The Sixers' offense threatened to set basketball back by 30 years in the first 30 minutes of action, but they rode a dominant defense to get a win over the rival Celtics on opening night. It wasn't pretty at times, and they made fans sweat it out longer than they would have hoped, but Philadelphia eventually emerged with a 107-93 victory.
Here's what I saw in the win.
The Good
• I say this with 100 percent sincerity — this is a very cool moment that happened prior to the game
Trey Burke idolized Allen Iverson growing up, and I can't even imagine what it felt like for him to see one of his basketball heroes with his jersey on. The sort of thing you dream about as a kid.
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• Loved the move to have Al Horford ring the bell to open the season. He told reporters this week he wanted to get the first matchup with the Celtics out of the way so he could cement his place in Philadelphia, and what better way to do it than to have him participate in a team tradition?
• There were a lot of problems in the opening half, but Philadelphia's defense was easily the standout from the first 30 minutes of play. The offense was an absolute disaster, Joel Embiid couldn't get going, nobody could get a head of steam going... and yet there the Sixers were, leading by a point at halftime.
You can feel how big this Sixers team is when the starting lineup is on the floor. When the average team tries to force an opponent to switch on defense, head coaches are pulling their hair out and trying to figure out how much they can live with someone getting targeted. There is no target for Philly.
Josh Richardson flew across the defensive line from moment-to-moment, hopping from Kemba Walker to Jayson Tatum to Jaylen Brown without breaking a sweat. When one of Philadelphia's bigs had to hold up in isolation against a smaller player, they had their frontcourt partner to offer another layer of protection at the rim. They looked exactly as people expected them to look, aggressive and dominant and capable of forcing their opponent into the shots no one wants to take.
They forced a damn eight-second violation at one point in the third quarter by picking up on Boston fullcourt. That was not even a real possibility last season and was a great snapshot of how they've changed their philosophy to match the personnel.
• Richardson is not going to take long to win over the fans of Philadelphia. After coming up with a block in the opening minutes of the game and drawing a lazy foul on Gordon Hayward, he immediately played the moment up for the crowd, drawing a gigantic roar from the home crowd.
He played with the same aggressive mentality on the other end of the floor and was one of the lone bright spots for Philly on that end in the first half. Many of Boston's top players ended up in foul trouble early, and Richardson owns part of the credit for that, as his desire to get into the paint put the Celtics in compromising positions.
This was an opponent the Sixers got pushed around by in recent seasons, and it looks like there's little chance of that happening anymore. Richardson deserves some of the credit for that — this was a tone-setting performance.
• We did not see Ben Simmons turn into a new man as a jump-shooter, but he played with an edge on Wednesday night. The Celtics have historically been able to bottle him up in part because they win the mental battle against him, not just because they guard him well, and Simmons made sure he was not going to let Boston punk him in the opener.
Finding a happy medium between "box score monster" and "completely irrelevant" is going to be key for Simmons against specific matchups this year. I think a lot of that comes down to just playing with power and purpose because he has the speed and strength to threaten teams even when they sag off of him.
Where I was more impressed was on the defensive end, where Simmons lived up to his preseason talk of wanting to be the best defensive player on the team. His energy level was elite from the opening tip to the final whistle, and like Richardson, he made switching across different defensive assignments look rather easy.
• This was not Joel Embiid's best game, and in fact I thought the first half was one of his worse two-way performances in a while. But that's the benefit of Philadelphia's new team construction: the integrity of the defense doesn't rest solely on his shoulders, and his buddies bought him some time to find his way against Boston.
Embiid really seemed to get going after taking an elbow in the face from Celtics wing Jaylen Brown, which caught the big fella in the grill and caused a brief stoppage in play. From that point on, his energy levels were up and he was flying all over the place, including when he nearly flew into the scorer's table to try to save a ball from going out of bounds.
That stuff was a lot more important than anything he did as a scorer, with Embiid settling for a lot of garbage shots throughout the game. But of course, he had the occasional highlight.
"The Good" part of this is that the Sixers were able to play frontrunner for so much of the game with Embiid clearly not playing close to his best.
• A little too much Furkan Korkmaz for my liking on Wednesday night, but he delivered a huge three with Boston closing in on Philly in the fourth quarter. The bar is not exactly sky high for Korkmaz — if he can make shots, he's going to get minutes. Mission accomplished on opening night.
• I know these guys are professionals, but it is way harder to do what Kyle O'Quinn did on Wednesday night than he made it look. With Al Horford and Embiid in foul trouble midway through the fourth quarter, Brett Brown had to find a way to buy time for his frontcourt. Rather than go small, he brought O'Quinn ice cold off of the bench, and he immediately rewarded his coach by immediately hitting an above-the-break three and then mixing it up with Boston inside, drawing a foul and depositing a layup shortly after.
He played just three minutes, and he made them count.
• We spent the preseason discussing how good Matisse Thybulle was on defense, but there was one potential downside in plain sight — overeagerness. Young players have a habit of getting baited into foul trouble, and someone who prides himself on being disruptive like Thybulle is especially susceptible to being exploited by good offensive players.
Kemba Walker was the first to get the best of the rookie on Wednesday night, getting him to take a bad second foul chasing a block with the shot clock winding down on a first-quarter possession. It says a lot about the rookie that Brett Brown is already asking him to take tough assignments like Walker, but he has to find a happy medium between chasing turnovers and avoiding foul trouble.
That being said, Thybulle rebounded in a big way in the second half, coming up with a few defensive highlights and finally finding his footing.
The rookie got a chance to play crunch time in his very first NBA game, and those reps will pay dividends later.
• Tier-two Frosty Freeze-Out on night one? Hell of a start for the fans.
The Bad
• The first quarter — okay, basically the entire game — highlighted some of my fears with how this team is constructed. Parts of the fanbase have been pining for Joel Embiid to camp out on the low block for years, and he tried to go to work early against Boston. But if opponents don't fear anyone on the perimeter, they're going to feel empowered to send hard doubles at the big man and dare someone else to beat them.
That's exactly what happened Wednesday night, and for long periods of the game, the Sixers looked like an offense without a plan. The Sixers didn't put pressure on Boston via their shooting, and nobody could get downhill that wasn't named Ben Simmons.
• I continue to be skeptical of the Josh Richardson at point guard experiment. It may turn out that it's the best option for this team, and he actually showed some nice flashes handling the• rock in sets with Embiid, looking better there than I thought he was in the preseason.
But here's the real problem — one of the other guards needs to emerge as a real option, or else somebody from the starting backcourt is going to be playing too many minutes. The team will get rest for Embiid for this year, which is great, but they can't burn out everyone else as they do it.
• If you're looking for a leader in the clubhouse for the answer to, "Who will emerge as the scapegoat if things don't go well?" Tobias Harris is the runaway favorite so far. After being handed a big payday in the offseason to stick around, Harris should be expected to play like an offensive machine for the Sixers. We are, to be charitable, a long way away from that.
Harris' M.O. has always been being good at a lot of things but not necessarily being great at anything. When you're a secondary figure in the offense, that's a great trait to have, but the problem for Philadelphia is that they need him to be their best offensive player, and potentially their No. 1 guy in crunch time. It's unclear whether Harris has the skillset and countermoves needed to actually make that work, and if he doesn't deliver, they're in big trouble.
• A real tough night at the office for James Ennis. Not sure there's much more to be written about it than that. He'll bounce back, but a few more of these and the calls for a younger option to take his minutes are going to get loud.
The Ugly
• Joel Embiid's free-throw routine where he picks his ass before shooting — still terrible.
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