Joel Embiid scored 46 points, grabbed 8 rebound and dished out 9 assists but it wasn’t enough for the 76ers to defeat the Warriors. Golden State won the game 120-112.
Draymond Green revealed after the game that the Cameroonian superstar reminded of him of his own quote that Nikola Jokic is the hardest player to guard in the NBA.
During the postgame press conference the Warriors forward talked about the plan to stop Embiid.
“With a guy like that, you never really want to give him a steady diet of anything because they just figure it out,” Green said. “He said to me ‘You know why I played like that tonight? You said Joker’s the hardest person to guard in the league, so I took that personal.’
“So I’m going to tell y’all Joel’s the hardest guy to guard in the league. You just don’t want to give the steady diet. In that fourth quarter we just tried to throw different looks at him.
“We fired a couple times, we came, we sent double teams from the top of the floor, we sent double teams from the bottom of the floor. He caught the ball at the three-point line one time, we sent the double team.
“Coach kind of gave us the free will to jus fake some hits and then pull back and just tried to keep him off balance. Loon did an incredible job all night at just battling him. And then saying that, he finished with 46 points. But the way Loon battled and just kept a body on him all night, the hope is that you wear him down.
“Some of those shots that he was making throughout the game during that fourth quarter, last six minutes of the game he missed a few of them. So just got to trust your defense, trust the process. And we did a good job of that.”
