The Sixers have won eight of their last nine games and sit at 30-13 heading into their Tuesday night matchup with the 22-21 Warriors.
It will be their final game before Thursday’s 3 p.m. ET trade deadline.
Here are the essentials:
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- When: 10 p.m. ET with Sixers Pregame Live at 9 p.m. on NBCSP+
- Where: Chase Center
- Broadcast: NBC Sports Philadelphia
- Live stream: NBCSportsPhiladelphia.com and the MyTeams app
And here are three storylines to watch:
No Curry vs. Curry showdown
Neither Seth Curry (left ankle sprain) nor Steph Curry (tailbone contusion) will play Tuesday.
NBA
It’s the third consecutive game the Sixers’ Curry will miss. Shake Milton has scored 49 points over the last two, starting against the Kings and coming off the bench against the Knicks.
James Wiseman and Eric Paschall are set to return after missing three games because of the NBA's health and safety protocols.
Joel Embiid is still out with a left knee bone bruise. The Sixers said on March 13 that he’d be re-evaluated in two weeks.
Sixers know they need to clean things up
After the Sixers’ overtime win Sunday at Madison Square Garden, nobody was pretending it was among their better victories this season.
“A lot of just horrendous execution by us tonight,” head coach Doc Rivers said. “It’s good when you win these games. Film gets a lot better when you’re teaching. We made a lot of mistakes. I had to waste the first timeout in overtime because I thought we had kind of lost our spirit. It was one of those games, man. You just had to pull it out of them and we did that tonight.”
Though their play down the stretch in New York was flawed, the Sixers, at 17-6, have the Eastern Conference’s most “clutch” wins and best clutch winning percentage.
The win mattered, in part because it enabled the Sixers to retain their spot at the top of the Eastern Conference standings, but Tobias Harris cares most about the process and the team’s big-picture aspirations.
“… It was a great win for us," he said, “but I look at myself individually and say, ‘That’s not going to cut it in playoff basketball, because it’s a different type of intensity and there were too many mistakes.’ I personally look at that and say, we’ve got to watch film and see ways to evolve and be better. I think for this team, that’s the whole group mentality. It’s great to get this win ... but tomorrow we’re going to lock in and get in this film session and understand areas that we can grow in so five, six games from now when we’re in a nail-biter, we don’t have those same types of mistakes.
“I think for us, it’s (about) growth and evolution as a team, but we’re striving for something greater. We know night after night what we bring to the table and that we can put ourselves in that position to win. But we’re actually truly trying to gain something so that when playoff basketball comes, we know how solid we are as a team and we know what to expect from one another in those situations. I would just say it’s that long-term outlook on what we’re trying to do.”
Chance for a big rebounding edge
As long as the Sixers limit turnovers, they should be well-positioned to have more possessions than Golden State.
The Warriors are 25th in defensive rebounding percentage and 30th in offensive rebounding percentage, according to Cleaning the Glass. The Sixers rank 11th and seventh in those respective categories.
In the five games since Embiid’s knee injury, Dwight Howard and Tony Bradley have notched a total of 96 rebounds, or a combined average of 19.2 per game. That’s an eye-catching pace, but they should have an opportunity to sustain it against the Warriors.