Philadelphia shocks Phoenix, improves to 2-30 on the season
Anyone who has taken the time to scan the Philadelphia 76ers’ roster this season has to have wondered how, exactly, this team would have manage to win a game. Somehow, in 32 tries, they’ve managed to win two!
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As the NBA world laughed on during Saturday night, the Phoenix Suns fell to the Sixers while playing in Arizona by a 114-111 score. The Sixers were without potent rookie Jahlil Okafor (out with right knee soreness), but managed to win due to – and we’re not sure if general manager Sam Hinkie is into this – competent guard play from Ish Smith and Isaiah Canaan.
Hinkie, infamously, decided to tear down what was a mediocre Sixers team in 2013 and rebuild the franchise via tanking games and asset hoarding. He succeeded in all three pursuits, but the NBA and the team’s ownership lost its nerve midway through the third lost season and decided to bring in basketball lifer Jerry Colangelo to help make The Process a little more palatable.
Colangelo, who helps run Team USA and sell shoes overseas, came on board around the same time Canaan rediscovered his shooting stroke. The guard has hit 22-49 from behind the three-point line since Dec. 13, a 45 percent rate, while lending some credibility to the team’s backcourt. He scored 22 points in the win. Ish Smith, acquired on Christmas Eve, started and contributed 14 points and five assists.
Nik Stauskas, whom the Sixers acquired in June along with a bevy of draft picks, contributed 17 points off the bench.
More frightening for the Suns than the loss was the second quarter disappearance of Eric Bledsoe, who left the game with a knee sprain. The guard – who has endured to two previous surgeries to his left meniscus – had to be carried off the court and will have to take an MRI on Sunday. It’s possible that the team’s leading scorer merely suffered a knee contusion when he collided with Sixer big man Robert Covington; an incredibly painful injury that warrants help off court, but a setback far worse than a ligament or cartilage tear.
With Bledsoe out, the Suns were left to battle with a lightened roster. Brandon Knight, whom the team traded what will most assuredly be a top five pick for, needed 23 shots to score his team-leading 21 points. Tyson Chandler, who will be paid $25.4 million following this season until 2018, played just 14 minutes off the bench.
The victory had to come as a triumph of sorts for both Colangelo and 76ers associate head coach Mike D’Antoni – who was on the bench for the first time on the job. Neither, in their current roles, were and will be available for interviews to the media, but both had to be happy with not only the win but the Phoenix setting. Colangelo helped jump start the Suns franchise, acting as both part-owner and initial GM during the team’s expansion days
D’Antoni became the team’s interim and then head coach midway through 2003-04, helping create what became a Steve Nash-led offense that helped revolutionize the how the league views its play. He left the team in 2008 to become the New York Knicks’ head coach, while Colangelo sold his interest in the franchise a decade ago.
Philly center Nerlens Noel credited a break during the Christmas holiday for the team’s fresh start:
“Guys kind of refreshed themselves,” Nerlens Noel said. “We want to come with a better mind-set that the second third of the season we want to continue to progress and play up-pace basketball and put some numbers on the board with scoring and defense.”
The Sixers, meanwhile, still work with the league’s worst record at 2-30. The team helped stave off ignominy by winning in its 19th game of the season, but it will have to end 2015-16 on an 8-42 tear in order to top the 1972-73 Philadelphia 76ers for the worst record in NBA history. That pace, winning 16 percent of games between now and mid-April, may not seem like much – but this was a squad that was designed to lose, and this is a franchise that has lost 40 of its last 42 games dating back nine months.
For now, though, the team got a win. It has a capable if not world-beating backcourt and a new sense of purpose. Who knows what 2016 will bring?
Eight wins, hopefully.
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Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @KDonhoops
