| 27 February 2011
If I only knew that all I had to do in order to get us wins was taking days off...
Due to a lovely weekend in Barcelona I completely missed two huge wins by the Sixers: the 77-71 against the Spurs (25-28, .471) and the following 87-107 at Minnesota (26-28, .481).
Judging from the facts I could check after (boxscore, play-by-play page, highlights) I guess the only nice thing of the Spurs game was the final W, because shooting was awful on both parts.
Winning a low scoring game against a traditionally defensive minded team like San Antonio is a very good sign, I guess.
Also, I loved to see how Holiday was the MVP, closing the game with four foul shots in the last 20 seconds, how Hawes was the only other scorer in double figure (!) and how Brand managed to pull down seventeen rebounds against Duncan, Blair, Dice & co.
A huge, huge step in Sixers' growing process.
Totally different thing in Minnesota, where Sixers placed seven players in double figure, kept T'Wolves to only 13 fourth quarter points, with no player getting more than 35 minutes.
But the most important thing to me is that the young Sixers showed some maturity playing with the right attitude against the lowly T'Wolves after the big win of the night before, over an elite, veteran team (more after the jump).
In the words of Doug Collins: "I said, 'You know, we're coming in here and we've had some success and we'll see now how we handle it. We know we've bounced back when we've got our hearts broken, so let's see how we do this"'.
They responded win the best way they could, continuing to play with the intensity and unselfishness that brought them the latest wins.
Sixers are definitely on the rise and see the .500 mark close: pretty unbelievable for a team that started 3-13.
Impressive and, at least to me, shocking.
