April 14, 2021
The Sixers made the most of an opportunity to play a shorthanded Nets team, locking up the season series victory with a 123-117 win over Brooklyn. Joel Embiid was the leading man once again, bludgeoning his way to 39 points and 13 rebounds.
Here's what I saw.
• If there's something I appreciate about the Doc Rivers approach to basketball, it's the willingness to make the game as simple as possible if the situation warrants it. Philadelphia had a simple approach to their meeting with the Nets on Wednesday: hunt the worst defenders on the floor by any means necessary.
With more aggressive staggering, the Sixers have been able to get at least one of their top three guys on the floor with their bench group recently, and Tobias Harris was the top dog for Philly against Brooklyn. Running the show from the perimeter, Harris waited out Nets switches until he was able to get either Joe Harris or Kyrie Irving on him, and he repeatedly punished Brooklyn for switching with little resistance.
Harris has taken beautifully to the role of switch hunter this season, a development that feels particularly great for the Sixers because of how badly they were punished by opponents who attacked them that way in the past. And his game has gone to another level (or perhaps back to his old level) with Rivers encouraging him to play this way, with Harris seemingly always finding the soft spot in a team's perimeter defense.
If not for Embiid going on an expected rampage against Brooklyn, Harris would have been the headliner for Philly by a mile. At the least, he was neck-and-neck with his teammate throughout the night, carrying the Sixers whenever Embiid got rest on the bench.
(For the record, staggering their stars and not leaving the all-bench group to die should have been a priority all season. But if it had to wait for the stretch run, fine. It may give the Sixers the final kick they needed to earn the No. 1 seed.)
• Speaking of simplicity, the Nets did not exactly dress up their defensive gameplan against Philadelphia's best player. Brooklyn sagged aggressively against Embiid (and as usual, Ben Simmons) to try to entice him into shooting jumpers. Embiid solved that problem in a couple of different ways, starting with knocking down some threes and finishing by, well, not getting baited into shots he didn't want.
After missing out on a couple early foul calls as he battle DeAndre Jordan in the post, it wouldn't have been shocking if Embiid strayed away from the paint. But to his credit, Embiid kept after it and rejected a bunch of open shot opportunities from the perimeter as the first half wore on, eventually using his size to overwhelm the Nets around the basket. Several times, Embiid stared down an open three and thought better of it, and his teammates made sure to post and re-post him until he was able to dance with a smaller man on the block.
A couple of offensive rebounds and bully ball post-ups later, Embiid was firmly in a groove, and he arrived at halftime with a cool 21 points and six rebounds. More importantly, he had accomplished his nightly goal of putting the opposing big in foul trouble, with Jordan picking up his third foul before halftime. Really, it could have been more than that.
Brooklyn has some interesting bigs to go to against other teams — Nic Claxton has proven to be a real weapon in a switch-heavy scheme — but it's a parade of guys who can't stay in front of the big fella in this specific matchup. As long as he commits to exploiting the advantage, and there's no reason to believe he won't, Brooklyn's inability to deal with Embiid is Philadelphia's best case in a theoretical playoff meeting with the Nets.
(Here's the thing — Embiid wasn't even all that good against Brooklyn. There were some ugly turnovers and a lot of missed jumpers. He's going to find his way to big numbers through effort alone.)
• I didn't think there was much to pick apart in Philadelphia's defensive game plan, even with Kyrie Irving going bananas for the first 24 minutes of action. Irving's ability to separate combined with his touch from all angles makes him nearly impossible to cover, and the Sixers were mostly good at turning him into a one-man-band.
Philly's pre-rotations and help defense were particularly inspired against Brooklyn, with Simmons providing a ton of value by reading plays before/as they were developing and putting out fires before they got dangerous.
Despite the stars missing from the Nets' rotation, I thought the home team came with the right attitude in a pivotal game for Eastern Conference seeding. The Sixers were pretty locked in, staying with plays where they looked beat and treating this matchup with a level of intensity just slightly below a playoff game. There were dig downs from Furkan Korkmaz, transition swipes from Simmons, and a lot of communicating from 1-5 on the floor no matter who it was.
