.
“Obviously, you’re playing Milwaukee and you always gotta understand that game starts with transition defense,” Nurse continued. “You’ve got a freight train coming at you the whole game and you gotta get ready to get your defense set up so I know that’s one thing we’ll be focusing on for sure.”
The Sixers also have to clean up mistakes made in the preseason. This is where Nurse and his staff will be able to really buckle down and figure out how they’re going to attack the Bucks and the 2023-24 season as a whole.
“We gotta polish up a lot of things,” the coach finished. “There’s some stuff that we’ve been running in practice that we haven’t run here. That stuff will need some extra polish because we haven’t really used it. That’s kind of like out-of-bounds plays and other things like that. There’s plenty of things to polish up this week. That’s for sure.”
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