These days, the NBA has been trying out latest formats and giving basketball fans something latest at times. Over the past couple of seasons, the league has implemented the NBA Play-In tournament at the tip of the 12 months, causing the underside two seeds to essentially earn their spot within the postseason.
This 12 months, the NBA will introduce Rivals Week. On Wednesday, the league-wide schedule was released, and every team got its hands on its 82-game schedule. As an element of the discharge, the league introduced Rivals Week for the primary time.
In response to a press release, rivals week is every week filled with matchups that feature “classic and budding rivalries” between specific teams and star players. The matchups will happen through the week of January 23, 2023.
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The brand new event will feature 11 nationally televised games across 4 networks over five days. Although not every franchise is involved, the Philadelphia 76ers can be an element of the motion, and certainly one of their rivalries just isn’t necessarily a well-known one.
Who Will the Sixers Face?
For the primary matchup of Philadelphia’s Rivalry Week, they’ll host a well-known foe within the Brooklyn Nets on Wednesday, January 25 at 7:30 PM ET. Obviously, Ben Simmons playing in Philadelphia will all the time cause a stir, considering how every thing went down last season.
The league will lean right into a latest budding rivalry within the Sixers’ second matchup. Over the past couple of seasons, Joel Embiid and Nikola Jokic have been the league’s most dominant bigs as they’ve battled it out for MVP in back-to-back years.
Subsequently, the Sixers and the Denver Nuggets will go toe-to-toe for Rivalry Week on Saturday, January 28, at 3:00 PM ET. The matchup against Denver will conclude Philadelphia’s first Rivalry Week slate in 2023.
Justin Grasso covers the Philadelphia 76ers for All76ers, a Sports Illustrated channel. You may follow him for live updates on Twitter: @JGrasso_.