• This felt like one of the better Shake Milton efforts post All Star and a game that could easily translate to a playoff matchup with Brooklyn. The benches are going to thin out for both teams when they hit the playoffs, but Milton should still get his chances against opposing second units, and this is a group he should be able to win some one-on-one battles against.
At the very least, Milton's confidence in his jumper is in a different place than it was earlier this season, and with Harris assuming the role as the leader of that second group, Milton slid into a secondary role that suits him better than do-everything playmaker. With Milton focused on taking open threes and attacking weak defenders off-the-dribble, he and the Sixers are set up for greater success.
• The matchup data is probably not going to be friendly to Matisse Thybulle, but I feel confident he is going to be their best option to defend Kyrie Irving in the playoffs. While Simmons can hang with the best of them across the league, his talents are better suited to the bigger wings. Thybulle was able to get into Irving's chest and still track him side-to-side when Irving inevitably found a sliver of daylight to squeeze through, and I think he'll have more answers on a night where Irving isn't shooting fireballs out of his eyes.
• The major negative in this game for me was Philadelphia's propensity for getting scored on immediately after scoring at the other end. Brooklyn got out with gusto after made Sixers buckets, and it didn't look like something the home team was prepared for, with the Nets picking up some easy layups and made threes in the process.
Maybe you could argue that sort of thing won't happen in a playoff series, with Brooklyn opting to play a more methodical game in a more rugged seven-game affair. But giving up points due to nothing more than a lack of effort and concentration is unacceptable in any context.
• Needing to bring Embiid, Simmons, and Harris back into this game to ensure the victory should not have been necessary. What's worse is that the starters came back in the game against a Brooklyn group of backups and still managed to make this game look a lot dicier than it was or should have been. Brooklyn's energy put them on their heels a bit, and they slowly coughed up a lead and left the door open.
As Doc Rivers astutely noted before the game, you take any wins you can get in games against NBA opponents regardless of how undermanned they might be during that game. But the Sixers played with their food far too much in that fourth quarter, and they nearly paid for it.
Not everything was as simple as "energy," obviously. The Nets showed absolutely no respect to Simmons down the stretch, with center Claxton practically standing under the rim on a lot of possessions, allowing Brooklyn to front Embiid and put a guy behind him, undercutting their ability to get the ball to their best player. If you're looking for a wrinkle that might rear its ugly head in the playoffs, it's this one, and it won't necessarily be the Nets who screw up Philly's offense with that strategy.
Still, never should have gotten to that point in the first place. They eventually got the 'W', but it didn't feel as good as it should have.
• Let's just throw an obligatory sentence about Mike Scott in here, because that feels like red meat for the fanbase right now. There's gotta be a better small-ball option than sticking him out there next to Simmons in the frontcourt.
• It's hard to know what to make of how Embiid looked at times on Wednesday. There were some explosive flashes around and away from the basket, but it was hard to miss the winces of pain on his face as he moved up and down the floor.
Is it as simple as the knee brace bothering him? I think that's a real possibility. It wasn't like he shied away from contact against Brooklyn, and he has made his distaste for the brace no secret since returning from his injury layoff. The Sixers had better hope that's all it is.
• Milton should get fined for the foul he took with 0.8 seconds left in the first half. Absolutely ridiculous.
• I know "the healthy Brooklyn Nets" have basically been a fantasy this season, but it seems borderline unfair that the Nets have three shotmakers on the level of Kevin Durant, James Harden, and Kyrie Irving. With only Irving available on Wednesday night, the Sixers could basically throw all their available resources at Irving, and it didn't matter much. He was cooking their best options left and right, canning shots with hands and bodies between him and the basket.
If you were inclined to dismiss this Nets group before the game, I would caution against it afterward as I have tried to all season. You'd be crazy not to fear this team when they have everyone available.
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