Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda

Under normal circumstances, you would have expected the Sixers to travel to New Orleans and face difficult odds in winning against the Hornets. However, since the Hornets were without their frontcourt line of Tyson Chandler and David West, one reasonably could have expected the Sixers' odds of winning to increase drastically if they could outrebound (doable), outrun (easy), out-defend (hard) the Hornets. As the game started, the Sixers were indeed controlling the glass and getting into their fastbreak offense. This gave them an early edge due to New Orleans having a poor transition defense. The problem in the beginning was controlling Chris Paul. He was getting past Miller and finding open teammates with ease. On top of that, he was stealing almost every other pass from the Sixers. The first half ended with the Sixers indeed succeeding at two of the three aforementioned keys and the notion turned toward that the Sixers should win the game. Not so fast...

The Sixers must have forgotten what helped them succeed in the first half because they quickly lost it in the second. They still managed to shoot the ball better overall than the Hornets as well as pull down more rebounds. The rebounds and the high amount of points in the paint was directly attributable to the Hornets missing frontline. Chris Paul still was a menace and continued to pick off passes left and right. Not only that but Peja Stojakovic decided to drain an insane amount of 3-pointers over the span of 5 minutes that provided the knockout punch. The Sixers still got on the fastbreak but only came in around their average against a team susceptible to that attack. As for the out-defending key? The Sixers finished with 21 turnovers (many were steals) and failed to guard the 3-point line. All that equated to what appeared in the box score as a lopsided loss.