The Philadelphia 76ers had a tough night in Tampa on Sunday when they fell to the Toronto Raptors 110-103 on a night when they couldn’t buy a bucket. They fired only 38.3% from the ground and then 11 against 37 from the bottom of the loss.
Superstar big man Joel Embiid felt pressure from the Raptors all night as he finished with 25 points but shot just 6 against 20 on the night. It was a night where he looked really good, but they didn’t fall.
“I was missing shots I used to make,” a somber Embiid said. “As soon as I cross half the track, two or three boys are sent to me and I played the right game all night. I shared the ball, passed it on to my teammates. We could have made more shots, a lot of shots were in and out. There are a lot of shots I’ve been doing all season and I’ve missed. So we have to do a better job. ”
After earning a maximum of 50 points in the race in his win over the Chicago Bulls on Friday, the big boy was unable to buy a bucket. It was really one of those nights and he even expressed it to coach Doc Rivers.
“I thought in the third quarter, as I was saying,‘ man who looked good tonight, the ball wouldn’t come in ’and there are nights like that,” Rivers said. “I thought a lot of our guys looked great tonight. The problem is that they didn’t come in and I thought the faults started to increase in terms of how we handled them, so we have to do a better job of handling the faults because that will happen over and over again.
Nor was it just Embiid. The Sixers received a lot of good looks from guys who usually take shots like Tobias Harris, for example. He shot only 6 against 17 at night and was only 1 against 9 from the depths. The ball moved to the offensive end and Embiid made the right plays of the double teams, only the shots did not fall.
“Yeah, unfortunately, it was,” Harris said. “For us, we looked really good and we gave them credit, they were able to do a lot of looks that made us get in the middle of the track instead of going out and running. We had good shots that we could make, just not we fell tonight. “
Ben Simmons returned to the lineup and had an offensive success scoring 28 points on the 9-for-11 shot, but even he acknowledged things could have been better on the offensive end.
“I think we all had a lot of great looks in attack that didn’t fall off,” he explained. “If they fell, it would have been a completely different game, but that’s how the game works.”
Basketball is a fault game and on Sunday only shots were missed. Now they have to move on to Tuesday’s rematch with the Raptors.
This post originally appeared on Sixers Wire! Follow us on Facebook!