The Sixers battled out of an early hole but couldn't get over the hump in the second half, and Miami ran away with a 99-82 victory in the fourth quarter once Philadelphia's legs gave out.
Here's what I saw.
The Good
• The Sixers had plenty of issues in this game, but they deserve a lot of credit for their commitment on defense in these circumstances. A lot of people (myself included) have remarked that the Sixers simply don't have the personnel to be a good defensive team anymore, and they went out and rejected that premise, buying in as a group to stop Miami from running away from this one.
What made this game special on that end was that it was hard to point to one guy as the source of their success on that end. There have been plenty of games this year where you could say Joel Embiid picked up everybody else, or that Matisse Thybulle's chaotic brand of perimeter defense was enough to save the day. But this was about connectivity and cohesiveness above all else, a reflection of a team who came in with a gameplan and executed it at a high level.
All throughout the rotation, guys were bought in and made a difference. Danny Green came into the game and caused havoc off-ball, ripping Jimmy Butler on a drive or two and jumping passing lanes to break up plays. Furkan Korkmaz, though he lacked in a big way on offense, made smart decisions and made Butler work hard for some tough buckets inside the arc. Tobias Harris played good, physical defense on-ball at times and slid his feet well in space, refusing to be the reason they gave up a lane to the rim. And there were subtle but impactful movements all over the floor, with players stunting, pinching, and helping just enough without opening huge attacking windows for the Heat elsewhere.
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This group could have easily laid down and died when it started to get out of hand in the first half. They buckled down and made Miami work instead, something they were able to do because their offense perked up after a horrific start.
• On the subject of the offense, Doc Rivers made an impactful adjustment at halftime that made life a lot easier for their best player. With Embiid struggling to find space and get the ball on the block, the Sixers brought Embiid further out, initiating much more of their offense from the elbows. That was the fix Embiid needed to leave somewhat of an imprint on this game, with Embiid marching to the free-throw line throughout the third quarter once he was able to actually get the ball and begin to attack.
For as much justified heat as Rivers has taken for his decision-making with rotations and such the last two years, there have been a lot of small tweaks like this that add up to Sixers victories over the same time period. He's not as inflexible as his worst critics would tell you, and he's not as masterful as his biggest supporters believe, either.
• Down Harden, the Sixers got another stinky start from Embiid in this one to boot. No matter — Tyrese Maxey was ready to carry the load early, shapeshifting on offense at a moment's notice. His trigger from three has gone from reluctant to damn-near automatic, with Maxey getting shots up even when the window is fairly tiny. As Green and other vets have stressed to him throughout this season, he works as hard as anybody on the team and should feel empowered to take any open shot that comes his way.
The deeper into this season he gets, the better Maxey looks and the more he's able to show. He's scoring when rejecting screens in pick-and-rolls, leaking out in transition, beating closeouts, putting it all together on his best nights, and still looking pretty damn good even in so-so performances.
• One great sign for the Sixers in this one is how spry Green looked after this season's evidence suggested his legs might be leaving him as he moves deeper into his mid-30s. Rivers has been cautious with increasing his role and minute count for obvious reasons — soft-tissue injuries are no joke at any time, but they're a cause for additional concern when it's a 34-year-old who has repeated flare-ups in the midst of a single season. That said, we might soon find ourselves in a situation where Green has to step back into a bigger role for this group. He's one of their only semi-reliable shooters, and he's perking up on the other end.
(Err, at least he has been a reliable shooter most of the year. Not exactly his finest hour from deep on Saturday night.)
The Bad
• Embiid did not pick a good time to have poor games on back-to-back nights, with the Sixers in desperate need of a big Embiid performance with Harden on the shelf. Miami clearly bothered him and often prevented him from getting the ball in the first place, which led to a lot of situations where Embiid was getting touches late in the clock after the offense broke down. There are many settings where Embiid thrives, but it's asking a lot for him to bail them out with long jumpers off-the-dribble after the first 18-20 seconds of the shot clock are wasted.
