ORLANDO, Fla. — The Sixers have made a habit out of losing, but the habits reached an unacceptable level Sunday night.
Coach Brett Brown called out his entire team after the 130-116 loss to the Orlando Magic that was bad on so many levels that Brown hardly knew where to start in his postgame review (see Instant Replay). The Sixers trailed by 29 in the middle of the third period, cut it to eight late in the fourth, but ultimately ran out of time.
“The Magic have some good young talent, but I thought that the way we started the game was as poor as can be,” Brown said. “It was unacceptable, not professional.
“We talk about it all the time when we view people: It’s how you compete. For the most part, our guys compete, but tonight, we didn’t and that’s unacceptable.”
He was not alone in how he saw it. Giving up 77 first-half points caught everyone’s attention (see highlights).
“We played no defense, we gave no effort, we had no juice, we dug ourselves too much of a hole,” Ish Smith said. “I don’t know why, but we just let them get too comfortable out there. It’s not like we were playing a back-to-back, we just didn’t bring it and it showed up on the scoreboard.”
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“No team should be able to score 77 points in a half, especially a team we think we can beat,” Jerami Grant added. “Coach was heated, we were all heated. Everybody was mad and fed up with what was going on.”
Brown just about predicted what was going to happen in his pregame meeting with the media. He was concerned about stopping Magic center Nik Vucevic and guard Victor Oladipo, and for good reason. Nerlens Noel and Jahlil Okafor were responsible for defending Vucevic, but neither did even an adequate job as Vucevic hit 13 of 18 shots and finished with 28 points. In the span of five nights, Vucevic scored 63 points on 26 of 39 (67 percent) shooting in a pair of Magic wins over the Sixers.
Oladipo matched Vucevic's 28, coming around Vucevic picks to get open jumpers.
Brown had seen enough of Noel’s non-defense, benching the 6-foot-11 forward two minutes into the second half and keeping him there the rest of the game. Okafor got 12 minutes of action in the second half, but not because of his defense.
“People are going to look at Nerlens and it’s not entirely fair because everybody was poor,” Brown said. “I thought Jahlil came in and did some decent things offensively, but you walk that fine line of you need some points, but you need some energy, some spark, some defense, too.”
The one bright spot of the night was the span from the middle of the third period to the four-minute mark of the fourth quarter when the Sixers trimmed a 29-point deficit to just eight. There was still time to complete a miracle comeback, but the Sixers' rally was stopped by some mistakes at the offensive end and slip-ups, again, at the defensive end.
The Sixers' bench provided most of the spark during the rally. Grant, Isaiah Canaan and Richaun Holmes supplied 26 points in the second half, hitting 9 of 14 shots and converting nine Magic turnovers into 18 points. Smith had 12 points and three assists in the second half.
“The group that sort of tipped it and got us going was unlikely suspects,” Brown said. “We’re down 29 and then you’re down eight. That’s a massive swing.”
Still, Smith knew there was no justifying the Sixers' start.
“When you get down that many points, everything has to be perfect and we can’t play that way,” Smith said. “The fight we showed in the second half, that’s the fight we’ve got to show for 48 minutes. Somehow, we’ve got to find a way to start the game that way and keep it going.”