PHILADELPHIA — 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.
They say that the NBA is a star-driven league, and it is. A team can win a lot of games playing the brand of basketball that the Sixers played in a 115-106 win over the Nets on Tuesday night, but it won’t win any championships. That’s as close to a universal truth as it gets, whatever the purists would like to believe. Doc Rivers knows it. Daryl Morey knows it. Embiid, Harden, Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving — all of them know it. Simmons probably knows it, whether or not he cares.
Yet there is another part of the equation. It’s the thing that we saw from the short-handed Sixers as they bounced off the ropes and never stopped swinging on Tuesday night. It’s the thing that too often goes missing with their stars in the game. It’s the thing that the Nets have never had.
