May 06, 2015
Similar to our just-completed college hoops review, we’re running a little behind with the recaps of the individual players on the town’s professional basketball team. To save time, I’ll be grouping guys together roughly based on their long-term outlook in Philadelphia. Just like the City Six series, I don’t know exactly when you can expect all of the installments, but they’ll all be finished in time for the NBA Draft coverage to seriously ramp up. Generally, we’ll start from the top of the hierarchy and work our way down. By now, I imagine you’ve guessed the two players that will be put under the microscope today, and if not, aw, here it goes…
One of the most common questions asked by skeptics and/or haterzzz of “The Plan” is very simple: After two years of tanking (I’d use “rebuilding,” but it is their question), what do Sam Hinkie and the Sixers really have?
Another way to phrase the question would be something like, “What has the front office acquired that they can actually bank on moving forward?” They’re looking for something tangible, even though the Sixers have demonstrated a clear preference of drifting toward the unknown and passing on present tangibility if they feel it doesn’t possess the requisite substance.
That’s how they view the top of the roster, anyway. The best example of their philosophy is the Michael Carter-Williams trade at this year’s deadline. MCW is a legitimate NBA player with a tangible skill set that the Sixers invested a late lottery pick in, but after a year and a half of up-close observation, they didn’t feel he had the goods to lead a championship-level team. For them, the decision to flip him for another likely lottery pick was pretty straightforward.
Of course, the skeptics don’t like those types of explanations, similar to how they don’t like Hinkie’s response to when he’ll care about wins and losses (answer: whenever the team is winning 50-plus games per year on a consistent basis, and not a moment sooner). There’s a major philosophical difference, and neither side is necessarily right or wrong. It’s just important to note that most people, both inside and outside of the NBA, generally don’t think like the Sixers do.
Back to that pesky question, what do the Sixers really have already under their roof? If we’re excluding potentially valuable rotation players like Robert Covington and overseas prospects like Dario Saric, that leaves Joel Embiid and Nerlens Noel. If dunking on the team’s video coordinator in a bunch of Vines isn’t tangible enough for you, Noel is all that’s already in the fold.
On a related note, I find it interesting how easy it is to frame the Sixers’ progress these past two years based on personal preference. Like what they’re doing? Embiid! Nerlens! Top-Six Pick! Lakers Pick! DARIO! Heat and Thunder Picks! All of the second-rounders! Don’t like what they’re doing? A skinny shot-blocker and a dismissive wanking motion. That’s why Sixers arguments haven’t stopped since the losing started; both sides can credibly argue their viewpoint, but can’t disprove the other’s.
For the sake of this post and as a charter member of the Embiid Vine community, I’m going to include JoJo in the season review even though he didn’t play a minute. Along with Noel, he’s certainly one of this franchise’s building blocks as it proceeds into the future.
Think of the Sixers as nightclub: Club Hinkie. These are the only two guys on the roster getting bottle service in the VIP section.
While reflecting on how much Noel improved throughout the course of this season, my mind takes me back to a November game in San Antonio that the Sixers lost by 25 points. Looking at his line of four points, 2-8 shooting, six boards one steal, and one block, it’s far from the worst on the team (Hollis Thompson went 1-8 from the field and was -33 in 26 minutes, in case you’re a bad performance aficionado). In all fairness, the defending champs make a lot of young players look pretty green.
Yet when paying attention to the game’s flow, Noel didn’t particularly look like he belonged on an NBA floor. The rook was trying to catch a slippery bar of soap on offense, making defensive rotations with the same speed that Blaine Gabbert picked up opposing blitzes in Jacksonville, and getting routinely tossed around in the paint like Jazz whenever he entered the Banks household.
“Nerlens when he first came out caught me off guard because he was way behind what I thought he was going to be,” Brett Brown said. “Physically, mentally, skill packagewise, hands, all of it. It was slow, the whole thing.”
Then right around January 1st, something clicked. Maybe after a tough West Coast trip, the game started slowing down for him. Maybe he made a New Year’s resolution to start playing better basketball. Whatever he did, it worked. At the same point most first-year players hit the rookie wall, Noel started running downhill. Check out his monthly splits via Basketball Reference:
The blocks and steals totals jump off the screen because they’re unprecedented. As a 20 year old, Noel was the only player league-wide that finished top-10 in both blocks (8th, 1.88 per game) and steals (10th, 1.77 per game). In the history of the NBA, no rookie has ever matched those numbers. This isn’t a case of Russell Westbrook or Allen Iverson (two guys that I really admire, by the way) aggressively gambling in passing lanes and hurting the team’s overall defensive structure, either. The Sixers went from the equivalent of the league’s sixth-best defense to 21st when Noel stepped off the court.
It’s already established that Noel is a unique defensive force. Whether it was punching James Harden’s dunk attempt at the rim or poking the ball away from Steph Curry on a reach-around steal, he’s already someone the game’s elite offensive players have to pay extra attention to. The $64,000 question is if he can affect the game in as many ways after making the full-time transition to the 4, something he’ll be forced to do next year with Embiid in the fold.
