Credit To The Celtics For Actually Making This A Series
Maddie Meyer. Getty Images.Credit where credit is due, the Celtics played a pretty solid game of hoops last night. And as a blogger, I have way too much integrity to just watch the Sixers get their asses kicked and then simply not blog about it after the fact. Could I take the easy way out and just blog about the wins? Certainly. But I'm a blogger of honor. I'm a blogger of integrity. And as the greatest basketball mind this company has to offer, I just feel like it's my obligation to tell everybody what really went down last night.
The Sixers needed a loss. They needed a loss in the worst way possible. Things have been going way too well for this team lately. They swept the Nets, they won game 1 in Boston without Embiid in the lineup, and then Joel won the MVP award on Tuesday night. Obviously life is always great when everything is going perfectly like that, but at the end of the day that's not real life. There are ups and downs to everything. And you have to learn how to handle the downs.
The most effective performance enhancing drug in sports is a little thing called adversity. Give your team a little shot of adversity and see how they handle it. See how they overcome it. The Sixers aren't focused on just beating the Boston Celtics. The Sixers are focused on winning a championship. The only way to do that is with a team who can handle the adversity it takes to get to that mountaintop.
If they just swept their way through Boston, they wouldn't get a chance to battle through that adversity. So did they lose last night? If you're a simple-brained neanderthal then sure, yeah, they lost. But at the end of the day, that was a scheduled loss. They needed it, and they knew all they had to do was split the series in Boston. That won't stop Boston from throwing a parade today because they beat the Sixers with a 65% Joel Embiid last night. But the Sixers have already put themselves in a position here where as long as they don't lose 2 games in a row, they win the series. Seems pretty easy to me.