76ers Focus on Playing ‘Angry Basketball’
Lost in the soup of numbers and defenses and offensive sets scrawled across a dry-erase board in the Philadelphia 76ers’ locker room there glowed but two words, scrawled by a coach, that might say more about this team than anything else right now.
“Angry basketball.”
What else would you possibly call it? The Sixers have not taken the Boston Celtics to a Game 7 of this Eastern Conference semifinal series with anything resembling precision. They don’t run perfect fast breaks or shoot sparkling jump shots. Their basketball isn’t beautiful. They really don’t have a great star.
But what they seem to have is youth and an ugly, wretched, grinding style that has allowed them to fight their way through three victories that might be some of the most awful basketball ever performed in the NBA playoffs in any year. And because of that they are a game away from stealing a series they should never have been in.



