Behind another 42 points from MVP contender Joel Embiid, the Sixers won a tight game 117-109 over the Boston Celtics on Wednesday night.
Here’s what I saw.
The good
• Joel Embiid will have lunch with the Celtics this season if they don’t show up with reinforcements in the middle at some point. He’s very big and very skilled for the guys they have in the center, and Boston has had a real whale for a while trying to protect him with the improved spacing around the big guy this season.
Embiid scored 22 points in the first half alone, playing the same disciplined basketball brand that boosted his MVP level start. He seemed to know exactly how Boston would react to each individual action of his, using fakes, footwork and certainly a little bit of size to force his way into points where they were almost forced to get him dirty. His only upset in the first 24 minutes was just a bad pass, rather than the type of overdribbling, possession of tunnel vision that has often condemned him against Boston in the past.
His dominance continued in the second half, with Embiid choosing the Celtics in addition to the low block. When they sent doubles in the first hour, he got the ball out of there quickly, leading to some great looks for his pitchers on the weak side. Boston tried to hold out with unique coverage, probably more than Brad Stevens really wanted, and Embiid absolutely tortured the ex-Cavs all night. Every time it looked like the Sixers were running out of answers, Embiid seemed to come up with a new one.
When it came time to end this game in the final quarter, Embiid didn’t just stick to the block and post, with the Sixers allowing him to effectively run at the point in the middle of the track so he could start the attack on his own, as he did in his 45-point game against Miami. The Celtics were so concerned with what to do with Embiid at the post that they simply abandoned other players on Wednesday, leading to some open glances for their teammates.
We may be seeing a preview of what it will be like in the Eastern Conference playoffs, if health permits. With a few notable exceptions, Embiid will have his way with the great men of many of the main competitors at the conference, including the Nets, who have just negotiated one of their best bigs as part of the exchange for James Harden. There may be problems with this list, but Embiid is a walking nightmare for many of his future playoff opponents.
• I’ll be honest, I never thought we would see Shake Milton with such confidence at the NBA level. He had a good combination of skills coming out of SMU, but he was a kind of up and down player in a limited race before this year, and even though he got big numbers in the G-League, we rarely saw him play with the fluid confidence that a guard needs to have when leaving the bank.
This is no longer a problem, and Milton has not given up on any confrontations placed before him. Even when he was tasked with defeating Marcus Smart, one of the league’s most tenacious defenders, Milton showed no desire to back down and continued to recover from pick-and-roll.
We are starting to see some more advanced readings from Milton from that basic set he directs with Dwight Howard. Milton was not rewarded with assists in all of them, but he did several jumps across the traffic to find a sniper on the corner on the weak side, putting the Celtics in scramble mode and giving Philly a couple of beautiful looks. If he manages to combine this type of pass / game with the score we all saw that he is capable of, he will have an absolute monstrous impact on this team.
And Milton’s defensive improvement would be the biggest story of his season had it not been for his flood of scores, because he went from a massive negative to any less an average defender, often better than that. There were at least a few plays in which Milton’s timely help in a corner pitcher interrupted the Celtics’ ball possession, a big sign earlier this year under the new coaching staff.
• I was not terribly in love with Matisse Thybulle in attack in this game, but I thought he was better than anything that his confrontation statistics ended up saying. Kemba Walker was cooking in the first half, but it was not for nothing that Thybulle was doing it wrong. At the very least, there were possessions where Walker couldn’t even catch the ball or go down the slope because Thybulle was very efficient at controlling traffic and denying him his place before he could get there.
The robbery numbers don’t always correspond to the defensive exit on a given night (and are often just the opposite, a sign that a guy is gambling too much), but I thought Thybulle’s four robberies were a fair representation of a solid night .
• We will look at some of the problems I thought he had next, but I cannot blame Simmons for the approach he took in this game. For most of the night, he played with the attacker, rewarded with free-throw attempts and second chance opportunities that he himself created.
Most importantly, Simmons made some absolutely critical defensive plays along the line, and they probably won’t close this without him. After Embiid’s poor possession on the post, it was Simmons who returned to the ground with just over two minutes left to break the counterattack and push the ball out of the field, allowing Philly to redefine his defense.
A minute or so later, it was Simmons who struck, hitting Embiid’s man on the post, a sequence that allowed the Sixers to increase the advantage in possession. In the next possession, he tracked Kemba Walker flying around a screen with the ball in his hands and still managed to force an absolutely wild shot that hit nothing beyond the table, and he eventually grabbed the defensive rebound that froze the game.
The box scoreboard is not going to please many people, but he made winning moves when it mattered and certainly deserves credit for it.
