It was only a matter of time before we reached this moment. With Ben Simmons imposing his will on damn near every team he plays against, his free-throw percentage always stood out as something a determined team might exploit. In Wednesday night's game against the Washington Wizards, we were "treated" to the logical extreme of that assumption, as Simmons went to the line an absurd 29 times on the evening, setting a new NBA record with 24 free-throw attempts in the fourth quarter alone.
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The final five minutes was exhausting, infuriating, and a good test of Simmons' mental fortitude. And yet the biggest disappointment was not watching Simmons trudge to the line over and over and over again, it was what the Sixers did on the other end of the court.
Put simply, the Sixers did not defend well when the Wizards flipped the game on its head. If they had, Simmons free-throw shooting would have been enough to get the job done, even if you'd prefer he make more than 15 of his 29 attempts.
Forty-eight fourth-quarter points brought the Wizards within an arm's length of pulling off a shocking comeback, and that's what stood out most to Sixers coach Brett Brown following the 118-113 win.
"You guys are going to walk away and write about Ben Simmons, I'm going to look at our defense. This is where the story should be told," said Brown. "They had 48 points in the [fourth] period. Some of it I shake their hand, other of it there were lapses, a few technicals, a few turnovers...Those are the things that interest me the most. I get the global issue of Ben Simmons being fouled, the Hack-a-Simmons. But it's deeper than that to me."
As Brown alluded to in that statement, a series of errors on the defensive end left them susceptible to a strategy like that in the first place. Rewatching the fourth quarter, there wasn't a man on the court who was blameless for their ineptitude defensively. Jerryd Bayless was one of the first culprits, cheating entirely too far off of Jodie Meeks, whose one legitimate NBA skill is shooting. The Sixers were well positioned to handle the drive, but Bayless ended up getting caught cheating too far.
There were bad fouls that are part and parcel of playing a group of young guys. Youth can provide you with energy and exuberance and help you hit some really high peaks, but it can also send you crashing down to earth when the energy isn't kept in check.
That's one of the big problems for Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot on defense right now. He damn sure tries hard and is a capable athlete on the perimeter, but sometimes he doesn't know when to call it quits. He gets caught fairly often trying to contest a shot he should just let go, and he handed Kelly Oubre an extra point at the line on that type of play on Wednesday night.
The fourth quarter is also where you begin to feel the dark cloud of foul trouble hanging over you. It can get guys removed from the game early and bungle up your rotation, but the closer players inch toward six fouls, the more they have to consider the threat of disqualification during their every move.
Joel Embiid is not a man always concerned with discretion — look at him trying to chase down players in transition if you don't believe me—but he did not sell out to protect the rim in the way you often expect him to. Simmons isn't exactly prime Scottie Pippen on this play, but at the very least he guides Oubre in a way that should make a contest easy for Embiid.
As always, some of it comes down to effort as well. Embiid is not disinterested in defense on that play, but the game was winding down and the Sixers were mostly just trying to crawl toward the finish line against a Wizards team they'd outplayed for most of the evening. Without John Wall, the Sixers are a considerably better team than Washington, and after building a 24-point lead it's only natural to get complacent.
You could see and feel that watching their perimeter defense. Robert Covington's positioning and reflexes are usually excellent, but he let Chris McCullough — a sparingly-used role player he's more than equipped to cover — get by him and cause a chain reaction that forced Covington to take a foul near the basket.
There's also the matter of the offensive possessions they ran before the game got into Hack-a-Ben territory. After storming out of the gate as one of the best three-point shooting teams in the league, the Sixers have been hot-and-cold lately, particularly between Covington and JJ Redick. The two men asked to space the floor above all else combined to go 1-10 from beyond the arc on Wednesday, which isn't going to get it done.
When the Sixers did miss threes, they weren't always equipped to deal with the counter punches Washington hit them within transition. When Redick missed a corner three with just over five minutes away and the Hack-a-Ben stretch just about to ramp up, he stared down the shot just a little too long. When it rimmed out, Meeks was off to the races the other way and forced Covington to take another foul.
No one is going to sit here and tell you it's good that Simmons shot 12/24 from the free-throw line in the fourth quarter. At the same time, if you're effectively getting a point per possession as a result of a defensive strategy, that's completely workable as long as you get stops. The Sixers currently average 105.5 possessions per game and 108.6 points per game, which works out to roughly 1.03 points per possession. Making 1/2 free throws over and over again puts them slightly below their usual offensive output, but not in a way that should be enough to hurt them or allow a team to overcome a big lead.
If you're looking for good news, this group seems conscious of the fact that it will not be the last time they have to deal with these circumstances. Simmons was adamant about not fearing the free-throw line—"I have no fear of taking free throws, it's not going to happen for much longer," he said after the game—and the guys around him all stressed they just needed to be prepared if and when Simmons gets forced to the line like this again.
"The Hack-a-Ben thing, they kind of made us a little stagnant at times, but we're going to see it. Teams are going to play that way," said Covington. "We just got to learn how to finish out games better than that ... During that fourth, that stretch, we kind of got away [from our defensive principles], and it was allowing them to get back into the game."
These Sixers do not lean on excuses when they struggle or fail, perhaps because they know they now have enough talent to overcome the nightly adversity of an NBA schedule. They now have one more bit of adversity to learn from as a group, and their focus should be on getting stops, even if their opponent decides that's no longer part of the gameplan.