NEW YORK — The Philadelphia 76ers finished the 2022-23 regular season with a 134-105 win over the host Brooklyn Nets on Sunday afternoon to finish 54-28.
Considering the Sixers started 12-12, the fact they ended the season as they did is impressive, especially in light of the injuries they battled. James Harden missed a month. Tyrese Maxey missed roughly six weeks, and Joel Embiid missed time here and there with various injuries.
Still, coach Doc Rivers steadied the ship. They had a big regular season filled with success.
“I’ve had a good time all year, really, but when you have a group of guys — I don’t know who, I think it was Pat Riley, one of the great coaches of my lifetime, I think he used the word cooperation,” said Rivers on Sunday. “When you have a group of players that wanna cooperate, then you have a chance as a team to win. I think we have that.”
The Sixers certainly have a chance to win. Led by Embiid and Harden, they are going to have as good a chance to come out of the East as anybody this year.
That said, cooperation is easy when there aren’t huge stakes on the line.
“Now, we haven’t gotten into stress time yet,” the coach added. “Then, you’ll know if cooperation works, really, because it’s easy to (cooperate) when the stress is not on. Now, we’re gonna go into the playoffs, and we’ll see if that continues, we’re gonna be hard to beat.”
As Rivers and the Sixers focus on their first-round opponent, the Nets, they are buckling down to prepare for the postseason.
“Just normal playoff prep,” Rivers finished. “A lot of film, gotta get our guys on the floor, need a lot of running, because we’ve kinda cut off four or five days ago. We had a big workout today (Sunday) with a bunch of our guys. They did a lot of running back there (at their home facility) so we’ve already started the process.”
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