PHILADELPHIA–The Philadelphia 76ers have aspirations of winning a championship as they brought in James Harden in a blockbuster trade from the Brooklyn Nets back on Feb. 10. The idea is that he and Joel Embiid will go out there and help lead the Sixers to the top of the league.
After getting off to a 5-0 start in games where Harden plays, things fell down in a thud as they were blown out by the Nets 129-100 on Thursday at home in a game that had a lot of hype, but it didn’t live up to it.
The Sixers just did not play well from the jump. The Nets took a 40-23 lead after the first quarter and they shot 56% from the floor for the game compared to just 32.3% for the Sixers. Brooklyn also had 29 assists compared to just 19 for Philadelphia and the Sixers had 18 turnovers.
A game such as this one can be a big wake-up call for a team.
“Tonight (Thursday) was good for us, man,” said Harden who shot 3-for-17 on the night. “We got our (butt) kicked and since I’ve been here, things have been sweet and we’ve been winning games so tonight was good for us. We get an opportunity to come down to reality, watch film, and just continue to get better and make sure were in the right strides.”
There was not much that went right for the Sixers on Thursday. Joel Embiid had 27 points on the night, but on the strength of shooting 15-for-19 from the free-throw line as he shot only 5-for-17 from the floor. The Nets got big games out of Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, and Seth Curry on the night and the Sixers have to learn from this.
“For us we’ve been rolling and playing well, so that does affect us, but, it was also a wake-up call for us that we’ve got a lot of work to do,” said Tobias Harris. “We’ve got to get better in a quick period of time. We’ve got to figure out ways to better ourselves as a group, so we don’t have nights like this. So, it’s a tough loss, but we’ve gotta bounce back from it.”
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The Sixers now move on with their season as they get set to hit the road to take on the Orlando Magic on Sunday. They will have two days to brew over this loss to the Nets and they will now have to just move on and learn from it.
“All the way down the line, they had guys making shots,” said Harris. “So I was surprised, but we gotta be better. We can sit around and say are we surprised with our effort tonight? Yeah. We gotta learn from it and grow from it for sure.”
This post originally appeared on Sixers Wire! Follow us on Facebook!
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