It’s over for the Philadelphia 76ers. For the fourth time in the last five seasons, the 76ers have been knocked out of the playoffs in the second round. The other time? They were knocked out in the opening round of the postseason.
Looking at the team’s performance over the last five seasons, one might wonder what’s wrong with the franchise? They seem to have an extremely talented roster featuring the likes of Joel Embiid, James Harden, Tobias Harris, etc. Moreover, the players play well during the regular season.
Unfortunately, when things get tough, the 76ers seem to succumb to the pressure of performing in the playoffs. It links directly to the Sixers roster not being up to the mark mentally and their opponents take full advantage of that weakness.
After losing in Game 6 of their second round series against the Miami Heat, Joel Embiid pointed out that the teams lack tough players such as PJ Tucker. Adding to that point by Embiid, Tobias Harris also said something along the same lines in the postgame conference:
“Mental toughness. I think so. Just mental toughness. That part of it, I don’t think we have yet. Seeing the Milwaukee game yesterday (against the Celtics), that’s a team that’s been through the fire, being able to fight and keep going. At times for our group, too many things just affected us as a whole. We drop our heads too much. Our body language at times is crappy. We needed that to be better throughout this series. And I think that hurt us in this series.”
“Our mental toughness for sure hurt us against that group. And they did a lot of things to kind of challenge that — the hustle plays, the 50-50 basketballs, everything. The physicality by them, as well. We needed to be better as a collective group at just holding our head and just fighting, just going right back at it. And I don’t think we did a great job of that.”
Like Harris pointed out, the lack of mental toughness has been a recurring villain for the franchise. The way they react when being down by some points or getting overpowered is not the characteristic of a mentally tough team.
They need to get rid of that flaw in their game in order to succeed in the NBA. But the biggest question remains: will they get a chance to rectify their mistakes in the next season? We are all aware of the fact that James Harden might not opt in to his player option and leave the team stranded.
Either way, they need to gear up for next season, this time around, to get over the hump in the second round of the playoffs.
