(3) Philadelphia 76ers vs. (6) Brooklyn Nets: 2023 NBA first-round playoff preview
The Eastern Conference’s third-seeded Philadelphia 76ers and sixth-seeded Brooklyn Nets meet in the first round of the 2023 NBA playoffs. The Sixers won the teams' last playoff meeting in the 2019 opening round.
More Yahoo Sports NBA first-round playoff previews:
(1) Milwaukee Bucks vs. (8) Miami Heat
(2) Boston Celtics vs. (7) Atlanta Hawks
(4) Cleveland Cavaliers vs. (5) New York Knicks
(1) Denver Nuggets vs. (8) Minnesota Timberwolves
(2) Memphis Grizzlies vs. (7) Los Angeles Lakers
(3) Sacramento Kings vs. (6) Golden State Warriors
(4) Phoenix Suns vs. (5) Los Angeles Clippers
How they got here
Philadelphia 76ers (54-28)
Despite reinforcing the wing position over the summer, adding veterans De'Anthony Melton, P.J. Tucker and Danuel House (via some tampering), the Sixers picked up where they left off at the end of last season, when two-time returning MVP runner-up Joel Embiid was gassed, 33-year-old one-time MVP James Harden was cooked and both were bounced from the playoffs short of the conference finals for a fourth straight season.
Philadelphia lost four of its first five games and Harden to a strained right foot for a month at the start of November. Third-year guard Tyrese Maxey, who assumed the Sixers' lead playmaking role in Harden's absence, and two-time returning MVP runner-up Joel Embiid both suffered left foot injuries in the weeks afterward. As the calendar turned to December, Philadelphia was a .500 team in seventh place, losing in double overtime to the lottery-bound Houston Rockets despite the healthy returns of Harden and Embiid.
Then, the Sixers took LeBron James, Anthony Davis and the Los Angeles Lakers to overtime on Dec. 9, winning the first of eight straight, and they never looked back. Since that win over the Lakers, Philadelphia owns the East's top-rated offense (119.4 points per 100 possessions) and the league's best record (42-16).
Everything starts with the 7-foot, 280-pound Embiid, the odds-on MVP favorite and an absolute force on both ends of the floor. His 33.1 points per game (on 55/33/86 shooting splits) are the most by a center in almost 50 years, and he added 10.2 rebounds, 4.2 assists and 2.7 combined blocks and steals per game.
Harden returned to form as an All-NBA-caliber offensive maestro, averaging 21 points (on 44/39/87 splits) and a league-leading 10.7 assists per game. He and Embiid combined for 18 free throws a night, and their pick-and-roll partnership is as deadly as any in the game. The emergence of Maxey (20.3 points per game on 48/43/85 splits) gave Philadelphia a secondary playmaking option beyond the usual contributions of Tobias Harris, whose $37.6 million salary often masks his capabilities down the offensive depth chart.
The additions of Tucker, Melton and trade deadline acquisition Jalen McDaniels gave Sixers coach Doc Rivers enough defensive options to patch the problem of featuring Harden and Maxey in the backcourt. Philadelphia finished with a top-10 defense, and its best lineups performed closer to league-leading levels with Embiid as the anchor. Once again, the Sixers look formidable entering the playoffs, and once again, the success of their season will be determined entirely by whether they can ever meet playoff expectations.
Brooklyn Nets (45-37)
Oh, boy. The Nets began the season with Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, Ben Simmons and plenty of questions about being swept from the first round of the 2022 playoffs. They answered none of them, save for a stretch of 18 wins in 20 outings that briefly elevated them among the Eastern Conference elite. Irving sandwiched that run with an eight-game suspension for platforming antisemitic material and a trade request on Feb. 3.
The Nets met Irving's demand, dealing him to the Dallas Mavericks, and then did the same when Durant requested a trade to the Phoenix Suns thereafter. The combined return for Brooklyn was Mikal Bridges, Cameron Johnson, Dorian Finney-Smith, Spencer Dinwiddie and the rights to six first-round draft picks.
The incoming plethora of two-way wings might have been a perfect vehicle for Simmons' abilities, except mental and physical hurdles prevented the three-time All-Star from ever finding his stride. By the end of the March, Jacque Vaughn, who assumed the Nets' head-coaching duties once they fired Steve Nash seven games into the season, officially ruled out Simmons for the rest of the season with knee and back injuries.
