As long as they have Joel Embiid, the Sixers have the toughness to hang in an old school Eastern Conference

Here come the Sixers, and they're looking tougher to beat than before, mostly because they're looking tougher.

Tobias Harris and Tyrese Maxey were the main reasons the Sixers were able to sweep the Nets. Their play will be key to beating the Celtics or Hawks in the second round.Read moreYong Kim / Staff Photographer

Published April 24, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET

A few days ago, Doc Rivers laughed when somebody asked if he’d ever seen a street fight like Game 3.

“I played for the Knicks,” the Sixers coach said after his team brawled its way to a 3-0 series lead against the Nets on Thursday.

And, hey, maybe bully ball is back. As of Sunday evening, the Eastern Conference semis look like they are going to have a serious 1980s flair with the Knicks and Celtics poised to join the Sixers as three of the last four teams standing. Throw in the Bucks and you’d have the same final four as 40 years ago, when the Sixers beat the Knicks and Bucks en route to their most recent NBA championship. Even if the Heat prevail, you’ll have a conference semis with three or four of the NBA’s top 10 teams in overall defense, defensive rebounding, opponents’ field goal percentage, and opponents’ turnover percentage.

The crazy thing is that the Sixers might actually belong amongst that group. Of all the positives you can draw from their four-game sweep of the Nets, that’s the biggest. Yes, this was a series that they were supposed to win. But the important thing is the way they won it. Before this season, the post-Process Sixers had lost 10 of the 11 playoff games they’d played in which they scored less than 99 points. Against the Nets, they were 2-0 in such games. Not only that, but they had a combined margin of victory of +20 in those games.

“It’s not always pretty at different moments,” forward Tobias Harris said on Saturday after the Sixers clinched the sweep with a 96-88 win without Joel Embiid, “but I think for the most part, we’ve done a great job of battling and fighting through and to be honest, there’s still going to be a lot more adversity to come. We’re on a team that’s fighting for a championship, those types of hurdles you’re going to have to fight.”

We probably shouldn’t get too carried away. The Sixers have a way of making you feel foolish for the conclusions you draw. The Nets were undersized, overmatched, and outmanned. If this had been a real boxing match, the refs would have stopped it after Game 2. That’s an easy scenario in which to act tough. The Sixers haven’t proven anything yet.

That said, they have made it clear that they are different team from the ones that crumbled against the Hawks and the Heat the last two postseasons. Those teams would not have come back to win Game 3. Who knows about Game 4, when Embiid was unable to go after spraining his knee two nights earlier.

A few numbers from the series that speak to this team’s evolving identity:

1) Paul Reed and P.J. Tucker combined to grab 28 offensive rebounds in the series. The entire Nets team finished with just 23.

2) Between offensive rebounds and turnovers, the Sixers finished the series with about 30 “extra” possessions. Compare that to last year’s first-round series, when the Sixers had 25 more turnovers and 10 fewer offensive rebounds than the Raptors. Toronto attempted 46 more shots from the field than the Sixers did in that series. This year, the Sixers attempted 33 more than the Nets. That’s the difference between sweeping a team and letting them hang around until Game 6. No doubt, some of that is attributable to personnel. That Toronto team was bigger, stronger, more athletic than these Nets. At the same time, that Sixers team was consistently on the wrong side of a lot of the little things that end up determining basketball games in the postseason. This team has the good kind of dogs: Reed, Tucker, De’Anthony Melton. They may not be difference-makers in the classic sense of the word. On this team, though, they make all the difference in the world.

3) Tyrese Maxey was 15-of-30 from three-point range while leading the Sixers with 21.8 points per game. He’s a far more comfortable player this year than he was in 2021-22, when he tended to fade in the background for long stretches of games. Maxey was a constant presence throughout the sweep of the Nets, every bit as involved on the offensive end as Embiid and James Harden.

So, yeah, they are different. The good kind of different. Is it a meaningful difference? We won’t know that until we see them against the Celtics, who have beaten them in 20 of 32 regular season and playoff games since Embiid’s second season in the league. In two playoffs series against the Celtics, the Sixers have lost eight of nine games. They’ve scored more than 106 points in one of those games.

It goes without saying that all of this is contingent on Embiid’s health. After Game 4, Rivers said he thought there was only a 50% chance “at best” that the big man would be ready for the start of Round 2. The Sixers are in a better position to survive without him than they were last season, when they lost Games 1 and 2 against the Heat as Embiid recovered from a blow to the head while also dealing with a torn thumb ligament.

“Playoffs is all about recovery, recovering mentally and physically,” Harden said after Game 4. “So it’s one game, you can’t get too high, can’t get too low over it. It’s a great job of us as a team finishing the series, but our next opponent is on the doorstep for us and we’ll be ready for whoever that is, but we do have to recover physically and mentally and understand that we still got a lot of work to do.”