Joel Embiid put the rest of the Sixers in his backpack and took them to a tight win in overtime over the Heat, with Philly emerging victorious in a 137-134 thriller thanks to 45 points from the center of the franchise, a game that is likely to wake up the dialogue with MVP.
Here’s what I saw.
The good
• I will not sit here and say that this was a wire-to-wire effort by Joel Embiid, who dragged on for about a quarter and a half of this game. But with Philly looking like crap after 24 minutes, the big guy apparently decided it was enough and demanded that his teammates remember who he was. The real damage started as soon as Ben Simmons hit the bench and paved the way for newcomer Isaiah Joe, opening up space and making the double teams a more dangerous proposition for Miami.
Embiid’s activity was a big part of history. He moved back and forth on the track, demanding the ball from anyone who had it at the time, and he punished Miami’s undersized frontline with a series of stunning plays. Fakes up, Euro steps, shots from the glass, fadeaway from the pole, he had absolutely everything in motion, and he even sprinkled it with a great lob finish from Simmons when Miami overestimated his comfortable pick-and-roll in the corner.
Once Miami tried to start sending more pressure on him, Embiid hit his snipers, who came after the big guy most of the time. It was even more impressive because Philadelphia struggled to even get the ball to Embiid in the first half, with Miami sending double and triple teams against the big guy, challenging someone else to beat them. Even when Miami knew he was the guy who was going to win and take a big shot in times of crisis, Embiid managed to profit anyway.
Then there was the defensive effort, with Embiid waking up after a lethargic start and blocking the painting absolutely for most of the third quarter. Lobs that were there for Miami early were swallowed up by Embiid, even as the Heat hit Philly’s perimeter defense like an old battery.
And when the Sixers needed him to dig deep in the second half of a back-to-back, anchoring a roster full of players who were dying of anger, Embiid somehow went back and found the strength to drag a bunch of backups to the end line, no guard to start the attack and little help at either end. If the big guy wasn’t doing this for Philadelphia, no one else was. When photos like this are happening, you know it’s your night:
Even a fundamental layup of Danny Green in the final minutes of OT was created by Embiid transforming himself into a human rag doll in the painting to rebound and recover and extend the play. This is the type of game that starts serious MVP discussions in a normal season, even with the lethargic start of the night. Embiid adamantly refused to lose this game.
• The twists were absolutely horrible and he should never be asked to play as hard as he is now, but Danny Green will be a useful basketball player for Philly, as long as he is in a proper role, rather than needing to create the dribble in the sock block. His shot finally came on Tuesday night, with Green exploding to nine, three points and 29 points after a terrible night in Atlanta.
The green can go through cold periods, but one thing you can count on is a consistent approach and a lack of fear when the ball passes in your direction. He’s a compound sniper, though up and down and the Sixers needed him a lot to get past Simmons with a howler and little going on outside of Embiid.
The other end of the track was, likewise, a mixed bag, but he is not the guy who should be the All-Defense team. Green had the biggest play of the game with time decreasing in the four quarters, releasing the ball after Isaiah Joe’s three-pointer hit and giving Philly the ball possession that would ultimately allow the game to tie. He is one of the guys who played the longest last season and had every right to fight until the end, but he came up with a move when it was absolutely necessary.
• Isaiah Joe is likely to be buried on the bench when the Sixers are healthy again, but I really like what he has shown in recent games, even with the warts he has on defense. He seems relatively at ease in his role in the Philadelphia attack, and showed more composure in creating than I thought he would be this early in the year, getting involved in some of Philly’s pick-and-roll attacks on Tuesday night market.
The most important thing for Joe on Tuesday is that Miami showed him a lot of respect on the perimeter, changing the way they defended Philly in the painting while he was on the floor with Embiid. If you make life easier for the franchise player, there will be a way for minutes in the rotation. And to Joe’s credit, he didn’t blink a single time while playing big minutes of time, fighting hard across the screens and confidently entering three into the bowels of the game.
