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Gortat, Wizards torch the Sixers again

A week after Marcin Gortat scores 24 against the Sixers, the Wizards' big center has another big game against them.

WHEN HE LEARNED before the game that Washington Wizards point guard John Wall was going to sit for that ever-popular reason of rest, Sixers coach Brett Brown turned his focus straight to Wizards center Marcin Gortat.

No surprise there, as last week in Washington the 6-11, 240-pound center torched Brown's club for 23 points and 14 rebounds, making 10 of his 11 shots.

What was surprising last night was how many times the 76ers defense managed to lose sight of the hulking center at the Wells Fargo Center, particularly in the first half. Gortat missed only one of his eight shots in the first 24 minutes. That's because each one was a layup or dunk, usually wide-open, after he shook himself loose in the lane.

He finished with 18 points, seven rebounds and six assists as the Wizards easily handled the Sixers, 119-90. In four games this season against the Sixers, Gortat averaged 18.8 points on 31-for-39 shooting (79.5 percent).

"We were trying to blitz Beal and we didn't rotate," Brown said of Bradley Beal, who scored 21 points. "So you jump Beal and you're looking for that support behind it. It's interesting to me, because our pick-and-roll defense all year has been very simple. So tonight we started out trying to switch on [Drew] Gooden and blitz Beal, and do some other things with others.

"The instruction is more complicated than we've been used to. It's something that I think, under normal NBA terms and with older teams, you're going to get it and you're going to bite on it, and it's a playoff-type adjustment, and we couldn't handle it. At that stage, I felt that we were searching. We started the game so poorly. We subbed our first group out quickly, trying to find some life. I thought that the first half defensively was just poor."

So effective was Gortat early in the game that Brown pulled all five starters only 4 minutes, 35 seconds into the game. That didn't do much good. Washington closed out the first half hitting 26 of its 36 shots (72.2 percent) in building a 70-54 lead.

The Sixers pulled to within 82-71 midway in the third, but the Wizards drained three consecutive three-pointers to up the lead back to 20, and cruised from there.

"It was hard for them [young players] just to be able to make adjustments on different players and on different schemes," Luc Mbah a Moute said. "I think we struggle with that. I don't know if that took away our competitiveness, but we got soft. They got layups, and we couldn't respond."

The numbers again told the story for the Sixers (18-61), who lost their seventh straight game, the first time they've done that since beginning the season 0-17. They shot only 31-for-89 (34.8 percent). It is the fourth consecutive game they have shot below 40 percent and the 34th time this season. They are 4-30 in those games.

The two bright spots in the lopsided loss were the career-high 27 points posted by Robert Covington and 17 by Jason Richardson.

But those performances were far overshadowed by the defensive play and by the injury suffered by Nerlens Noel late in the fourth quarter. Noel came down on the foot of Will Bynum and twisted an ankle. He left the game, and Brown said he would be surprised if Noel made the trip to Chicago, where the team plays Saturday.

"There is a level of forgiveness that I give them," Brown said of his team's poor defensive showing. "On the fly and in the heat of the moment, it's going to have to be something that they grow to. The last 10 games that we've experimented with Nerlens here and Furkan [Aldemir] there . . . There are some moving parts out there that aren't common and not consistent with what we've been doing."

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