In today's episode of The Sixers Beat, Rich and I preview the Sixers' second round series

against the Atlanta Hawks.

Talking about some of the keys for the Sixers, if Joel Mied does miss time because of his

torn meniscus, but how the Sixers should defend the Trey Young pick and roll, the importance

of keeping Clint Capella off of the offensive glass,

and how they can attack Atlanta's defense.

If you're not already an athletic subscriber, head on over to Theathletic.com slash Sixersbeat.

We can get a discount on a yearly subscription.

Enjoy the podcast. All right, welcome everybody.

This is Derek Bonner, joined over Rich Hoffman,

on the Sixers Beat, a part of the Athletics Podcast Network.

Now getting ready for Sunday's opener to the second round

playoff series against the Hawks.

How you doing, Rich?

I'm great.

I am excited to get in to, I would say a second round playoff matchup that nationally

probably isn't getting a lot of buzz, considering the other matchup in the East is pretty good.

And the Sixers have a pretty big question mark going on.

I guess that's kind of like the first thing we can talk about a little bit.

It's just like a prediction on this series is useless.

Yeah.

There's so many ifs and you couch it in so many different ways that it's, I mean, we just wrote an article sort of previewing the series and we made predictions. And it's like, it was the shrug emoji that I have no idea. Is Joel Embed Healthy? How many games does he play? Does he miss two games and come back for the entire series? Or does he play a game, miss a game, play two games, miss a game, and you never really have a chance of game plan? Does he look like his MVP self? Is he a liability defensively because he's in space and he can't move like he usually can? Is he dominant offensively? Does he get Capelle and Falter? there's so many different variables and all of it comes back to the big guy and what he is able to do. Look, I think we mentioned last time if Embed doesn't play at all, it's pretty close to a toss-up. If the six or if Embed is healthy, I think it's a competitive five, which means that it could be five, balls bounce one way, it could be six, you know, if Atlanta gets a couple of breaks or if Tray Young just has too many games where he's completely losing his mind.

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