With any other Sixers team, this game would be an easy season-long front-runner for craziest game of the year. This season, though, it's about par for the course. Double-OT, a thirty-point scorer, highlight moves, insane comebacks and insaner game-tiers and go-ahead buckets--this game had it all. And we're pretty sure the Sixers will one-up it against the Spurs a couple nights from now.
First and foremost--the Sixers lost this game at least three times before they lost it for real. In regulation, Kyrie Irving finally got over his career-long mental block while playing the Sixers and took over in the fourth quarter, seemingly putting the game out of reach with some big buckets and fine creating for teammates. But then the Sixers came back to tie the game and force OT, where the Cavs got up six with about two minutes to go. The Sixers again somehow managed to scrap to a draw, forcing a second OT, where the Cavs hit some free throws to go up three with under 20 seconds to go--a deficit Michael Carter-Williams erased with a ridiculously low-percentage contested stepback look from three. That kinda game, you see.
Then the Sixers took a team vote and decided to let the Cavs just win the damn game already. Well maybe, maybe not on that being the exact course of events, but it would go a long way to explaining the relative lack of defensive resistance on Kyrie Irving's buzzer-beating drive attempt--his third of the game, natch--and then MCW's bizarre in-bounds toss to the rim that Wilt Chamberlain on stitls couldn't have thrown down, and which no Sixer even really made an attempt at anyway.
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In any event, it's a fine loss for these Sixers. 5-2 would've been uncomfortably good for this squad, and here they were able to get to all sorts of fun stat achievements--a career-high for Evan Turner (31 points), with double-doubles for Evan (31/10), Spencer Hawes (13/11) and Carter-Williams (21 and 13, with seven boards, two steals, two blocks and three threes--if you drafted MCW in your fantasy league this year, kudos)--without worrying about further offsetting their initial tanking mission.
Still though, games like tonight--you have to kind of wonder if this team is maybe a little too good to tank outright. Yeah, yeah, it's early, and we have no idea when Spence and Evan are gonna play themselves off the island with the big-ass numbers they're putting up, and MCW crash-landing back to earth is now officially way overdue. But man, they showed some serious fight tonight to withstand that Kyrie onslaught, and the fact that it even took a superlative offensive effort at home from one of the NBA's best young guards to fend off the Sixers from winning both ends of their back-to-back with Cleveland...it's getting hard to keep acting like this team is really all that bad.
Upcoming home games against the Spurs and Rockets might help to clarify things some. Those are two good teams, and if they can kinda suck the life out of this Sixers squad a little, maybe the season will fold in on itself from there. But is that even what we want at this point? Isn't this season too much fun to give up on in the names of draft prospects? It's getting very confusing, and this season was supposed to be the absolute crystal clear-est Sixer season ever. This is all Doug Collins' fault somehow.
Anyway, fun game, good loss. Enjoy the 31-spot, Evan--once you break the 30 ceiling, you can never truly go back to mediocrity again. We hope.
