Analysis: Some NBA teams know it's time to shake out of early-season slides — or else
MIAMI (AP) — Postgame interviews in the NBA typically start about 10 minutes after the final buzzer. Coaches usually speak first, followed by a few players. When a team wins, most people are in a great mood. When a team loses, not so much.
That's the normal routine.
Things are not normal for Philadelphia right now.
Philadelphia lost in Miami on Monday night, the 76ers wasting an early 19-point lead and falling 106-89. The game ended at 9:51 p.m. It took more than an hour for coach Nick Nurse to emerge for his postgame media session. The reason — a team meeting, because the 76ers had a lot to talk about after falling to 2-11 on the season.
“Sorry for the delay,” Nurse said to the half-dozen or so reporters who waited out his arrival. He took questions like normal, then the locker room opened and a few players talked as well.
There's a lot of the season left. The first quarter of the 82-game marathon isn't even over. It's not time to start panicking.
But some teams, quite frankly, know it's time for things to get better — Philly atop that list.
Since the NBA went to the current 16-team playoff format in 1984, there have been only four teams with losing records after 15 games that made it to the NBA Finals: San Antonio in 1998-99, Detroit in 2004-05, Boston in 2021-22 and Miami in 2022-23.
They were all 7-8.
That's bad news for Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Miami — three teams that just haven't hit anything close to their best stride yet. Injuries are a huge part of that; Khris Middleton hasn't played yet for Milwaukee, Joel Embiid played Monday night for only the third time this season for the 76ers, and the Heat got Jimmy Butler back after more than a week Monday but were without Terry Rozier and Jaime Jaquez Jr.
But the Heat are 6-7, the Bucks are 5-9 and 76ers are 2-11. And that's not anywhere near what those clubs expected coming into the year, injuries or no.
“There's urgency there, for sure," Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said. “If you look at in both conferences, there’s urgency throughout the conferences. And I think there’s parity. It brings out great competition. It brings out all these different emotions. You win a game, you feel like everything is great. You lose a game, you feel like the world is coming down. That’s what competition does, particularly when you’re jostling so competitively in the standings where there’s a lot of teams bunched up.”
Philadelphia hasn't scored 100 points in three of its last four games, hasn't even reached 90 points in either of its last two games. And here's a weird stat: the 76ers are 2-0 in overtime games this season, 0-11 in games that end after 48 minutes.
“Listen, it’s obviously difficult, right? Don’t like the losing, that’s for sure," Nurse said. “I mean, it doesn’t matter. The games are coming and we've got to figure some things out. We've got to play better. Got to get our guys on the floor. There’s a lot of things going on. But we've got to go out and play and somehow sustain. A lot of these games, there's lots of very good moments for long, long stretches.”
Cleveland and Boston have obviously separated themselves atop the Eastern Conference; the 15-0 Cavaliers visit the 11-3 Celtics in an NBA Cup game on Tuesday night. From there, the rest of the East — from Orlando at 9-6 to Philly in a group at 2-11 — are separated by just six games, with about a million games left to play. Nobody is out of it, certainly not a 76ers team that has Embiid, Tyrese Maxey, Paul George and an NBA champion point guard in Kyle Lowry.
“I mean, 2-11 is pretty bad, of course,” Philly's Jared McCain said. “But it's still the beginning of the season. Least minutes played as a team together, so I say it all the time: Give us grace. We've got to get better.”
To be fair, there was nothing that seemed to be shattered in the 76ers' locker room when the team meeting finally ended. No broken whiteboards, no signs of trouble, and many players were cracking jokes.
“We had a meeting? I didn't know,” Embiid said, which was his way of letting reporters know that he wasn't going to spill the tea on anything that got said behind closed doors.
He did concede, however, that he might need to be more aggressive going forward. The 76ers are figuring out how to make all the pieces fit, but Embiid knows they can't keep going down this path.
“We've got that record,” Embiid said, “and something needs to be done about it.”
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