The Philadelphia 76ers will look to rebound after a road loss when they host the Chicago Bulls on Monday.
To be fair, the Sixers competed with the Miami Heat on Saturday but fell short, 99-82, with newly acquired All-Star James Harden resting his strained hamstring.
Joel Embiid had 22 points and 15 rebounds, but made just four of 15 shot attempts and didn’t appear to have as many open looks without Harden.
The Sixers fell behind by at least 20 points for the third straight game. This time, they weren’t able to recover.
It’s just one loss in a marathon regular season, though numerous teams are battling for seeds in the hotly contested Eastern Conference. The top six teams are packed within six games of each other.
“I really don’t look at the standings,” Sixers head coach Doc Rivers said. “What do they matter? You have to win. And I swear to God, after 82 (games), someone’s going to tap me and say, ‘This is who you’re playing.’ … You can only control what you can control. The other stuff is for everyone else to talk about.”
Without Harden, Embiid faced more double teams than usual.
“Just to control the offense,” Embiid said of missing Harden. “Obviously, if all that attention is on me, it would be different if he’s out there because you gotta guard him a certain way. And that opens up a lot for whether it’s me, my teammates, that’s just another guy that brings so much attention. It makes the game easy.”
The Bulls will be hoping to avoid a fifth straight loss when they visit Philadelphia.
Chicago fell 118-112 to the Milwaukee Bucks on Friday despite Zach LaVine’s 30 points and DeMar DeRozan’s 29.
The Bulls appeared to be an elite team earlier this season and now they’re facing a brutal stretch of 10 of 12 on the road.
“It was much better than the last couple of games, but that’s just the starting point in terms of what you have to do,” Bulls head coach Billy Donovan said of losing to the Bucks. “I thought we really competed and were physical and tried to match them as well as we could. We had some breakdowns, but overall I thought the guys played hard and competed and battled for the entire game.”
The growing pains are tough lessons to endure at this stage of the season. But the Bulls have no choice but to learn and improve as the playoffs approach.
“You learn how hard it is to compete in this league, to beat a team like the Milwaukee Bucks that won a championship,” DeRozan said. “They had to go through plenty of growing pains as well until they got to their goal. We’ve got to take the growing pains and understand if you really want it, you have to get back up on your feet when you get knocked down. And how hard it is to complete in this league and play every single night, not every couple of games, not just versus the bad teams.
“Competing versus the good teams. We’ve got to take on that challenge. It’s good for us to get hit and see how hard it really is to win in this league,” DeRozan added.
The Bulls have struggled to find their rhythm with the addition of Tristan Thompson.
“It’s the lack of time that we’ve had together,” Donovan said. “I thought if we could get some length and some size and rebound we could get out in transition.”
–Field Level Media
