The Philadelphia 76ers earned their 44th victory of the season Friday night, defeating the Sacramento Kings 123-114 at the Wells Fargo Center.
It has come full circle for the Philadelphia 76ers. Just a few short years ago, they were the young team in a rebuild. They were young enough to remain fiesty game in and game out. They would give any team their best shot on any given night, but would almost always come up short.
Things are different now. The Sixers have become the team that pulls away late to avoid the upsets from the younger, less talented teams. On Tuesday, it was the Cavaliers who gave the Sixers all they could handle before Joel Embiid woke up and secured the seven-point victory in the final minutes. Tonight, it was the Sacramento Kings who gave the Sixers their best shot.
The Sixers, in one of Brett Brown’s more noticeable coaching performances of the season, utilized mismatch opportunities endlessly to build a lead as big as 13 points. Brown often elected to switch Jimmy Butler to the ball-handler role and bury Ben Simmons in the paint against smaller matchups in De’Aaron Fox and Buddy Hield.
With Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons taking a break, Jimmy Butler became a ball-handling post operator while Harris became the shooter. Butler abused matchups with Bogdan Bogdanovic, Harrison Barnes, and Nemanja Bjelica to create scoring opportunities for himself, while Tobias Harris benefited from cuts for easy finishes at the rim. When Butler was given a few minutes to refresh, Harris attacked isolation opportunities in the post against the same favorable matchups.
As a result of Brown’s rotations and manipulation of matchups, all five starters had excellent nights. Simmons scored the fewest points of the five, finishing with 18. Harris and Redick added 19 each. Embiid logged 21, while Butler led the way with 22. However, it wasn’t just the 99 points scored by the starters that tell the story of tonight’s game, the assist to turnover ratio is what made this performance possible. The Sixers recorded 28 assists while only committing 10 turnovers. They were highly efficient on the offensive end of the floor tonight, maximizing the majority of their possessions. As a result, Philadelphia, now 44-25, emerged victorious.
The Sixers will now turn their attention to the Milwaukee Bucks, whom they play in their gym on Sunday afternoon.
The Bucks (52-17) are looking to lock up the No. 1 seed in the East, while the Sixers are looking to break the 20-games-above-.500 seal for the first time this season and maintain pace as the three-seed in a very tight battle for home-court advantage with Indiana and Boston. Every game is a must-win for the Sixers as they look to guarantee themselves home court advantage in the first round of the playoffs.