Sixers dissect lack of execution in road trip finale loss to Bulls
The Philadelphia 76ers looked like they were battling some tired legs on Saturday night when they finished their 4-game road trip against the Chicago Bulls.
On the second night of a back-to-back and playing their third game in four nights, the Sixers just didn’t have it in a 105-92 loss to the Bulls. Philadelphia shot just 39.1% from the floor compared to 50.6% for Chicago.
Tyrese Maxey shot just 8-for-22 and Tobias Harris was 6-for-16. The Sixers as a team shot just 1-for-10 from deep in the opening quarter as the Bulls took control of the game.
“I think that certainly offensively, we needed to shoot it better and just execute better,” coach Nick Nurse told reporters after the loss. “I think you saw the sluggish part was a lot of standing around and non-cutting and things like that and execution. Give them credit. They did play and fight a lot of the set pieces we were doing. They were disrupting them early on.”
It did seem that in the early going, the Sixers settled for too many jumpers. They wanted to try and go for the big 3-pointers, but they weren’t able to get them to fall and that hurt them on offense overall. There wasn’t much of a rhythm.
“I thought we started shooting too much from the perimeter early,” Nurse continued. “It’s never a good idea to try to jump shoot your way to a win on the road, usually, right? I think started 1-for-10 from 3 so that didn’t help, but I will say this I thought we fought.”
Nurse is right. The Sixers did fight. The Bulls are a tough matchup for Philadelphia and fatigue certainly played a factor, but Philadelphia was right there. It was only a nine-point game heading to the fourth before Chicago opened up an 18-point lead in the final frame.
The Sixers just ran out of gas.
“I thought the defense was actually at times very good, created a good amount of turnovers,” Nurse finished. “I thought we were fighting. I thought they had a couple of big rescue baskets that they made as well so it wasn’t like we didn’t have it because we were fighting out there with what we did have, but didn’t have enough. Didn’t play well enough. Probably just not enough offensive juice to get a W tonight.”
The Sixers will return home to host these same Bulls on Tuesday.
