Daily News | Doc Rivers and the Sixers have run out of excuses for another playoff failure | Mike Sielski
Maybe the 76ers will saunter into Scotiabank Arena in Toronto on Thursday night, thrash the Raptors to end this first-round series, and sneer as they tell everyone they told you so. But the display of defensiveness that Doc Rivers put on after practice Wednesday sure didn’t seem the act of a coach supremely confident in himself or his team. After taking a three-games-to-none lead in these Eastern Conference quarterfinals, the Sixers had four chances to finish off the Raptors.
Really? Rivers’ own heavy history in such situations suggests that the Sixers face a hard task in closing out this series, and he bristled when someone brought up that past Wednesday. Three times in his career, one of Rivers’ teams has had a 3-1 lead and lost the series anyway, but he painted himself as largely a victim of bad luck and adverse conditions.
The 2015 Clippers? Chris Paul missed the first two games of that Western Conference semifinal against the Rockets. “Then he was playing on one leg,” Rivers said. The 2020 Clippers, who lost to the Nuggets in the first round? “That’s the one where we blew that.” How big of him to admit. But he went only so far. “That was in the bubble,” Rivers said, “and anything can happen in the bubble. Game 7 would have been in L.A. But it just happens. With me, I would say I’ve got to do better always.
With what he said Wednesday, Rivers did nothing to dissuade anyone from believing that these factors are already preying on his and the Sixers’ minds. It took Danny Green, who has three championship rings himself, to remind everyone — including his own coach – that the Raptors didn’t wrest away control of this series as much as the Sixers handed it over to them.
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