Analysis: Some NBA teams know it's time to shake out of early-season slides

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Analysis: Some NBA teams know it's time to shake out of early-season slides — or else

2024-11-19 18:55 Last Updated At：11-20 01:40

MIAMI (AP) — Postgame interviews in the NBA typically start about 10 minutes after the final buzzer. Coaches usually speak first, followed by a few players. When a team wins, most people are in a great mood. When a team loses, not so much.

That's the normal routine.

Things are not normal for Philadelphia right now.

Philadelphia lost in Miami on Monday night, the 76ers wasting an early 19-point lead and falling 106-89. The game ended at 9:51 p.m. It took more than an hour for coach Nick Nurse to emerge for his postgame media session. The reason — a team meeting, because the 76ers had a lot to talk about after falling to 2-11 on the season.

“Sorry for the delay,” Nurse said to the half-dozen or so reporters who waited out his arrival. He took questions like normal, then the locker room opened and a few players talked as well.

There's a lot of the season left. The first quarter of the 82-game marathon isn't even over. It's not time to start panicking.

But some teams, quite frankly, know it's time for things to get better — Philly atop that list.

Since the NBA went to the current 16-team playoff format in 1984, there have been only four teams with losing records after 15 games that made it to the NBA Finals: San Antonio in 1998-99, Detroit in 2004-05, Boston in 2021-22 and Miami in 2022-23.

They were all 7-8.

That's bad news for Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Miami — three teams that just haven't hit anything close to their best stride yet. Injuries are a huge part of that; Khris Middleton hasn't played yet for Milwaukee, Joel Embiid played Monday night for only the third time this season for the 76ers, and the Heat got Jimmy Butler back after more than a week Monday but were without Terry Rozier and Jaime Jaquez Jr.

But the Heat are 6-7, the Bucks are 5-9 and 76ers are 2-11. And that's not anywhere near what those clubs expected coming into the year, injuries or no.

“There's urgency there, for sure," Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said. “If you look at in both conferences, there’s urgency throughout the conferences. And I think there’s parity. It brings out great competition. It brings out all these different emotions. You win a game, you feel like everything is great. You lose a game, you feel like the world is coming down. That’s what competition does, particularly when you’re jostling so competitively in the standings where there’s a lot of teams bunched up.”

Philadelphia hasn't scored 100 points in three of its last four games, hasn't even reached 90 points in either of its last two games. And here's a weird stat: the 76ers are 2-0 in overtime games this season, 0-11 in games that end after 48 minutes.

“Listen, it’s obviously difficult, right? Don’t like the losing, that’s for sure," Nurse said. “I mean, it doesn’t matter. The games are coming and we've got to figure some things out. We've got to play better. Got to get our guys on the floor. There’s a lot of things going on. But we've got to go out and play and somehow sustain. A lot of these games, there's lots of very good moments for long, long stretches.”

Cleveland and Boston have obviously separated themselves atop the Eastern Conference; the 15-0 Cavaliers visit the 11-3 Celtics in an NBA Cup game on Tuesday night. From there, the rest of the East — from Orlando at 9-6 to Philly in a group at 2-11 — are separated by just six games, with about a million games left to play. Nobody is out of it, certainly not a 76ers team that has Embiid, Tyrese Maxey, Paul George and an NBA champion point guard in Kyle Lowry.

“I mean, 2-11 is pretty bad, of course,” Philly's Jared McCain said. “But it's still the beginning of the season. Least minutes played as a team together, so I say it all the time: Give us grace. We've got to get better.”

To be fair, there was nothing that seemed to be shattered in the 76ers' locker room when the team meeting finally ended. No broken whiteboards, no signs of trouble, and many players were cracking jokes.

“We had a meeting? I didn't know,” Embiid said, which was his way of letting reporters know that he wasn't going to spill the tea on anything that got said behind closed doors.

He did concede, however, that he might need to be more aggressive going forward. The 76ers are figuring out how to make all the pieces fit, but Embiid knows they can't keep going down this path.

“We've got that record,” Embiid said, “and something needs to be done about it.”

AP NBA: https://apnews.com/hub/nba

Swollen rivers are flooding towns in the US South after a prolonged deluge of rain

2025-04-07 23:16 Last Updated At：23:21

FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) — Days of unrelenting heavy rain and storms that killed at least 18 people worsened flooding as some rivers rose to near-record levels Monday and inundated towns across an already saturated U.S. South and parts of the Midwest.

Cities ordered evacuations and rescue crews in inflatable boats checked on residents in Kentucky and Tennessee, while utilities shut off power and gas in a region stretching from Texas to Ohio.

