Sixers Have Get-Well Win Against Blazers But Go Down Another Man

The Sixers get a win, but lose a wing.

[Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images]

Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and is now writing for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey As Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard. 

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Just seeing the smirk on Joel Embiid’s face as he took center court for the opening jump against Hassan Whiteside, you kinda knew everything was gonna be OK in this one. With the possible exception of Andre Drummond -- who fucking got himself traded to Cleveland to avoid having to square up against our big man late this year -- no one-on-one matchup gives Joel more za za zu than Mr. Assy Plus-Minus. Coming off two straight losses (including a blessedly rare L at home, against the putrid Phoenix Suns) and with this being their third game in four nights, we needed the extra push, and Whiteside certainly gave it to us last night. 

Literally, actually: Five minutes into the first quarter, Whiteside got typically lost navigating a Milton-Embiid pick-and-roll, and by the time it ended with Joel rolling to the hoop for an easy dunk, all the Blazers big could do was shove Embiid as he was coming down off the rim. The push resulted in both an and-one and a technical foul, as well as JoJo springing back up to have some choice words for his old foe -- thanks to Horf for playing Peacekeeper in the absence of Ben Simmons -- before laughing it off and motioning for the not-Wells Fargo Center crowd to do the responding for him. 

Anyway, the pair of free throws (thank God the team doesn’t have Tobias -- who scored 22 but missed his lone free-throw attempt last night -- shooting techs anymore) gave him 12 points in his first-quarter run, on the way to a 42 and 17 night against the short-stacked Blazers. Damian Lillard did his best to play Zach LaBooker against us, going off for 25 in the first half, but he seemed to tire a bit as the game went on, as Matisse Thybulle and a taking-it-increasingly-personally Josh Richardson started really harassing him on the perimeter. Still ended with 37, but no other Blazer had more than 15, and aside from an outburst in the second quarter that saw Portland briefly seize the lead with Embiid on the pine -- eliciting a smattering of (likely necessary) bloodletting boos from the home crowd -- the Sixers controlled this one fairly handily. Final score: PHI 115, POR 104. 

The win didn’t come without its cost, though. After a superlative night of making Dame Dolla earn every cent of his offense, Thybulle went up for a dunk in traffic and got fouled, but landed awkwardly on Anfernee Simons’ foot on the way down. (Yes, it’s OK to personally blame Spike for his boy fucking with our playoff push.) Matisse was in pain on the ground for about a minute after the dunk attempt, though at least he appeared to be putting weight on his foot as he limped off the court. Twitter’s early diagnosis was a sprained ankle, and I suppose we’ll see the severity of it after the MRI results come back today. 

With two weeks to go in the season, a light sprain might mean Matisse is still back in time for the playoffs, but a grade-two sprain could render him unavailable for our increasingly inevitable Miami showdown in the first round (which, at least, would start in Philly, now a half-game up in the fourth spot, if the season ended today). Needless to say, that would be less than ideal for a team still missing its best wing defender (and Jimmy Butler pesterer) in Ben Simmons -- who, by the way, is now just a couple days away from his supposed re-evaluated-in-three-weeks re-evaluation, though we’ll see if the Sixers actually stay on schedule with that one. 

How big a blow would losing Matisse be? Well, most of Philadelphia (my mother in particular) would certainly be devastated at the on-court loss of his smile, which -- yep, tough one. It’s still to be determined how much Brett Brown would actually trust him in the playoffs, though, especially since his shot has still yet to quite come back around to where it was before he got hurt in December. (Thybulle was 1-4 from deep in this one, bringing him to around 30% for the month of March.) For the last few weeks, his and Furkan Korkmaz’s minutes have varied pretty wildly depending on the matchup, and in a playoff scenario you wonder if Brett would lean towards one or the other almost exclusively in his rotation. 

For his own part, our coach seemed none too pleased after the game at the prospect of having to play out the string without his young defensive ace. “Boy, you just hate to see a young man like that not get every possible rep he can,” he lamented, in between extended swigs from a water bottle with the label inexplicably torn off. “You don’t know how he’ll respond to certain situations until you actually get him in there -- and the cost of losing any amount of that experience is really tough on a rookie player. And on our team right now, where, you know, the perimeter defense hasn’t always been where it should be.” 

So it’ll be a lot of tapping our fingers the next couple days, as we await news about Thybulle and an update on Simmons that could tell us a lot about how our postseason prospects are looking. In the meantime, we host Houston tomorrow night in our second-to-last game of the season against an over-.500 opponent. (Our old friends from Milwaukee come to visit a week later.) Gonna need all the juice we can get for that one, so maybe let’s find that fan that gave Russell Westbrook the double-finger a couple opening nights ago and have him be the bell-ringer before the game.