• After a hot start, Tobias Harris disappeared from the game until the start of the fourth period, when the Sixers desperately needed someone to join Simmons in a difficult situation. He took responsibility as one of the veterinary leaders, marking or assisting in three buckets in quick succession to put Philadelphia in the lead with a group of bank players around him.
With Embiid carrying the cargo to Philadelphia, all Harris needs to do is set up explosions like these during dead periods. That should be enough to win the day.
The evil
• Bad defense or just better Boston attack? There was probably a little bit of both on Wednesday night. The Celtics, as they always seem to do against Philadelphia, hit incredibly hard shots from all sides. Marcus Smart seems to really enjoy these games against a division rival, especially when he can launch a rainbow float over Embiid’s outstretched arm to torture Sixers fans.
I don’t think Philly played very well in defense, however, and it looked like they were one step behind their opponent most of the night, forced to play in reactive defense rather than imposing their will on the game. The Celtics’ hot shot ended up forcing the Sixers to make some confrontational adjustments that I think they would have preferred to avoid, and I would like to see this one again before pondering which side deserves more credit / blame.
• Before Wednesday night’s game, Doc Rivers said he would like to put Ben Simmons more on the post, perhaps even on both sides of the basket with Simmons and Embiid. It is not a strategy that I particularly want to see them revisit, but so be it, if that is what they use.
Here’s the problem – Simmons makes almost no attempt to score on the post when he hits the ball. The Celtics were playing miniature guards at Simmons in the low block, and he barely exploited the opportunity to score before kicking the ball out and zeroing in on the attack. If we’re at the point where he’s not interested in attacking Kemba Walker and Jeff Teague on the court, there’s basically no point in giving him the ball down there.
To Simmons’ credit, he was determined to reach the free throw line and seek contact on Wednesday, arriving on the line quite often against a team that often left him completely useless. Unfortunately, all of that changed in the second half, and his physical approach earned him the fifth foul even before the third half ended. He has struggled to find the middle ground between playing aggressively and recklessly, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that he did not develop the skills to take fouls to really benefit from playing that way.
I can’t criticize the guy for trying to make use of his structure the way everyone has been asking him for years, but it’s really impressive that the options are basically “go down or not go” four years after his career. Jaylen Brown had an unlucky night and kicked the ball in front of Simmons, but comparing his growth in recent years is not flattering for Simmons in attack.
• Even if Matisse Thybulle’s offensive skills emerge, he still has a long way to go strictly as a decision maker. He’s all energy dispersed all the time. There was a streak in the second quarter in which he played one-on-one on a counterattack and decided to pull up to a contested three instead of slowing down, and in a few moments he cut directly into the path that Ben Simmons was trying to enter, throwing possession.
With Seth Curry almost back on the roster, there will be serious competition for minutes at the back of the rotation soon. The Howard-Maxey-Milton three-man group is settled, and Doc Rivers has always talked about Furkan Korkmaz, who returned from injury on Wednesday night. Combine that with Isaiah Joe by giving them good minutes off the bench, and Thybulle must hear footsteps behind him.
• Speaking of Maxey, I don’t love him as the fifth guy on the starting lineup that the Sixers had against Boston. Rivers wanting to keep Shake Milton in the same role as his offensive spark off the bench is understandable, but if he wanted to go that route, I think it is almost better to put a pure sniper alongside Embiid / Harris / Green / Simmons.
There were many possessions on the pole with Maxey on the strong side feeding Embiid on the pole, and although he did much like the guy who gave him the ball (this has been a problem at times this season), he was not particularly helpful when ball came back towards you. At the moment, his trigger of the three is not fast enough, and the Celtics did an effective job of stopping him on his way to the basket
• Dwight Howard continues to make an impact as an offensive rebound (and subsequent foul draw), but his defensive instincts have been surprisingly bad in recent weeks. Boston absolutely divided the Sixers when Howard was in the game on Friday night, and while part of that can be attributed to the defensive perimeter defense that compromised his position, Howard handled the consequences in the poorest possible way.
The ugly
• There have been a few games this season when it felt wrong to happen in an empty gym. The contrast between a normal Sixers-Celtics game and this Sixers-Celtics game, however, made me feel like I was going crazy. The rivalry games do not have the same feeling without much enthusiasm from the people in the stands.
• It has become more and more the norm in the NBA, but I refuse to accept guys who don’t even attempt a shot at the end of the quarter to protect their field goal percentages. Boston’s Semi Ojeleye took the ball with almost two seconds to go before the first quarter and space to dribble, and he turned on his side with the ball and ran off the clock instead of trying to do something positive for his team. It is ridiculous that we have reached that point.
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