The Philadelphia 76ers are a team that plans to hang their hat on their defense to win them games in the 2019-20 season. It’s what helped them hold off the Cleveland Cavaliers on Tuesday when their offense wasn’t clicking, but on Wednesday when the offense couldn’t find a groove again, the defense couldn’t back them up in a loss to the Orlando Magic.
The Magic got to the foul line 34 times and when the game mattered most in the fourth quarter, they outscored Philadelphia 32-15. It was a defensive effort that could not pick up the offense and it upset coach Brett Brown as he stated:
I think it did. I think that it did and it sure is easy to point to missed shots. You just look at a stat sheet. But, I feel like defensively is where my energies and my attention goes to at this stage and we have to do more without Joel. It takes far more of sort of a collective effort. Sometimes you can make mistakes and you have 7-foot-2 Joel Embiid putting out fires and covering things up, tonight we didn’t have that. And like I said, I give Orlando credit and I look forward to seeing exactly the detail behind the way that they scored.
Tobias Harris, who had another rough shooting night as he scored eight points on 4-for-13 shooting and 0-for-3 from deep, also was upset with the defensive effort. Harris stated:
At times it did, but when we turned the ball over it was hard for us to get our defense set and then they were making threes in transition. We never gained a rhythm offensively against some good looks…against some more in the flow plays.
It will take a while for the Sixers to truly find their groove on the offensive end. This is a team with a lot of new parts and it will take a little bit of time to get everybody on the same page. They’ve played 11 games and the projected starting lineup has played a grand total of four games together and Ben Simmons had to leave one of those four games with an injury. This will not happen overnight on the offensive end. The defense has to be there for them.
They head to Oklahoma City on Friday to take on Chris Paul and the Thunder. [lawrence-related id=19254,19247,19239]