PHILADELPHIA _ The euphoria that a 10-5 January brought this city when it came to the 76ers has deflated.
There is the obvious reason _ Joel Embiid being relegated to the sideline for nine of the last 10 games with a knee injury _ but just as big is the inept defense the team has displayed of late. In those 10 games heading into Wednesday's contest against the San Antonio Spurs, the Sixers had yielded an average of 114.5 points a game.
Not exactly surprising is that they were losers in six of their previous seven, including the last four, all on the road. The offensively efficient Spurs certainly didn't supply a remedy, either. San Antonio repeatedly answered any blitz the Sixers could muster with terrific ball movement that led to easy baskets in what became a 111-103 Sixers loss.
The Spurs improved to 40-12, while the Sixers dropped to 18-34.
The Spurs, playing the second of eight games on their current road trip, made 21 of their first 30 shots and methodically scored 58 first-half points for a seven-point lead at the break.
The Sixers showed life in the second half, cutting the lead to two midway through the fourth, but San Antonio, which got a game-high 32 points from Kawhi Leonard, seemed to have an answer when needed in beating the Sixers for the second time in seven days.
Jahlil Okafor and Dario Saric paced the Sixers with 20 points each, while Okafor also grabbed eight rebounds. Robert Covington added 18 points and Nik Stauskas added 16.
"That's the thing that I get, coming back off the road and those four games, we were a little bit beaten up, we didn't have Jo and there are some realities to the design of the roster," 76ers coach Brett Brown said. "In this group, there is zero margin for error if you can't find a way to get into 48 minutes. Because you blink and you get hit in the mouth so hard in this league and you get hit quick. And you get hit hard and quick with this team maybe more than any.
"It's not like it used to be in January, and some of that was people playing above themselves, some of it was Joel Embiid, some of it was you get into a rhythm. It's life in the NBA. You can get into rhythms when you're playing because of the frequency of games. You can also get in a doghouse for a while. I feel that all we do is go back to square one, the boring stuff. You go back and you figure out what we're doing defensively, first. I think there's a physicality that we left (on) our road trip that I'm not happy about. I'm not happy at all about some of the physical side of how we defended. That has to be, and will always be, the backbone of any conversation that we have when we talk about growing this. When that leaves us, it's not good enough for us, it's not how we're building the program. That's the sting. That physical side of stuff wasn't as long. It was maybe 40 minutes or 38, but it wasn't 48. We need to get that back."
The effort never left, which is something Brown can wrap his arms around while he awaits the return of Embiid, whose defensive presence may solve the coach's woes in that area.
