The Philadelphia 76ers are returning home now after a long four-game road trip. It ended on Monday night when they fell to the No. 1 seed in the West, the Denver Nuggets, 116-111. Philadelphia has now lost three games in a row as they navigate through this final stretch of the schedule.
They had to go to battle on Monday night missing their two best players. Joel Embiid was held out as he is dealing with calf tightness and James Harden missed his fourth consecutive game due to left Achilles soreness. When a team doesn’t have their two best players, more often than not, they are going to take a loss.
The Sixers will now return home and play host to the Dallas Mavericks on Wednesday when they hope they will have their stars return. Coach Doc Rivers sounded more optimistic that Harden would return rather than Embiid on Wednesday.
“Jo, I don’t know but optimistic for James,” Rivers told reporters.
At this point in the season, with the playoffs right around the corner, the Sixers do need to prioritize the playoffs. As long as Embiid and Harden are good to go for the postseason, they will be in good shape.
The key, however, is to not lose too much ground in the standings. At the moment, the Sixers are the No. 3 seed in the East and while the No. 1 and No. 2 seeds are out of the question, they don’t want to fall to No. 4 and possibly face the Milwaukee Bucks in Round 2.
“Just get healthy,” Rivers added. “I love our team and I will keep saying it. We’re not worried. I’m that Ja Morant. We respect everybody, we like our team. So we just gotta get healthy.”
Whenever the Sixers can get healthy again, Rivers will be looking forward to it. They haven’t been able to use a regular rotation for a bit.
“When you don’t have guys—our bench has taken a major hit over this stretch because half our bench is starting,” he finished. ”It’d be great to get back to our normal rotations. Where we can have everybody. We can have the right rotations in the second and the beginning of fourth quarters. We haven’t had an opportunity to do that.”
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