“I think everybody was shocked at how quick (the river) actually did come up,” said salon owner Jessica Tuggle, who was watching Monday as murky brown water approached her business in Frankfort, Kentucky, the state capital along the swollen Kentucky River.

She said that as each new wave of rain arrived over the weekend, anxious residents hoped for a reprieve so they could just figure out how bad things would get. She and friends packed up her salon gear, including styling chairs, hair products and electronics, and took it to a nearby tap house up the hill.

“Everybody was just ‘stop raining, stop raining’ so we could get an idea of what the worst situation would be,” she said.

Officials diverted traffic and turned off utilities to businesses in the city as the river was expected to approach a record crest Monday.

Ashley Welsh and her husband and four children had to quickly depart their Frankfort home along the river Saturday evening, leaving a lifetime of belongings later submerged by floodwaters.

When she awoke to water coming into their house early Saturday, Welsh woke everyone up and they packed their truck. They alerted guests to leave an Airbnb they own down the road, packed up the Airbnb and then helped her sister, who lives next to the Airbnb, evacuate. After they took a short nap at their house, the water had risen.

“By the time we woke up, there was already three feet of water that we had to wade through to get out,” she said.

They packed a suitcase and escaped from the rising water and went to a local hotel. One daughter carried two cats through water to safety and their black Labrador dog had to swim, as they stayed close to make sure no one got swept away.

The water rose up to their second floor. By Sunday morning, she checked her house's cameras.

“My stuff was floating around in the living room. I was just heartbroken. Our life is up there,” Welsh said.

The 18 reported deaths since the storms began on Wednesday included 10 in Tennessee. A 9-year-old boy in Kentucky was caught up in floodwaters while walking to catch his school bus. A 5-year-old boy in Arkansas died after a tree fell on his family’s home, police said. A 16-year-old volunteer Missouri firefighter died in a crash while seeking to rescue people caught in the storm.

The National Weather Service warned Sunday that dozens of locations in multiple states were expected to reach a “major flood stage,” with extensive flooding of structures, roads, bridges and other critical infrastructure possible.

In north-central Kentucky, emergency officials ordered a mandatory evacuation for Falmouth and Butler, towns near the bend of the rising Licking River. Thirty years ago, the river reached a record 50 feet (15 meters), resulting in five deaths and 1,000 homes destroyed.

The Kentucky River was cresting at Frankfort Lock at 48.27 feet (14.71 meters) on Monday morning, just shy of the record of 48.5 feet (14.78 meters) set there on Dec. 10, 1978, according to CJ Padgett, a meteorologist with the weather service’s Louisville, Kentucky, office. While other areas are in major flood stage, the forecasted crest for this location is closest to its record.

Carroll County Deputy Judge-Executive Michael Humphrey in Kentucky has ordered mandatory evacuations in some places, warning that a “significant flooding event of which history has never seen” is expected.

More than 100 structures were destroyed in McNairy County, Tennessee, where a tornado tore through the town of Selmer with winds estimated up to 160 mph (257 kph), local emergency management officials said. State officials have confirmed five people were killed by the severe weather in the county of roughly 26,100 residents.

The storms come after the Trump administration cut jobs at NWS forecast offices, leaving half of them with vacancy rates of about 20%, or double the level of a decade ago.

Forecasters attributed the violent weather to warm temperatures, an unstable atmosphere, strong winds and abundant moisture streaming from the Gulf.

The NWS said 5.06 inches (nearly 13 centimeters) of rain fell Saturday in Jonesboro, Arkansas — making it the wettest day ever recorded in April in the city. Memphis, Tennessee, received 14 inches (35 centimeters) of rain from Wednesday to Sunday, the NWS said.

Rives, a northwestern Tennessee town of about 200 people, was almost entirely underwater after the Obion River overflowed.

Domanic Scott went to check on his father in Rives after not hearing from him in a house where water reached the doorstep.

“It’s the first house we’ve ever paid off. The insurance companies around here won’t give flood insurance to anyone who lives in Rives because we’re too close to the river and the levees. So if we lose it, we’re kind of screwed without a house,” Scott said.

In Dyersburg, Tennessee, dozens of people arrived over the weekend at a storm shelter near a public school clutching blankets, pillows and other necessities. Just days earlier the city was hit by a tornado that caused millions of dollars in damage.

Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Anthony Izaguirre in New York; Kimberlee Kruesi and Jonathan Mattise, in Nashville, Tennessee; Sarah Brumfield in Cockeysville, Maryland; Andrew DeMillo in Little Rock, Arkansas; Adrian Sainz in Memphis; Tennessee; Sarah Raza in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Obed Lamy in Rives, Tennessee; and Sophia Tareen in Chicago.