Durant and Irving left the Nets in fifth place in early February, and the emergence of Bridges as a legitimate primary option helped hold a guaranteed playoff seed. Bridges averaged 26.1 points (48/38/89 splits), 4.5 rebounds and 2.7 assists in 27 games down the stretch. Brooklyn has a plethora of wings and shooters to surround Bridges on a roster that is once again ready-made for a superstar to elevate it into contention.
As it were, Brooklyn finished 11-13 as currently constituted after the All-Star break, owners of a negative net rating (-1.2 points per 100 possessions). Defense can still keep the Nets in games, but the difficulty of generating halfcourt offense behind Bridges as a first-time lead playmaker is a tall order come playoff time.
Head to head
The Sixers swept their regular-season series with the Nets, 4-0.
In their first meeting on Nov. 22, Durant, Irving and Simmons all started for Brooklyn, while Philadelphia was without Embiid, Harden and Maxey, and the Sixers still won, 115-106. The healthy Sixers handed Irving and company another loss two months later. Nobody played in Sunday's regular-season finale, when G League mainstays Mac McClung and Louis King combined for 40 points in Philadelphia's blowout win of Brooklyn.
The only showdown that could be considered a preview of this series was their meeting on Feb. 11, and even that came shortly before the All-Star break in the first game Bridges and Johnson dressed for the Nets. Embiid and Harden combined for 66 points in a 101-98 victory, but Brooklyn's defense strangled everyone else on the Sixers enough to grant Bridges a game-winning layup attempt in the final seconds.
Closing lineups
Philadelphia 76ers
Embiid, Harden and Harris will be on the floor in crunch time, and Tucker's 91 games of playoff experience over the past six seasons have likely earned him a spot alongside them. Melton joined that quartet in the Sixers' most-used (and theoretically best defensive) lineup this season — a 1,029-possession sample size that yielded a surplus of 6.8 points per 100 possessions. That net rating nearly doubled in 715 possessions with Maxey in the fifth spot, so expect Rivers to favor the 22-year-old until defense becomes the priority.
Brooklyn Nets
The Nets have ridden the highly versatile small-ball lineup of Dinwiddie, Finney-Smith, Bridges, Johnson and Royce O'Neale at times in fourth quarters, but they need size with Embiid on the floor of close games. That means subbing O'Neale out for 6-foot-11 starting center Nic Claxton in a lineup that has outscored opponents by 20 points over 328 minutes. That includes a +11 finish in 23 minutes against the Sixers.
Matchup to watch
If Embiid is dominating, as he has done for the last five months, the Nets really have no shot. That is no guarantee, given Embiid's history of injuries and conditioning issues in the playoffs, but it is a monumental task for Claxton. The only other certifiable big body on Brooklyn's roster is a developing Day'Ron Sharpe.
Claxton did submit his best performance of the season (a 25-point double-double on 11-of-12 shooting) opposite Embiid on Jan. 25. Claxton kept Embiid to 26 points on just 6-for-18 shooting in that same game, offering a modicum of hope he can reproduce some semblance of that effort in this series. Any minutes isolating Embiid is time Brooklyn's perimeter defenders can spend snuffing out the rest of the Sixers.
The NBA's tracking data provides another sliver of optimism: When the two centers have been directly matched up against each other this season, Claxton has scored 21 points (10-12 FG) to Embiid's 26 (10-21 FG) on superior efficiency. That defies the eye test and the fact that Embiid gave Brooklyn 37 points on 18 shots in their last meeting. It would be a monumental upset if the Nets seriously threaten the Sixers in this series, but forcing Embiid to face his playoff demons early could be enough to put a scare into them.
BetMGM series odds
Brooklyn Nets (+600)
Philadelphia 76ers (-900)
Series schedule (all times Eastern)
Game 1: Brooklyn at Philadelphia on Saturday (1 p.m., ESPN)
Game 2: Brooklyn at Philadelphia on Monday (7:30 p.m., TNT)
Game 3: Philadelphia at Brooklyn on Thursday, April 20 (7:30 p.m., TNT)
Game 4: Philadelphia at Brooklyn on Saturday, April 22 (1 p.m., TNT)
*Game 5: Brooklyn at Philadelphia on Monday, April 24 (TBD)
*Game 6: Philadelphia at Brooklyn on Thursday, April 27 (TBD)
*Game 7: Brooklyn at Philadelphia on Saturday, April 29 (TBD)
Prediction
Sixers in six.
