Carried by a monumental effort from Lou Williams that almost resulted in his first triple-double, the Sixers staved off a late Warriors shooting display to win 110-102. Lou's shot was on tonight, none more on (onner?) than his game-sealing three to give them a two possession lead with one second left on the shot clock. I'll let RickoT explain the rest in our newest segment here on Liberty Ballers: Ricko Overreacts to Basic Statistics!
Great shot by Lou to bail him out. See what I mean about him being an all-star? That was a great shot. 5-8 from the three-point line! Who needs Kapono?
That was fun, wasn't it? Stay tuned for more the rest of the season.
The second half run by the Warriors was caused mainly by two things: Samuel Dalembert's foul trouble and a return to earth for our outside shooting percentage. Marreese Speights played better in his 10 minutes but still doesn't play enough defense to merit consistent playing time in Eddie Jordan's defense-first rotations. So Jordan went to Brand at center for a good chunk of the game, giving PF minutes to Thaddeus Young. It's really tough for me tonight to comment on how each player performed defensively since there was relatively no defense played by either team. I can say there were some very impressive individual performances by Andre Iguodala and Jrue Holiday. In addition to a number of impressive steals, AI, Lou, and Jrue held the Warriors guards (Curry, Ellis, Morrow) to 21-59 shooting from the field (< 36%).
However, the defensive rebounding wasn't there the whole game (a lot of it being Dalembert's quick fouls), and inefficiency on the offensive end led to more possessions for Golden State. This marked the second straight game the Sixers' opponent put up a whopping 95 shot attempts. The Warriors also managed a surreal 33 three pointers (say that 3 times fast. Get it!?!), making 13 of them, good for just under 40%.
The Sixers did have better ball movement tonight for the most part, helped by a ridiculous amount of made shots by this historically poor outside shooting team as well as some fairly decent court control by the guards. There were still too many times when the ball was simply dumped into Elton Brand about 12 feet from the basket as he slowly worked on his man until firing up his legless turnaround jump shot. Moreover, there were just as many Andre Iguodala cringe-inducing jump shots that happened to fall in tonight. So the half court offense is far from perfect. And the Warriors' defense is far from high school level. But a win is a win, and you have yourself one unhappy blogger about that.
Check the game thread for a neatly wrapped .gif showing a half court oop from Jrue to Iguodala that'll make your momma's hair turn white. That may be a Barbershop reference, but I'm honestly not sure. Sixers/Suns tomorrow -- God help me if we win. Final note, holy crap the Warriors crowd got loud (rhyme) when they were coming back in the 4th. For a 16-40 team I applaud the Bay Area fans, who I was positive had forgotten that basketball was still played outside of Los Angeles.