MILWAUKEE — A few hours before tip-off on Saturday, Philadelphia 76ers head coach Doc Rivers sat down for his pre-game press conference and, after bragging about his Marquette Golden Eagles’ Big East championship, noted how no lead is safe in the NBA anymore.
“It’s been that way for a year and a half, I think everyone’s starting to notice now,” Rivers said. “The 3-ball and the amount of people who can make ’em have changed the game. You just can’t have empty possessions when you have a lead or it will go away quickly.”
Those words turned out to be prescient, as the Sixers came back from an 18-point second-half deficit to stun the Milwaukee Bucks, 133-130, and end the Eastern Conference leaders’ 16-game winning streak. The Bucks’ winning streak was the longest in the league since the Phoenix Suns won 18 in a row in 2021.
“Hopefully we can use this and just keep going,” James Harden said. “They keep talking about we have the toughest schedule remaining. So for us it’s just every game. Every game, every quarter, every possession, making sure we do it together, and tonight was huge for us.”
Harden was stellar, finishing with a season-high 38 points, nine rebounds and 10 assists. Nineteen of those points and four of those assists came in the fourth quarter, as Harden led the Sixers’ turnaround and came up with huge plays down the stretch. With the Sixers down by four and less than 90 seconds to play, Harden drained a 30-footer, then assisted on Joel Embiid’s go-ahead 3 on the very next possession.
“That’s what I do man,” Harden said. “I’m very comfortable in those situations. Whether it’s playmaking, whether it’s scoring, I’ve been doing it for a long time. That’s just me out there playing basketball. I put the work in, I work on it every single day in practice and the results show.”
The Sixers scored 48 points in the fourth quarter, which was nearly as many as they had in the entire first half. Even more impressive, they scored on 10 of their final 11 possessions, and the one empty trip was a five-second call where they didn’t get a shot up.
Pre-game, Rivers praised the Bucks for their poise in big moments, but in the end it was his Sixers that stayed cool under pressure down the stretch.
“That’s growth for us,” Rivers said. “The Bucks do what we did tonight all the time. We hung in there, it was good. We were really struggling getting good rhythm offensively, we kept searching, we kept trusting, and film will look great tomorrow because it will show that.”
Losers of three out of four coming in to Saturday, this was a game the Sixers needed — to get back on track, to gain some much-needed confidence against a potential playoff foe and to maintain some breathing room in the race for the No. 3 seed. It was no surprise, then, that there was plenty of yelling and celebrating as the team walked through the tunnel and back to the visitors locker room.
But for all the excitement of breaking the Bucks’ streak, and the impressive nature of the comeback, Embiid was there to bring everyone back to earth. More than an hour after the final buzzer, and with the rest of the team long gone, the big man finally emerged to share his thoughts.
“It’s good. Having these type of games, especially with our schedule the rest of the way, it’s good for us,” Embiid said. “It prepares us for the playoffs. But it’s good and bad. It’s good because you know you’re able to do it, but then again it’s also bad because you also put yourself in those positions. Maybe we should try to find a way to not put ourselves in those positions in the first place.”
