Joel Embiid put up 39 points and 13 rebounds as the Philadelphia 76ers held off the Brooklyn Nets’ late rally to win 123-117, as they regained the top spot in the Eastern Conference. Ben Simmons added 17 points and nine assists. Tobias Harris chipped in 26 points.
The Nets, who were without multiple players including Kevin Durant, James Harden, LaMarcus Aldridge and Blake Griffin, went down by as many as 22 points in the fourth quarter, looking like a game the Sixers were going to run away with. However, Brooklyn went on a 21-2 run in just over six minutes of action to open the door up for them to steal the game.
Once the Nets were able to make it a three-point game, Simmons was fouled on the drive to the rim on the other end, as the 62 percent free-throw shooter stepped to the line and knocked down both attempts with a little over two minutes left in regulation.
That eased the anxiety at Wells Fargo Center just a tad, as the Sixers were ultimately able to put the Nets away at the free-throw line. The Sixers didn’t make a single field goal the rest of the game after Furkan Korkmaz‘s 3-pointer at the 8:21 mark that gave Philly their game-high 22 point lead.
The Nets’ 21-2 run came with Kyrie Irving sitting on the bench, as Nets head coach Steve Nash relied on Landry Shamet, Bruce Brown, Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot, Alize Johnson and Nicolas Claxton to bring them back into this game.
“I didn’t want to take the group out that was doing so well,” Nash said. “I wanted to reward those guys for playing as well as they did.”
“They worked for each other on both ends of the floor. Scrapped and they were able to recover the momentum and played really well.”
Irving, who had 37 points on 13-of-22 shooting and nine assists in this one, didn’t seem to be too upset about not coming back into the game when the Nets had a chance to steal this one late, as he humbly stated that they were down 19 when he checked out of the game.
“Leave that group in and let them rock,” Irving said. “They played their hearts out. That’s all you can ask. I thought they grew as a group and us as a team.”
While this win gives the Sixers the home-court advantage if they were to finish the regular season with the same record as the Nets, Nash is looking at the bigger picture down the stretch.
“It’d be great to have the No. 1 seed. I think it means a lot, it’s valuable,” Nash said. “But not at the expense of losing players or prolonging our injury situation. So I think we have to be very careful and make sure that our guys get to the finish line as whole as possible.”