I’m skeptical about whether he can guard power forwards full-time, mostly because Brown experimented with the arrangement late in the season to disastrous results. With Noel playing the better part of six games alongside Furkan Aldemir, which very well might be Turkish for “caveat,” the Sixers defense went from sneaky good to a dumpster fire. Noel had trouble sticking with stretch-4’s that move well without the ball, and more than anything, he looked more homesick than a college freshman. After all, he has spent his entire basketball career living in the defensive paint.
“There were some concerns revealed defensively, no doubt, when you see him away from the basket and not having that presence at the rim,” Brown said. “That was a concern. Him being able to switch and keep guards in front of him, athletically he is that gifted, was a positive. I think him being forced to communicate way more than when he simply had to run back to the rim [was good for him].”
Brown was smart to try out the position switch, and it will be interesting to see if anything changes with the added benefits of a full training camp and much better player at center. One thing is certain, though: Playing the 4 doesn’t come naturally to Noel, at least not defensively. He’s at his absolute best coming out of nowhere from the weak side, when his only responsibility is protecting the rim.
One of my favorite scenarios this season was when Noel got switched out onto an opposing guard after a pick-and-roll. Sensing a mismatch, the other team would isolate that guard on the Sixers center, which is standard operating procedure. The problem is that going one-on-one against Noel isn’t a mismatch; in fact, it was often harder to score on the athletic 6-foot-11 rookie than the original defender. Problem is, you can’t really do that type of stuff and focus too much on the ball-handler when the guy you’re guarding is capable of this:
“I think it was a good test for me,” Noel said of giving the 4 a whirl. “It’s something I’m going to improve on, perimeter defense and still being able to stick in the paint and block shots.”
Only time well tell on that front, but another major positive worth pointing out in regard to Noel’s season is his health. In Andrew Unterberger’s Sixers Prediction League, one of the questions was literally, “How many games will Nerlens Noel play this year?” In summer league, he was lumbering up and down the floor like a man three times his age on Sunday morning at The Y. As it turned out, his slow start might have simply been rust after sitting out a year more than anything. In the regular season, Noel played in 75 games and generally held up well despite being at such a strength disadvantage on a nightly basis.
As the monthly splits spell out, his offensive game came a long way in the second half of the season, but it’s still an area where he needs work. At the risk of mentioning this too many times, the Sixers offense was historically bad this year and Noel played a major part in that happening. That said, March offensive explosions like in the two videos below are especially encouraging coming from someone that doesn’t need to average 20 points to be an effective player. The second game may have earned him a rare first-place Rookie of the Year vote from Knicks/ABC broadcaster Mike Breen:
“Something I’m going to focus on [this summer] is working on consistency with my 15-foot jump shot,” Noel said. “You know, just making sure that I continue to grow that part of my game and sticking with the fundamentals.”
More than any other facet of his game, I’ll be interested to see how Noel’s jumper looks when he first takes the floor next season. The rookie’s form is still pretty ugly and he only made 31 percent of his jumpers from 10-16 feet this season. That said, I would call that performance a slight success after Brown completely reworked his shooting motion last season, (mostly) correcting a shooting elbow that wasn’t anywhere close to the proper position directly under the ball. Refining that form and getting up 10,000 shots should be one half of his two-pronged offseason plan:
In the strength and shooting departments, Noel definitely still has a lot of work to do to become even average. At this point, you might’ve already wondered if Hinkie could trade Noel while his value his highest. He certainly could, but I would guess that he’d require a better return than the juicy Lakers pick that MCW fetched. Noel’s defense provides a much higher floor than MCW’s, and the rim protection alone could allow him to be a major contributor off the bench for a contender.
That very well might be his destiny, too. After an up-and-down (down-and-up, more accurately) rookie season, we still don’t know exactly what type of NBA player Nerlens Noel is going to end up being. The good news is that we’re all pretty excited to find out.
Speaking of excitement, it’s going to be a pretty big deal when Embiid finally steps on the floor in summer league. After watching him effortlessly drain threes and throw down monster (“monstah” in Brett Brown speak) dunks in warm-ups every night, I want to see him play against some real competition again.
We’ll keep this section relatively short, because there are already 2,000 words and Embiid didn’t play at all this year. In many ways, it was an extremely difficult first season for the draft’s third overall pick. The long process of rehabbing from the surgery on his broken navicular bone must have been challenging enough, but his 13-year-old brother also tragically died in a car accident in October.
In December, he was sent home from a West Coast trip because Brown wasn’t satisfied with his work ethic and weight. After the season, the Sixers head coach tried to provide some perspective by explaining that everything about Embiid improved immensely once he was allowed to play.
“Put a person in a canoe and don’t give them a fishing rod, it’s probably frustrating,” Brown said. “Here we are, and he starts going to the court, and his world changes. It makes sense. He’s got his spirit again.”
HOT TAKE ALERT: I can’t see a world where a healthy 7-footer that has range out beyond the arc, a developing post game, and the ability to protect the rim isn’t a freaking awesome NBA player if healthy. That’s obviously a big “if” though, and Brown believes Embiid’s condition will be the determining factor.
“I attribute [his health] directly to his weight,” Brown said. “We talk about diet all the time. You can point to many players when weight becomes a real factor, that the pounding of 82 games rim-to-rim takes its toll.”
Follow Rich on Twitter: @rich_hofmann
