In the span of 36 hours, the Sixers had to play the Spurs in San Antonio, fly to Chicago, play the Bulls on a back-to-back, and then get on a plane and fly to Houston. It’s like the schedule makers had never seen a United States map.

On the flipside, they didn’t have to face Dejounte Murray, DeMar DeRozan, Jakob Poeltl, Zach LaVine, or Nik Vucevic, and that pretty much sums up the 2021 NBA regular season, doesn’t it? Ridiculous travel, a crunched schedule, and myriad games where the best players simply are not available, making for lopsided affairs

In the Sixers’ case, they’ll take it. They’re now on a five-game winning streak after beating Chicago by 12, and increased their lead over Brooklyn to a full game, with the tiebreaker secured.

Here’s the remaining schedule:

They should win at least five of seven there. Houston stinks, they get the Pistons and Pelicans at home, and Indy and Miami aren’t exactly world beaters this year. If the situation becomes iffy come May 14th, then you clean up at home against the woeful Magic.

Brooklyn still has to play:

  • at Milwaukee
  • at Dallas
  • at Denver
  • at Chicago
  • vs. San Antonio
  • vs. Chicago
  • vs. Cleveland

They’ve got a tougher slate. And Milwaukee is 3.5 back after a ridiculous loss to the Rockets, so if the Sixers just take care of business, they’re the #1 seed in the Eastern Conference, which would allow them to avoid the Bucks/Nets in the second round and get New York instead.

Right, to the Chicago game, Doc Rivers on the overall performance, and allowing the Bulls back in it:

“Yeah I wasn’t happy. That’s two nights in a row where our bench has kind of given up a lead. It’s something we can fix. They just didn’t play well, to be honest. I thought as bad as they were defensively, it was offensively where they didn’t have a lot of movement. We’ll be able to fix that.”

The bench hit four shots on Monday night. Didn’t help that Furkan Korkmaz had to leave with a right ankle sprain, but they got just 23 points from the other six guys comprising iterations of the second unit.

On Ben Simmons handling Coby White in the fourth quarter, same way he slowed Lonnie Walker on Sunday:

“You don’t see me campaigning, and I’m not going to, but I’m just gonna say it again – there is not a better defender in this league. That last side out of bounds play, they ran a great action, Ben blew it up completely. They couldn’t get the ball in, he gets the steal, and the game is over. I don’t know how many times he’s done that. We’re talking about ultra-quick guys, big guys, his strength I think is what surprises most of the guys he’s guarding. He’s just been really good for us.”

Here’s the steal Doc is talking about:

He makes it look very easy, doesn’t he? We’ve seen him do this so many times over the years. He’s glued to Coby White and goes around that screen as if it’s not even there.

Doc on the starters:

“They were phenomenal. When you look at the plus/minus (numbers) tonight, you see twenties for basically everybody. All of the minuses are on the second unit. It just shows what they were doing offensively. We shot what, 53%? And it was all of our first unit guys who were shooting the ball well.”

Rivers was also asked if he learned anything about his team over the last few games:

“I don’t know if I learned much. We’re a good basketball team. We can win games on the road when we don’t play great. I think that’s a great sign in some ways. This is a team that had not played well on the road, and lost when they did play well in the past. Now we’re winning when we don’t play well, and that’s a great sign moving forward.”

To me, that’s the story of this season. It’s the road wins against decent-to-okay teams.

They haven’t had a lot of “marquee” wins due to situations with COVID and injury and whatnot, and their only full strength vs. full strength impressive wins were probably LA and Utah. But the way they go out and handle business on the road despite not always playing well is a total 180 from last season, and from the Brett Brown years in general. If this team locks up the #1 seed in the East, you can go back and look at these two wins. You can look at that three-game road sweep they pulled off in late January (T Wolves/Pacers/Hornets). You can look at them going 4-2 on that six-game trip. Their ability to find a way to win these games is likely going to be the main reason for securing the #1 seed this year, assuming they handle their business over this final stretch.