The regular season is over for the Philadelphia 76ers and that means now preparing for the playoffs that will begin on May 22. Of course, the team does not know its first-round opponent; it must wait for the outcome of the play-in tournament.
The Sixers will have some rare time to practice throughout the week before the postseason begins, and that offers coach Doc Rivers the opportunity to clean some things up heading into the grind of the playoffs.
One of those areas is transition defense. The team has had issues on that end all season. They finished the season ranked 29th of 30 teams by giving up 14.3 fast-break points per game, according to Team Rankings. Only the league-worst Houston Rockets gave up more.
“There’s no tricks to transition,” explained Rivers. “It’s so much about habit and discipline, and we’ve had bad habits all year. We’ve gotten better as it has gone on, but it’s such an individual team thing if that makes sense to you. But, we’ll have three guys that will do it and two guys that don’t break the habit and then it kills the entire transition. We’ll be working on that for five days. I can guarantee you that.”
On top of fine-tuning their transition defense, Rivers will have to reset his team’s mindset. They will be hearing all week about how they are the favorites in the East due to them being the No. 1 seed, but none of that will matter once Game 1 tips off.
“We’ve done nothing,” Rivers said bluntly. “We got a great regular season. Everyone’s starting 0-0 now. We can’t rest on this. We got to get ready. We’re gonna play a tough opponent in the first round. I don’t know who it’s going to be, but they’re going to be ready. They’re going to be playoff-tested already. Whoever it is, they would have played up to three games already and we would have had a week off.”
Rivers is right about the fact that the Sixers have not accomplished much at the moment. This team has not proven anything in the playoffs despite their regular-season success.
“I’m just worried about us, because we don’t know who the opponent is,” the coach finished. “I guess that’s a little bit of a disadvantage. I think the advantage is we get the practice time, and we’re gonna work on a lot of stuff that really pertains to us. Then I think by Wednesday we’ll know or have a better idea and then we can start working on the other team.”
This post originally appeared on Sixers Wire! Follow us on Facebook!
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