The Philadelphia 76ers had a tall task on Friday when they paid a visit to the FedEx Forum to take on the Memphis Grizzlies. Still short-handed, Philadelphia needed everybody to step up in order to come away with a win over a very talented Grizzlies team.
The Sixers got a big performance out of Joel Embiid who had 35 points, 12 rebounds, and eight assists, but it wasn’t enough in a 117-109 loss to the Grizz on Friday. Philadelphia is now 0-2 on this 3-game road trip which finishes up on Monday against the Houston Rockets.
Embiid shot 13-for-26 from the floor as he was able to have some offensive success against burly Memphis big man Steven Adams who has a tendency of giving the big fella some trouble.
“I thought Joel was fine,” coach Doc Rivers told reporters. “He was aggressive. He scored, he passed the ball, he’s doing a lot of good things for the team, and I thought we played at a good pace. The problem is, and I go back to the turnovers and offensive rebounds, how many fast breaks that we have and didn’t score and came up empty on? Those are the things we have to do better. We definitely missed some ball handling. You can see that, but we knew that we just have to deal with.”
The caveat with Embiid is, and Rivers alluded to it, is the offensive rebounds. Adams had 10 offensive rebounds on Friday for Memphis. That just cannot happen if a team wants to win on the road.
“They just killed us, and Adams is great, I’ll give them credit,” Rivers added. “We even double-teamed him twice on the glass, and he still got them. So that’s something we’ll watch. There were a couple more that I thought we could have gotten and just kept it alive, but that hurt us.”
In the end, despite Embid’s best efforts, it was the inability to keep Adams off the offensive glass and Philadelphia’s inability to take care of the ball as they dropped to 12-11 on Friday.
“We had too many spurts where we weren’t the most physical team and didn’t give the 50-50 basketball, and they killed us on the boards and just were able to create extra possessions,” added Tobias Harris. “I thought offensively, we had, through the course of the game, good looks that we normally would take on any given night that didn’t fall for us, and that hurt.”
[mm-video type=playlist id=01f09kz5ecxq9bp57b player_id=01f5k5xtr64thj7fw2 image=https://sixerswire.usatoday.com/wp-content/plugins/mm-video/images/playlist-icon.png]
[listicle id=71792]
[lawrence-related id=71795,71785,71787]