PHILADELPHIA — Danny Green wasn’t ready for his Moses Malone moment, so I guess I’ll be the one to say it. Take the Sixers in five. And don’t think twice.
As for Green, I don’t blame him for laying it on thick when somebody asked him about the growing perception that the Sixers are ripe for an upset in their first-round playoff series against the Toronto Raptors. The first rule in any postseason matchup is to seize the motivational high ground. Up in Toronto, Nick Nurse can’t be thrilled that his team has emerged as a trendy upset pick in recent days. The idea of the Raptors as a playoff sleeper has reached a conventional enough point that Shaquille O’Neal actually made headlines by picking the Sixers in a sweep.
Green, who won a title in Toronto in 2019, wasn’t going to be the one to pour cold water on that kind of hype.
“They’d give anybody a tough series, whether they were playing us or not,” the veteran wing said on Wednesday after the Sixers wrapped up their second practice in preparation for Saturday’s playoff opener. “Of course it’s going to a tough series. They beat us more games than we beat them during the season for a reason. They’re a really good team. We have to take them seriously. They’re nobody to sleep on, no matter who they’re playing. ... I think they give anybody a different, weird matchup because of their length and how well they’re coached.”
All of which is true. As far as team basketball is concerned, the Raptors are a daunting matchup. The Sixers realized as much during the regular season, going 1-3 in their four-game series and losing both of the games in which Joel Embiid and James Harden played. The Raptors are young, and athletic, and deep, and they also happen to be one of the hottest teams in the Eastern Conference. Their 14-5 record in their last 19 games included an 8-1 mark against teams that finished the regular season among the top eight seeds in their conference.
But there’s a reason the Sixers will enter the series as a 2-1 favorite in the Vegas sportsbooks. Their road to the NBA Finals might be a tough one to hoe, but that’s mostly because of the potential matchups awaiting them in the second and third rounds. Talent prevails this time of year, and the perception of the Sixers’ seems to be in the midst of a drastic overcorrection. Has the Harden-Embiid pairing fallen short of the lofty expectations that accompanied the mid-February trade that brought them together? Sure. But will they be the best tandem on the court during the series? No doubt.
More often than not, playoff basketball is as simple as that. The bearishness surrounding the Sixers’ chances stems mostly from a handful of variables that a week of practice should be enough to neutralize. One, their transition defense has been mostly abysmal this season. According to CleaningTheGlass.com, the Sixers are allowing 131.1 points per 100 transition plays. Only three teams in the NBA ranked worst. In the Raptors, they’ll need to contend with an opponent that has been one of the better transition-scoring teams in the league during Nurse’s four years as head coach. In the same vein, the Raptors rely heavily on second-chance points in their halfcourt offense, with an offensive rebounding rate of 28.4% that ranked second in the NBA this season. Conversely, the Sixers have struggled with their defensive rebounding throughout the season, ranking in the bottom half of the league in that category.
Cause for concern? In the Sixers’ two losses to Toronto down the stretch, they were outrebounded by an astonishing 32-12 margin on the offensive glass. Obviously, that’s not a good look. But it’s also the sort of thing that the Sixers have four practices to iron out.
“We know as a group we have things we need to work on,” coach Doc Rivers said after Wednesday’s practice. “A lot of it is continuity. A lot of it is spacing. We know exactly what we need to do.”
And therein lies the argument for the Sixers. When they have faltered this season, it has not been a matter of talent. In Embiid, they have the NBA’s scoring champion, a bona fide MVP-caliber center who will leave the Sixers with the best player on the court for all but eight to 10 minutes of each game. In Harden, they have a playoff-tested veteran who can make a strong case as the series’ second-best player even if he isn’t the dynamic isolation scorer we saw in Houston. In Tyrese Maxey and Tobias Harris, they have a couple of players with the scoring chops to exploit the attention the Raptors devote to disrupting the Embiid-Harden combo. As long as the Sixers use this week to get all of those parts working off the right script, the problems that the Raptors pose are eminently surmountable.
Make no mistake: Toronto has talent. Fred VanVleet is one of the league’s more underrated guards. Same goes for OG Anunoby, a two-way force whom any team in this playoff field would consider itself fortunate to have. But while it’s fair to have discounted your championship expectations based on what you saw in the regular season, a loss to the Raptors in the first round would still qualify as a monumental upset. For now, though, the question boils down to the benefit of the doubt. As long as you extend the Sixers a reasonable share of it, you should find them tough to bet against.
