Daily News | Ben Simmons and the Nets’ loser energy were no match for a Sixers team that taught its injured stars a lesson | David Murphy
Loser energy is a difficult thing to overcome. One team had it. The other team had the opposite. Ben Simmons and two future Hall of Famers were on the first team. James Harden and Joel Embiid were not on the second. Somewhere within all of those facts is a lesson.
Energy. Pace. Physicality. Will. Synergy. Put them in a package and call it whatever you like. That is why the Sixers were able to overcome the absence of their top three scorers against an opponent that featured two of the top scorers in the sport. It is why they were able to overcome an eight-point first-quarter deficit and blitz the Nets on both ends of the court. For 48 minutes, they never slowed down. They never stopped.
That wasn’t the case for the other team. This was a night that was supposed to be about Simmons. In some ways, it was. If a guy plays against his old team, but his old team isn’t there, does it really count? Turns out, the answer is, well, kind of. By the fourth quarter, Simmons had faded so far into the background that he seemed to take the rest of his team with him. Or, more likely, they all arrived independently. Maybe the Nets are his perfect spot.
But there was something else there, something greater than the sum of its parts. The additions of P.J. Tucker and Montrezl Harrell and the emergence of Paul Reed have combined to give them a level of physicality that did not previously exist when Embiid was on the sideline. Melton had a hand in that, too. It manifested in Harris’ gritty 24-point performance, in the 21 minutes that Furkan Korkmaz played where the Sixers outscored the Nets by 12.
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