• Dwight Howard was brutal in the first half like most of the rest of the team, but he kept Philly’s energy high in the second half after Embiid got a well-deserved break and had to maintain the lead they fought hard to recover. When he’s not just running over guys fighting offensive rebounds, he creates a ton of second chance opportunities.
The evil
• Ben Simmons has had some ugly games with a Sixers uniform, but this is among the worst games he has ever had as a professional. It was hard to figure out what exactly he expected to get possession of the ball, and the more this season passes, the clearer it becomes that they will have problems when the playoffs arrive and he has to create something out of nothing.
I feel like a broken record and we are only a few weeks into the season. There were several possessions in the first half alone, where Simmons resumed his dribble without any kind of plan in mind, including an ugly moment when he had a straight shot in the basket with no one really protecting him on the free throw line, but he never looked at the edge. That would be ridiculous for a high school basketball player, let alone a guy with the NBA’s highest contract:
On a night when they are short of manpower and relying on bank players to play big roles, he had only two attempts in total. This is simply unacceptable. What’s the use of spending part of your routine before the game working on medium range shots with Sam Cassell if you won’t even look at the rim during the game?
When he was a novice and judicious in the selection of his shots, it was easy to say that he was being judicious and trying to involve other people. How can you say that with a straight face now? It is not as if your reluctance to attack is balanced by good decision-making constantly. Against Miami, he always tried to play uptempo with no one joining him, flying against opposing defenders and taking offensive fouls, or zeroing in on the attack instead of just trying to challenge someone on the edge.
There is no defense he can provide to cover the holes in the attack, especially in a team built around a post-attack center. And even his defense was a mess on Tuesday, with Simmons committing 2-3 horrible fouls that would end up earning him a spot on the bench.
In defense, I can buy: “It’s just a game”. In the attack, something needs to change and fast. They are not paying you to be Rajon Rondo, and even a young Rondo would be embarrassed by some of these pieces.
• Joel Embiid did not have a big impact on the game in the first part of Tuesday night, although a lot of that could be attributed to a supporting squad that simply did not succeed or failed to take the ball from him. At first, Joel Embiid was struggling hard to get a pole position and playing within the flow of an attack that didn’t really keep him involved. Miami was challenging Philly’s snipers to beat them, and it worked in the Sixers’ favor for a while, with Danny Green and Mike Scott starting to get decent.
As time went on, however, Miami’s pressure on the big man inside the arch turned his attack into something fierce, and they quickly became unresponsive. This is a team that should, at the very least, know how to get the ball out of its best player almost at any time, as it would end up doing in the second half.
• Tyrese Maxey’s defense was awful for long periods of play on Tuesday, the kind of thing you expect from most newbies, but it’s a little more painful when you basically need to keep one on the floor to keep a ball handler reliable in the mix.
There are excuses that you can attribute to your age – successfully fighting for screens will become easier for him as he gets stronger and can ward off traffic – but there were misunderstandings about the patrol report that are difficult to excuse. Maxey gave way too much room for guys like Tyler Herro and Duncan Robinson on the perimeter, and he tried to make up for the shots made by playing away from the ball, a decision for which he was quickly burned.
The approval of Maxey’s entry (or lack thereof) is another thing to keep an eye on in the future. He was largely to blame for Philly’s inability to get touches on Embiid early, either because he was unable or unwilling to try to feed him while he was under pressure. He didn’t look particularly comfortable in an Embiid-centric environment, and he has to find ways to prevent the ball from getting stuck when he is the strong guy at Embiid.
(A side note: Embiid was absolutely furious with Maxey for not being where he expected him to be for a perimeter exit. Watch out for the big guy’s ire, young man.)
The ugly
• At what point do we see the Six exhibiting many of the same problems in the attack, having the same fainting in the effort, problems with less competition and conclude that there is something wrong with the main pieces playing together that is difficult for anyone to fix?
Maybe not soon, especially as the Sixers were battling smoke and understaffed on Tuesday night, but they weren’t exactly against the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls. That kind of performance by Embiid should not have been necessary to achieve a OT victory over a team of eight men.
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