Philadelphia outlasted Miami in a play-in rock fight to set up what might be the best series of the first round. The 76ers have a potential path to their first conference finals of Joel Embiid’s career … but they’ll have their work cut out for them against New York.
Apply all the clichéd adjectives you want to the Philadelphia 76ers’ 105-104 win over the Miami Heat in Wednesday’s play-in game: gritty, old-school, physical, hard-nosed. This was not the beautiful game, but rather a scrappy slopfest befitting a high-stakes postseason contest. The four players who took the most shots made a combined 33 percent of their attempts:
- Tyler Herro: 9 for 27
- Jimmy Butler: 5 for 18 (most of which came after he suffered a knee injury but kept playing)
- Joel Embiid: 6 for 17
- Tyrese Maxey: 6 for 16
But after overcoming a 12-point half-time deficit and several rounds of boos from the home crowd, the 76ers can breathe a sigh of relief: first, that they qualified for the playoffs at all, avoiding an elimination game against the Bulls on Friday, and second, that they avoided the top-seeded Celtics in the first round. (Those curses go to the potentially Butler-less Miami squad, which now faces incredibly long odds to return to the Finals.) Instead, Philadelphia will play the no. 2 Knicks in what might be the best series of the first round.
This result positions the 76ers on a potential path to the first conference finals of Embiid’s star-crossed career. Yet their performance on Wednesday also highlighted reasons to doubt their ability to beat the Knicks—their win was less the confident triumph of a team ready to storm to a first-round upset, and more the shaky survival of one dangerous but flawed group against another.
The most obvious sign of promise for the 76ers is that they continue to win at a ridiculous rate with Embiid on the floor. Philadelphia closed the regular season on an eight-game win streak, added a ninth consecutive win on Wednesday, and is now 32-8 this season when Embiid plays. That’s a 66-win pace over 82 games.
But as the final one-point margin indicates, the latest victory didn’t come easy. Through three quarters against the Heat, Embiid—who recently returned from knee surgery—was just 3-for-12 from the field, and he backed away from his typical role as the offense’s focal point for long stretches. With Maxey also slowed by Miami’s zone defense and Tobias Harris—who was benched in crunch time—struggling to make an impact, the 76ers relied on reserve forward Nicolas Batum to keep them in the game.
Batum obliged, scoring 20 points and shooting 6-for-10 from distance. (The rest of the team shot 6-for-25 on 3-pointers.) He added a game-clinching block in the closing seconds. But his single-game outburst doesn’t represent sustainable production for the 35-year-old backup, who’s much more accustomed to filling in the gaps at this stage of his career.
Fortunately for the 76ers, the Knicks won’t give them trouble in quite the same way that the Heat did. After falling behind early and losing Bam Adebayo to foul trouble, Miami coach Erik Spoelstra didn’t waste any time turning to a lively, roaming zone defense that bamboozled the 76ers for huge swaths of the game. Philadelphia averaged only 12 turnovers per game this season, second fewest in the league, but committed 12 in the first half alone—leading to 17 Heat points—against Miami.
Tom Thibodeau’s Knicks won’t mimic that approach. The Heat played a league-high 987 zone possessions (12 per game) this season, according to Synergy tracking data. For comparison, the Knicks have played just 69 total zone possessions across four seasons with Thibodeau as head coach, including just 10 this season; only the Pacers (nine possessions) played zone less often.
However, New York has the personnel to wreak havoc with a more traditional man-to-man style, even against the skilled Sixers; with OG Anunoby, Josh Hart, and a pairing of two strong centers (Isaiah Hartenstein and Mitchell Robinson), the Knicks ooze defensive tenacity in the frontcourt. They won’t give Embiid and his supporting cast many easy looks, either. New York allowed a ludicrous 100.9 points per 100 possessions with Anunoby on the court, which was the lowest figure for any rotation player in the league.
And the Heat poked at other holes that the Knicks should be able to exploit further. For instance, Miami scored 20 second-chance points off 18 offensive rebounds in the play-in game—a worrisome sign for Philadelphia given that the Knicks are the best offensive rebounding team in the league. Hartenstein and Robinson averaged a combined 7.9 offensive rebounds per game, the best mark for any teammate duo.
Allowing extra shots has been a surprising flaw for the 76ers defense all season long. Philadelphia ranked just 26th in defensive rebounding rate, per Cleaning the Glass, grabbing 71.5 percent of opponent misses. For context, the much-maligned defensive rebounding rate for the Thunder was 71.1 percent—basically the same as the Sixers’ season-long mark. (Philadelphia was better with Embiid on the court, though.)
Still, the two teams look evenly matched despite their seeding difference, especially with Julius Randle out for the postseason. The Ringer’s NBA Odds Machine gives the teams essentially the same chance to advance: 50.4 percent for the Knicks and 49.6 percent for the 76ers.
For as much as the Heat struggled to generate good looks against Philadelphia on Wednesday, the Knicks may as well, as coach Nick Nurse dials up defensive schemes to get the ball out of Jalen Brunson’s hands. At the very least, new Sixer Kyle Lowry will surely pester Brunson all series long.
Embiid might also benefit from the extra rest afforded teams in the first round of the playoffs. The Knicks and 76ers will have two days off after both Game 2 and Game 3.
Even on a relatively off night against the Heat, the reigning MVP finished with 23 points, 15 rebounds, and five assists, and he came alive in the fourth quarter. Over a 59-second span in crunch time, Embiid sank two free throws, nailed an open 3-pointer, grabbed an offensive rebound, and converted a three-point play; a minute later, he found Kelly Oubre Jr. on a cut for what proved to be the game-winning bucket.
Whether that sort of possession-to-possession dominance is sustainable over an entire game, let alone a series, remains to be seen—but for a player with a mixed playoff track record, that stretch was an important signal of Embiid’s extra gear.
The 76ers enter the true playoffs with plenty of questions, some more urgent after their close escape on Wednesday. They don’t know how consistently effective Embiid will be. They don’t know whether they can count on Harris, their third-leading scorer. They don’t know whether they can keep the Knicks off the boards.
But they also enter the true playoffs with a tremendous opportunity because the non-Celtics side of the Eastern Conference playoff bracket looks so wide open. The 3 vs. 6 series matches an inconsistent Bucks team that’s missing an injured Giannis Antetokounmpo for an unspecified amount of time against the inexperienced, imbalanced Pacers. Depending on Giannis’s health, the 76ers-Knicks winner should be favored to win the next round, too—which would mean the first conference finals berth for the 76ers since 2001 or the Knicks since 2000. Either way, history will be on the line when the teams tip off in Madison Square Garden on Saturday.