Panic Erupts Too Soon Following Sixers Game 1 Loss To The Nets

On Saturday night, the Sixers lost a basketball game to good, if not great, team. Almost simultaneously, the long dormant but ready-to-blow-at-any-moment supervolcano stewing in Yellowstone National Park erupted, sending clouds of ash for thousands of miles in every direction and blanketing the Northern Hemisphere in a cloud of dark, Brooklyn Nets jersey-colored waste, which steadily choked out whatever sad pockets of life remained.

Only it didn't quite happen like that, though if you were listening to chatter around Philadelphia and around the basketball world the past 48 hours, it may have seemed that it did.

There is a supervolanco in Yellowstone called the Yellowstone Caldera, and the Sixers did lose to the Nets on Saturday night, but that's where truth ends and blind hysteria begins.

The Sixers, of course, are the third seed and are heavily favored to beat the sixth-seeded Nets and at least contend for the Eastern Conference Championships. Anything short of a six or seven game second round series against the Toronto Raptors would be viewed as a failure; even a loss to the Raptors, a better team for much of the season, would be a pretty big dissapointment for most Philly fans.

Perhaps because of this, and because of the ease with which the red-hot 2017-18 Sixers playoff team dispatched the Miami Heat in the opening round a year ago, many may have expected a similar cakewalk against the Nets this year. Especially given the fact that this Sixers team, equipped with new stars like Jimmy Butler and Tobias Harris, should be markedly better than last year's team.

So it is understanable in some sense why all hell broke loose following a Game 1 loss to the Nets, at home, 111-102, as the Sixers aren't as invulnerable as initially believed. Just as it is maybe a litte bit understandable when, in 2013, a new study showed that pockets of magma beneath Yellowstone National Park were large than initially believed, all hell broke loose.

This is not about comparing the Nets odds of beating the Sixers in this seven-game series — yes, the series if a best of seven, not best of one — to the odds of the Yellowstone caldera wiping out North America (but maybe it is, a little bit). It is about overreaction.

Within a few hours of the loss, analysis took some pretty hearty leaps and bounds:

Brett Brown would surely be fired if the Nets won the series, ESPN assured the world. The Game 1 loss was also placed squarely on his shoulders.

Further mental gymnastics led other writers to believe Ben Simmons, specifically, "must go" if the Sixers lose the series. Simmons, the reigning rookie of the year and 2019 All Star, surely he has no place on a championship team.

Joel Embiid and Amir Johnson glancing at a cell phone for a moment on the bench to check on Johnson's daughter's health suddenly became emblematic of a team culture issue. The connection to the team's play on the court was...delusion. But a powerful point was made, maybe.

Speaking of Embiid, he should be benched for the entire opening round, and maybe more, because he is clearly not the same player after scoring only 22 points and pulling down 15 rebounds in 24 minutes of play Saturday. More than that, he's unlikely to ever lead the Sixers to success, because his knee gets hurt sometimes. All of this was unknown before Saturday's loss, but became clear immediately following.

And most damning of all: Simmons — that same questionable Simmons that led the Sixers to consecutive 50-plus win seasons, the same Simmons that "must go" — dared give an honest answer when reporters asked him about booing: "If you're going to boo, stay on that side." The Sixers probably should have ceded the series after Game 1, if one of their stars can't stand firmly behind some drunken jeering following a frustrating loss.

From the ash heap of that single catastrophic loss, the Sixers will, however, endeavor to mount a comeback. Game 2 is set for 8 p.m. Monday night at Wells Fargo Center.