Philadelphia 76ers: Dario Saric and the Sixers outlast the Nuggets

Well, it wasn’t always pretty, but the Philadelphia 76ers pulled out a road win against the Denver Nuggets by a score of 107-102 thanks to Dario Saric.

Well, it wasn’t always pretty, but the Philadelphia 76ers pulled out a victory against the Denver Nuggets to pull their season record to 15-19, largely off the back of a stellar performance by Dario Saric.

And they did so without their best player in the starting lineup.

With Joel Embiid out for a rest day, Brett Brown‘s squad had to fall back on a starting lineup of Ben Simmons, J.J. Redick, Robert Covington, Saric and Amir Johnson to face off against the Nuggets’ formidable trio of Nikola Jokic, Gary Harris and Jamal Murray in the Mile High City, and somehow lived to tell the tale.

Of the previous eight games the team played without their superstar center, the Sixers had only managed to win one of them, an early season slugfest against the Utah Jazz, but against all odds the team somehow found a way to fend off a late Nuggets surge to notch another game in the win column, and live to fight another day.

Even with six players scoring in double digits, including Jerryd Bayless, who was held scoreless in the team’s 114-110 loss to the Portland Trail Blazers, the 76ers once again found themselves up by double digits in the early minutes of the fourth quarter, only to slowly watch the opposing team chip away at their lead.

With the Nuggets trailing by only three points with a minute to go following four free throw attempts by Jokic, arguably the Nuggets best player, Brown’s squad finally found the inner strength needed to put their collective foot down and seal the victory off of a late Covington dunk.

This was a game the 76ers needed to win, and more importantly, it was a game the 76ers should have won, and even though it wasn’t necessarily pretty, the team ground it out, and found a way to win their second game of the season without Embiid thousands of miles away from the City of Brotherly Love.

Next: What’s T.J. McConnell’s role with the Sixers when Markelle Fultz returns?

With Embiid expected to play in the team’s next game against the lowly Phoenix Suns, it’ll be incredibly interesting to see if the Philadelphia 76ers can once again take care of business against a less opponent and move one step closer to a winning record.