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It's tough to preview a basketball game when basketball doesn't work the way you're accustomed to it working. Nope, the Sixers, these Sixers who were supposed to challenge the all-time record for futility, failing to win even 20 regular-season games.
Instead, they're 3-0, having stolen the lineal championship of basketball from the Miami Heat and, against all odds, holding on for two more games. Now the Golden State Warriors come to town, revisiting their legacy as Philadelphia's original NBA team, except now the laws of the universe are broken.
Like the Sixers beating the Heat and Bulls twice in a week and scoring 110 points a game along the way. The Sixers, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, haven't scored 110 points in a game since 1984. That's absolutely a true fact, look it up.
So this presents an interesting conundrum for the Warriors, ostensibly one of the league's more entertaining teams. But now that the Sixers are 3-0 and averaging 110 points a game, we have to disregard the other assumptions we'd ordinarily make about this game. For instance: ordinarily we'd be pretty geeked about Andre Iguodala coming back to Philadelphia, but since the Sixers started 3-0, Dre's been turned into a sheep named And-Ram Iguo-baaaaa-la. How will Evan Turner deal with being guarded by a sheep? Can he adjust?
Ordinarily we'd be concerned by Steph Curry and Klay Thompson's shooting. The Warriors' guards take a ton of three-pointers and make a bunch of them. But how will they adjust to the massive gravitational and electromagnetic anomalies that have come to plague Sixers games? Such anomalies have opened up the offensive game of rookie point guard Michael Carter-Williams. Coming out of college, MCW's jump shooting was the most pitiable thing ever conceived that involved the word "Downtown" and didn't involve Petula Clark. Now he's shooting 47 percent from outside the arc.
We'd ordinarily expect Andrew Bogut to take Spencer Hawes to the cleaners, but I don't know how Golden State's big Aussie center is going to react to the all-Xenon atmosphere that they've got at the WFC now. Do Australians breathe Xenon? Because apparently Sam Hinkie does, and he's taught all his players to do the same.
The world is upside-down.