MIAMI — Before everybody dives too gleefully into the search for Doc Rivers’ replacement, they should at least do the man the favor of acknowledging that he has no good options. He may not even have an option that one would qualify as the least bad.
Sometimes, a team is just plain screwed, and there is a very high probability that the Sixers currently qualify as such a team. Nobody needed to watch their 106-92 loss to the Heat on Monday before contemplating such a scenario. We had an 82-game sample that said top-seeded Miami entered this postseason as the better team, and that the Sixers entered it within striking distance only because they enjoyed MVP-caliber production on two ends of the court at a position where many of their opponents barely had adequacy. Take away the MVP and replace him with something less than that and it only makes sense that the gap will widen. Lo and behold, here we are.
There are a variety of reasons why Rivers spent Game 1 of the Eastern Conference semifinals saddled with the full and undivided weight of the social media commentariat’s sacred responsibility for assigning real-time blame. One or two of these were valid, and we will evaluate those shortly, but most of them were coping mechanisms deployed out of necessity to keep a suffocating existential despair at bay long enough to derive some degree of meaning out of 48 minutes of basketball.
