The Philadelphia 76ers had a golden opportunity at home on Sunday night as they had a chance to win Game 7 and move on to the Eastern Conference finals for the first time in 20 years. Unfortunately, it did not happen as they fell to the Atlanta Hawks 103-96 which ended their season in the second round for the third time in four seasons.
They lost despite Hawks star Trae Young only shooting 5-for-23 on a night where he was bothered by Philadelphia’s defensive schemes all night long. He had a tough time getting a shot off against the Sixers and their length.
Ben Simmons, who had a bad night on offense, was the primary defender on him all night long and he did bother him a bit and coach Doc Rivers was quick to point that out.
“That’s what Ben did,” Rivers said. “So there was a positive with Ben even though people were upset at him, but defensively, he did his job tonight on Trae.”
Still despite Young’s struggles on that end of the floor, the Sixers were not able to capitalize. They were 9-for-28 from deep, they shot 42.5% from the floor, and they turned the ball over 17 times. The Sixers also had a lot of looks at the rim that they missed so that does not help with the opposition’s star struggling the way he did.
“Offensively, we were just bad,” Rivers added. “We’ve been a good offensive team all year. Tonight, we were not. We weren’t even an average offensive team tonight. Not only with just missing shots, how many point-blank misses we had at the rim, how many fast breaks that we blew in transition where we didn’t get anything out of it and they got something. The last part of that, we just did not trust each other. We didn’t trust the open guy.”
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The offensive responsibility for Philadelphia obviously falls on Joel Embiid, but it is on Simmons to run things and push the pace on offense. He was not able to do so on Sunday despite his strong defense on Young.
“He had a tough night,” said Simmons. “Offensively, I probably didn’t do enough. There’s a lot of things I didn’t do well in this series.”
As the Hawks now move on to the next round, Rivers was left feeling impressed with what the 22-year old star has done in his first playoff run.
“Trae was the major factor in this whole series,” he finished. “Joel was our guy, Trae was their guy. Trae, when you look at it, he only had six turnovers on a night he shot 5-for-23, but the fact that we had to give him so much attention allowed other guys to get off. He’s definitely their guy. He’s having a heck of a run right now.”
This post originally appeared on Sixers Wire! Follow us on Facebook!
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