The Philadelphia 76ers knew the adjustments they needed to make heading into Game 2 of their second-round series with the Atlanta Hawks. They needed to slow young star Trae Young and force the ball out of his hands.
They did so in a solid way, holding Young to 6-for-16 shooting and 1-for-7 from deep. As a result, the Sixers came away with a 118-102 win over the Hawks to even the series at 1. They had issues with other Hawks, but they were corralled Young to come away with a much-needed win.
The Sixers started Ben Simmons on Young in this game, and they had much better discipline defending him off the screens. Atlanta will use a lot of screens to free him up and they tried again on Tuesday, but Philadelphia sniffed them out better.
“I thought it was good,” said coach Doc Rivers. “I thought the switching early on was good. We took them out of their 77 and double-drag play for the most part. He’ll be more aggressive next game, there’s no doubt about it. I thought you could see his adjustment was trying to attack early in transition, so we’re going to have to adjust to that next game.”
To Rivers’ point, Young tried to attack the Sixers early and often in order to avoid seeing multiple defenders. While that is something to look for in Game 3, Philadelphia controlled him in Game 2.
“What Trae wants is to go downhill and we felt like to switch him in at least flatten them out, even if he beat our guys, it would give us time to adjust and be in our help positions,” said Rivers. “In Game 1, he was just going downhill so quickly that we decided to switch on the double-drag the first guy, not the second guy. I thought that has some impact.”
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Just as they did with Bradley Beal in the first round, the Sixers mixed their coverages against Young. That confused him a bit and accelerated his decision making, which leads to turnovers. He had four on the night.
“You got to show him different looks,” said Seth Curry. “You can’t show him the same look throughout the game or he’s gonna adjust to it so we just mixed up our coverages and did different things and did a good job of just playing a little bit harder and being more disciplined with what we tried to do last game where we didn’t accomplish.”
Another thing Philadelphia did was hunt Young a bit on the other end. They had him switch onto a guy like Tobias Harris, for example, and they made him work on that end of the floor. The Sixers wanted to do more of that.
“We got to put him in more actions,” said Harris. “We thought in Game 1, it was just too easy for him. Everything was just the way that he wanted it offensively, and then on the defensive end, we didn’t really make him do too much out there. Putting him in actions, getting him in some rotations was definitely key for us.”
The Sixers must prepare to make more adjustments as the series shifts to Atlanta for Game 3 on Friday.
This post originally appeared on Sixers Wire! Follow us on Facebook!
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