Tag: Philadelphia 76ers
Highlights

Breakfast Special: Nuggets-Spurs Has Gone Mad

- by Fox Doucette

The Denver Nuggets went 34-7 at home during the regular season. The San Antonio Spurs won 32 of their 41 home contests, losing just nine. If you knew nothing else about the series, you’d predict that it’d be the kind of seven-game series where the home team won every game and it ended in the Mile High City without the series truly starting in the “a series doesn’t start until the road team wins a game” sort of way. Well, hold on to your butts, folks. Denver won 117-103, in San Antonio, and leveled the series at 2-2, with each …

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Highlights

Breakfast Special: Kevin Durant’s Better As A Heel

- by Fox Doucette

Kevin Durant may be a thin-skinned, easily-riled mercenary with all the moral courage of a toddler threatened with having his screen time taken away, but there aren’t many better players in the league when they’re in full-on Eff You Mode. Durant had 12 points in the first quarter, finished with 38 points on 14-of-23 shooting including 11-of-13 on his two-point shots, posted a game-best plus-32, and led the Golden State Warriors back to control of their first-round series with the Los Angeles Clippers with a 132-105 win. Some games merit deep dives and deeper analysis. Durant and Stephen Curry (21 …

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Highlights

Breakfast Special: The Sixers Finally Showed Up

- by Fox Doucette

Far from the outright embarrassment they were when they lost Game 1, the Philadelphia 76ers showed up in a big way in Game 2 to even their playoff series with the Brooklyn Nets 145-123. This was a case of a Nets team with virtually no playoff experience against the seasoned Sixers who made it to the second round last year, exactly the kind of battle-hardened bounceback game that shows maybe Brett Brown isn’t going to be coaching the Pelicans next year after all. HERO OF SERBIA Boban Marjanovic showed out for the second unit, scoring 16 points in 18 minutes …

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Highlights

Breakfast Special: Revenge of the Scrubs

- by Fox Doucette

There were a few real head-scratcher losses by good teams in the NBA Wednesday night, and while we’ll save the recaps for the lightning round because they don’t merit a feature (with one exception for the top three that you’ll see when we get there), it is endlessly interesting every year when March and April roll around and for every team that provides a compelling storyline as they fight for a playoff spot (Pacers and West Coast road trip, anyone?), there are five more that are either bad teams winning as their garbage fire roster finally provides some hope for …

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Highlights

Breakfast Special: Milwaukee’s Best

- by Fox Doucette

Spring is here, suffering is here, life is Skittles and life is beer, and the Los Angeles Lakers got poisoned in the park like pigeons by the Milwaukee Bucks, 115-101. It was the first time since 1982 that the Bucks swept the season series from the Lakers twice in a row, and those ’81 and ’82 Lakers teams had Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Last year, a not-yet-there Milwaukee team managed to grab both wins from the practically-G-League Lakers, and this year, the first game at Staples Center featured a Bucks road win. The home rematch…well, the Bucks didn’t have …

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Highlights

Breakfast Special: Silly College, March is for Pros

- by Fox Doucette

The talk on most of basketball Twitter yesterday turned from the NBA to college, as everyone’s a bracketologist om Selection Sunday. And besides my alma mater Nevada getting in as a 7 seed (and apparently 26th overall by the NCAA’s gimcrack math), that’s all I have to say about college ball until the draft. The NBA was too busy giving us amazing matchups, like… Did the Sixers Just Make a Finals Case? Philadelphia beat Milwaukee on the road 130-125. Imagine a world where either the Pacers pull off a major miracle and finish third or else Boston gets hot down …

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Highlights

Breakfast Special: Competitive Games Are For Suckers

- by Fox Doucette

The NBA put on seven games for the entertainment of the viewing public Tuesday night. Only two of them were anyone’s idea of competitive in the fourth quarter, and a third finished with the tightest final score margin (five) but the team that won was up 14 with little enough time left in the game that it would’ve been bonkers had they not put the game on ice (give it up for Darren Collison, and we’ll get to the Pacers-Knicks game shortly.) The rest of them were either double-digit blowouts or a Spurs-Mavs game where every time Dallas looked like …

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Highlights

Breakfast Special: The Pacers Stink on National TV

- by Fox Doucette

Smart Pacers fans knew to watch anything besides ABC yesterday, as smart Pacers fans saw the 106-89 beatdown—featuring 30 second-half points and some of the worst shooting the team’s put up all year—coming down Broad Street in Philadelphia with its doors open. Take a returning Joel Embiid, on the road, on national TV, and that’s a perfect storm for the 76ers to dominate, and so (at least after halftime) they dominated, all while Pacers fans resigned ourselves to wishing we had the dulcet tones of Chris Denari and Quinn Buckner on Fox Sports Indiana/League Pass to soothe our souls instead …

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Highlights

Breakfast Special: James Harden Plays 2K Out There

- by Fox Doucette

Rationality fails in the face of James Harden‘s stat lines. Even though he’s got Chris Paul back and in theory doesn’t have to be the entire Houston Rockets’ offense by himself, in practice Harden needed 58 points, 10 assists, seven rebounds, four steals, eight made three-pointers (on 18 tries, and 16-of-32 overall), and a whole lot of fans of the Miami Heat left scratching their heads like “how did this game get away?” The Rockets, down 12 after three quarters, outscored Miami 35-20 in the fourth to win 121-118. Houston was so depleted in this game that they used a …

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Pacers Tuesday

Looking Ahead to the Playoffs for the Indiana Pacers

- by Fox Doucette

The Indiana Pacers are 18-10 in the absence of Victor Oladipo, including wins over Atlanta and Toronto in which Oladipo left the game with an injury. They are 22-11 without him, which would seem to suggest that, if not “just as good in his absence”, at the very least the Pacers are deep enough to have earned the fifth-best record in the NBA that they presently hold. The emergence of Myles Turner as a Defensive Player of the Year candidate and Domantas Sabonis as an honest-to-gods Sixth Man of the Year choice certainly help, as has the addition of rent-a-guard …

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