Sixers Fall To Shorthanded Blazers 121-105
By Connor Thomas
If you missed the Sixers matchup with the Portland Trailblazers last night, here’s pretty much what it looked like:
No surprise, Joel Embiid was absolutely dominant again for Philly, scoring 31 points in the first half despite missing a short bit of game time with a knee injury. What was a surprise is that a Sixers side without Ben Simmons was largely ineffective outside of Embiid, and would’ve gotten run completely out of the building if it weren’t for the big man’s efforts. Another surprise was the play of Portland without stars Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum. Despite missing their 2 best players, the Blazers still had 6 players in double figures, led by 3rd year guard Gary Trent wiho had 24. Oh, and some guy named Carmelo Anthony also scored 22. The Sixers offense was bad, their defense was worse, and they got completely dominated in the 2nd half of Thursday night’s contest by a team that shouldn’t be better than them even at full strength. But, hey, that’s the NBA. Sometimes you put up a stinker, it happens to everyone. This is one of those games where you mentally flush the memories down the toilet and move on to the next one. The Sixers, who fell to 16-7 with the loss, have a huge game with the new-look Brooklyn Nets coming up tomorrow night. If they are able to put together a strong performance against the Durant-Harden-Irving trio, all will be forgiven from last night’s awful performance.