The seven-player Sixers played a game for about 24 minutes, but the Nuggets beat them in the second half for a 115-103 win over Philly. Tyrese Maxey was the human silver lining, losing 39 points and running the show for most of the afternoon.
Here’s what I saw (with an emphasis on the fact that there will be far more moral wins than usual).
The good
• If the Sixers were supposed to show up for this game and just give up for an easy Nuggets win, someone forgot to tell Maxey. Doc Rivers basically gave him the ball and told him to find out, putting the novice guard in a challenge of pick-and-roll looks and often asking him to create something out of nothing in isolation.
Maxey was more than up to the task, losing 22 points to the Nuggets only in the first half. Jamal Murray was arguably the top player in the NBA bubble last summer, and Maxey put him in the torture chamber in the first half, passing him without being punished too much on the defensive end of the court.
The only real difference between Maxey that we saw on Saturday afternoon and Maxey that we see regularly was the kind of pictures he was allowed to take. His floater / runner game was there as it always is, but without the big mouths of the stars to feed, Maxey became a little more adventurous as a pull-up shooter, which didn’t necessarily lead to great results, but forced Denver to consider the possibility more than attacking the rim.
(One thing I want to highlight and that I could write about in more depth later – I thought Maxey did a better job of looking for contact around the basket than in any other game so far. He has not been rewarded with trips to the line, but on at least two occasions, as I recall, he got into Nikola Jokic’s chest enough to move the big man from Denver’s All-NBA back and create a window to score. That’s the kind of thing that the little guards need to master to last in the league.)
I thought Maxey was a better passer on Saturday than the assistance numbers give him credit. He was the only guy who could consistently put pressure on Denver in the painting to force his defense to collapse, and when the guys cheated towards the edge, Maxey found teammates open without exposing the Sixers to a major upset risk.
Maxey’s composure stood out game after game during his first leg as a pro, and he was one of the big reasons why Philly stayed close, despite being defeated on Saturday.
• Isaiah Joe is basically dying whenever he has to fight through a defense screen – he is still remarkably thin compared to most of the guys he faces – but the Six bet that they can help you through this process and take advantage of your shot meantime. Joe was irregular as a sniper, but he looked up without leaning too far to the “sniper” side of the spectrum, letting the game come to him.
That last part is important because Joe’s tunnel vision was very bad at times in Arkansas, and the Sixers seem to have put it in his head that he is just one piece of a larger unit here, even when they only have seven players. He certainly has the touch and quick release of a great marksman, although he has to deliver results at some point.
• I have no idea if Paul Reed will ever be a functional offensive player, and his three-point shot from the top of the table combined with some “adventurous” dribbling suggests that he has a long way to go. But he took the opportunity to compete against the Nuggets, making energetic moves throughout the game to give the Sixers a spark from the bench.
Defensively, Reed flew everywhere (sometimes at his own expense) and used his length to great effect, impacting a few shots around the basket and covering his teammates who missed spins with some strong late closings. He also appeared on the offending glass in the afternoon, skimming through traffic to extend his belongings on a night when Philly needed every extra chance he could get.
The key to it will be to transform the brief moments when your athletic ability is functional into consistent stretches. This could very well just be a matter of changing your role into a healthier version of the Sixers team – if you simply ask Reed to define the screens and the rim as your little center, you will probably have a lot less slapstick comedy moments. He will benefit greatly from some time in the G-League.
• Say this about the group of players in a few minutes that the Sixers sent there on Saturday afternoon – all those guys were ready to go out and compete. During an NBA season, games often depend on who is more motivated to make it happen on a given night, and Philly behaved like a team of guys with something to prove.
It’s hard to maintain that energy over 48 minutes when you only have seven guys able to get dressed and play, obviously, but after they got into a 10-2 hole to start the game, it wouldn’t have been a shock to see them slowly but surely get kicked in the ass.
Rivers probably deserves a little credit for all of this, in fact. He fought last season as the leader of a team with very high expectations, but some of his best moments as a coach happened as a leader of groups that were counted only to exceed expectations. With everything that happened in the past few days, the coach managed to get these guys to play a reasonably competent basketball brand.
The evil
• The Sixers made it a game for the first 24 minutes or more, and it was the best they could withstand a much more talented opponent. The wheels came loose for them as soon as the third quarter started, officially putting the game out of reach.
Philadelphia could survive with a group of players completely unable to part with the dribble outside Maxey. The Sixers ended up settling for a bunch of junk shots – medium reach pull-ups with their hands on their faces, tough floaters in traffic, three contested – that even really good players shouldn’t drop with a high percentage.
The defense was the biggest fight, as you can expect from a group that pushed Danny Green forward for long periods of play. Rivers and the coaching staff tried to confuse appearances at times on Saturday, spraying the defense zone at times, which may have been tactical, but it might as well have been just a method to minimize wear and tear on players in a game in which they there were only seven healthy guys.
Denver didn’t make much difference in the second half other than taking pictures – they blocked many open looks in the first half, and when they started to profit from the same looks in the second half, it was basically an ending for the Sixers.
• Dakota Mathias had a rough day at the office on Saturday and, although his kicks changed a bit in the second half, he will have to start blinking a little more to hold on to this level. He has shown almost no ability to split up in limited action so far, so unless he is an absolutely unlit sniper, he is giving up on D too much and not offering enough in the attack to get minutes.
Of his two-way guys, Reed has a considerably better case to stay in for a while because it is a pretty obvious project that they can expect to turn into a contributor. The Six convinced Mathias of what he does in practice (from the beginning of the camp), so we’ll see if this works in a real game.
• I’m not inclined to ride a lot with these guys, given the circumstances and the group they had available to play on Saturday. They held on to the rope, had beautiful flashes, and managed to avoid a complete breakdown, even when players were asked to do things they almost never do in NBA games.
However, if the Sixers are forced to eliminate a group like this again in the coming weeks, they will need to do a better defense job, without getting dirty. Dwight Howard is a soot machine at its best, and Danny Green joined him in the problem department, limiting the physical capabilities of two of his best defenders in the second half.
Let’s hope for everyone’s sake that they don’t have to go through this again.
The ugly
• I mean, in addition to playing the game first?
It is easy for me to sit here and point out that there were a lot of cracks because of the loss and that no one should be surprised at how it all came apart. That said, when they reach the end of the season and the sowing of the playoff is set, it doesn’t matter if they picked up an L with their initial group fully loaded or the seven-man MASH unit they put on the ground Saturday. All games count the same way in the standings.
The Sixers did well to build up a bit of filling with the start of 7-1, and it looks like they will need it, depending on how much time the team has to play without the services of a large part of the team.
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