Michael Porter Jr. leads Nets to impressive win over 76ers as tank takes hit

PHILADELPHIA — The tank is in trouble.

The Nets aren’t just beating bad teams anymore. Now they’re beating good ones.

One game after blowing out Toronto, Michael Porter Jr. and his Nets headed down the Turnpike to earn an impressive road win, smothering the Sixers 114-106 before a sellout crowd of 19,746 at Xfinity Mobile Arena.

The Nets followed up drilling the fifth-place team in the Eastern Conference by winning at the fourth-place squad.

They stayed percentage points ahead of the victorious Hornets for sixth in the lottery odds, but lost ground on the Pacers and Pelicans.

Brooklyn’s defense — which has gone from historically bad in October to the best in the league in December — frustrated Philadelphia and had its fans raining down boos.

The Nets held the Sixers to just 40.7 percent shooting and 7-of-27 from 3-point range.

A huge scoring night from Porter did the rest.

Porter had 25 of his game-high 28 points by intermission, the highest-scoring half of his career. Since an 0-7 start, the Nets are 9-12 — and 9-9 with the red-hot forward.

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Rookie Egor Demin had eight of his 20 points in the fourth quarter, while Nic Claxton added 16 points and 10 rebounds.

But it was the defense that made the difference. Terance Mann, Demin and Nolan Traore took turns on Tyrese Maxey and made life tough on the Sixers All-Star. He came in averaging 31.7 points and had 38 in the prior game against Dallas, but was held to 13 on 3-of-14 shooting.

Joel Embiid had 27 for Philadelphia, but the Nets led by as much as 19 and pulled away in the second half.

It was tied 27-all after one, with Porter having 14 points on 5-of-6 shooting while the rest of the Nets had combined for just 13 on 4-of-16 from the floor.

The Nets were clinging to a tenuous 70-65 edge after a tip-in by Andre Drummond — his offensive rebounding was Philadelphia’s only effective offense — when Brooklyn seized control with a 19-7 run that included seven unanswered points.

Demin sandwiched a pair of 3-pointers around a Maxey miss, the second completing a four-point play to make it 77-65. On the other end, he was helping harass Maxey into having missed nine of his first ten attempts.

Tyrese Martin padded the lead to 89-72 on a 3 with 1:58 left in the third.