The Philadelphia 76ers began their 3-game road trip on Tuesday with a predictable 124-96 loss to the Denver Nuggets. The Sixers invaded Ball Arena while missing Joel Embiid, Tyrese Maxey, Paul George, Kelly Oubre Jr., and Jabari Walker while the Nuggets had a healthy squad. There was very little chance for the Sixers to win that game.
With that being said, there were opportunities. Philadelphia shot just 4-for-24 from deep in the first half and it stalled the offense a bit. After the loss, coach Nick Nurse addressed the struggles as he did like the looks Philadelphia got on the offensive end.
“Listen, I think we’ve kind of been down this road a couple times,” Nurse told reporters. “The offense has got to be good against this team and it wasn’t awful. We just didn’t hit any shots. 24 3s in the first half. I bet you 19 or 20 of them were ones we probably wanted to take. I think we had a couple of our bigs take some early in the game that were a little quick, that I talked to them about in the first timeout, and said, We may need you to take them with the way they’re playing, packing the paint, but we got to search a little bit longer for something else, and then if it comes back around to you a little later in the shot clock, then we can do that. So, that was a little bit on us.”
For the Sixers to have any shot against the Nuggets on Tuesday, they had to convert on those open looks–which they didn’t do. Philadelphia shot just 39.4% from the floor which is not going to cut it against Denver’s No. 1 rated offense in the league.
“We got to some great spots,” Nurse continued. “Had some open 3s. We got to some great 15 footers, and we just didn’t hit any of them, and obviously, they were hitting. We were trying to send some help to (Nikola) Jokic, and he obviously passed them out, right? And they hit him, so kind of picking our poison, and they came out hot, and we didn’t, and that was pretty hard to get anything going from there.”
On top of that, Nurse didn’t like the energy Philadelphia played with in the Mile High City. He wants to see more out of his team rather than what they showed.
“Just, we were really short on all our shots,” he finished. “I thought we were a step, half step—running down long rebounds. I think they got three rebound 3s in the first quarter. That’s just, you know, you get a stop, and you just can’t give that up, and in a game like this, and the stuff that we needed to do, which was move the scoreboard, we didn’t do.”
The Sixers will take on the Sacramento Kings on Thursday to continue the road trip.
This article originally appeared on Sixers Wire: Nick Nurse addresses Sixers’ blowout loss to Nuggets to begin trip
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