PHILADELPHIA — After losing two home playoff games and facing eliminatio✨n in Game 5 against the Sixeౠrs on the road, Nets coach Kenny Atkinson was hopeful his team would give its best effort Tuesday night and force a Game 6 in Brooklyn.
“My guesꦜs is ᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚwe come out fighting like lions,” Atkinson said before the game. “That’s what we’ve done all year.”
Turns out the Nets came out like lambs, losing the game almost as soon as it began. The opening quarter of Game 5 — heck all fo👍ur quarters — will go down as one of the worst stretches of basketball in Nets history, and that’s saying something.
It was an ugly exhibition that resulted in a 122-100 stomping by the Sixers, who needed just five games to close out the Nets in their best-of-seven first-🔥round series. Among the lowlights: the Nets didn’t score their first points until a Jarrett Allen dunk with 6:08 left in the first quarter; the Nets made just one of their first 15 shots as the Sixers exploded to a 23-2 lead; and the Sixers led as mꦓany as 39 points in the second half.
“At the end 🎃of the day we weren’t good enough,ꦦ” Atkinson said.
It was clear the Sixers wanted to close out the Nets more than the Nets wanted to stay alive. The Nets were uncharacteristically sloppy. They had over-and-back violations, shot-clock viol🌸ations and couldn’t establish any kind of rhythm on offense. And while Joe Harris continued to be mired in his shooting slump, the Sixers were draining 3s like they were layups.
“They did a great jo🌄b of capitalizing off our misses and scoring in transition,” Nets guard D’Angelo Russell said.
This is normally the kind of game to flush, and while there was plenty of positi𓂃ve talk in the locker room about how far the Nets have come this season, there’s one image of Tuesday night’s game worth using as motivation du🌠ring the offseason. It came in the second quarter as the Sixers were blowing out the Nets.
After Joel Embiid buried a 3-pointer from the top of the key to make it 41-17, he stood at center court as timeout was called and spread his 7-foot wingspan to bask in the adulation of the crowd. It was an over🅰-the-top praise-me pose the Nets should never forget. By then the Nets had no fight to retaliate. It was 60-31 at halftime and 95-64 at the end of the third quarter. So much for coming out “fighting like lions.”
While the Sixers move ♑on to the second round, the Nets are left to ponder what went wrong after an impressive 111-102 victory in Game 1, which seems like a lifetime ago.
In the end the blowout means little. The Nets were cooked after losing a must-win Game 4 Saturday afternoon in Brooklyn. There was a realization Philadelphia could beat them with Embiid, who scored 23 points in Game 5, or without him as they did in Game 3. And the task of winning three straight games, including two in Philaౠdelphia, was daunting.
“They showed how ✱powerful a team they ꧙are,” Atkinson said of the Sixers.
The Nets were let down by Harris, who went from the best 3-point s𝕴hooter in the league at 47.4 percent during the regular season 🃏to a bricklayer (19 percent) in the postseason. Russell averaged 19 points a game but didn’t have the impact of an All-Star, and Allen was pushed around like Kleenex.
“This will give us a lot of thought going into the offseason to understand where we are and ꦗwhere we have to go to get to this leve♈l,” Atkinson said.
Still, Game 5 should add more motivation than devastation, especially the snapshot of Embiid exaltin🍌g at center court.
“These tﷺhings do fuel you,” At🍷kinson said. “It should give us a good push into the offseason.”
A push to be lions again.