That sort of lets Embiid off the hook for his own struggles and flaws, though, and Embiid's best hasn't been there the last couple of nights. Miami offers a rougher, more disciplined version of the swarming defenses he has picked apart all season, and Embiid fell back into bad habits when he was able to get early touches in the first half, dribbling without a plan and allowing the Heat to put him in spots that were tough to escape from. At his best, Embiid has been a disciplined dribbler, using the handle to slip free and then immediately looking for the finish or the pass. He was sloppy on South Beach, and it led to bad offense whether he was the guy ultimately taking the shot or not.
For the first time in a while, fatigue also looked to be a real factor for Embiid, whose legs were not there when he tried to attack Miami with his jumper. On back-to-back attempts from deep in the fourth quarter, Embiid front-rimmed jumpers that never looked close to going in, dead long before their arrival. You probably could have anticipated this in the second half of a back-to-back, as it's not like Embiid has participated in tons of those throughout his career, but that left the Sixers without the final push they needed in the second half, short a closer and go-to guy with the game there to be had.
Obviously, there's no reason to panic about him having a couple of off-nights after a sustained run of dominance this season. A clunker in this one is barely going to register for most people. But after he dug deep to push the Sixers past Miami in a similar scenario earlier this season, you might have expected him to do the same in this one. And even if this game didn't mean anything regarding a future playoff matchup, it still factors into the standings and the battle for seeding when it's all said and done.
• It seems slightly insane to focus as much on entry passing as we have the last couple of nights, but Harris is simply that bad at getting the ball to Embiid (or anyone else) when he's the guy with that responsibility. Honestly, we are at the point where they should actively avoid Harris even being the guy in a position to get Embiid the ball, because you can predict how it's going to play out before it happens in most cases.
Frankly, it's indicative of the broader problem with Harris. He moves far too slowly with almost everything he does to be counted on as a producer in a high-level offense. The mechanical skill is there in a lot of ways (unfortunately not as a catch-and-shoot guy right now) but it's out of sync from how he thinks and feels the game. That's a death sentence against a team like Miami, who scratches and claws for every inch for 48 minutes or damn near close to that number.
Putting Harris in the middle of your zone offense just seems like you're asking for failure. The guy in that spot needs to make quick decisions and find the gap in the defense as soon as it's created with the entry pass, and Harris doesn't even really look to go elsewhere with the ball right away, waiting until he is swarmed by defenders to make a move. They need the exact opposite approach, and though it's useful to have a midrange shotmaker in that spot, they'd be better served with almost anybody else making decisions for Philadelphia there.
The crazy thing is that it felt like Harris was one of their better players for stretches of this game, in spite of all the issues you see pop up again and again. He's such a bewildering player to watch a lot of the time — you see the skill, you see he cares, you see him bail the offense out of some tough spots, but you also see that he's a guy who helps put them in a jam a lot of the time.
• Matisse Thybulle was an absolute zero on offense in this game, which is a sentence fragment you could put in place during at least half of the games he has appeared in this season. He was so ineffective, so unimposing to the Heat that Rivers actually opted to go away from him in crunch time of this game, even with Danny Green missing an assortment of threes and not doing much to change the calculus for Philadelphia.
This team badly needs a reliable two-way wing. You could say that about almost any basketball team in existence because you can never have enough of those guys, but they have nothing resembling a helpful wing between Embiid and Harden.
• Paul Millsap actually did some decent dirty work in this game. I still can't believe he's the guy getting the backup center minutes behind Embiid, and Embiid playing 36 minutes in the second half of a back-to-back should probably not happen. The position has to be managed better.
• The final score of this game doesn't feel indicative of the game I watched, which was neck-and-neck for a good chunk of the second half. It sort of highlights the absurdity of back-to-back games on a general level — one team had way more to offer in the final minutes of the game for no reason other than the fact that they had the opportunity to chill at home the night before. Put some more NBA teams in cities where they aren't sharing arenas with hockey teams so we can avoid this nonsense moving forward, I guess.
The Ugly
• Dear god, did the Sixers look like a team on the second half of a back-to-back at the outset of this game. The Heat are an annoying team to play on a good night — that's praising them, to be clear — and Philadelphia struggled to deal with their pressure, their mix of coverages, and the physicality that was thrown at them as they tried to set up shop on offense.
They could have helped themselves out by, I don't know, simply making shots? Going 5-for-23 for the quarter is pretty tough to do even when you're nursing tired legs, and the Sixers were able to get some quality looks at the basket in spite of Miami's ability to junk up their offense. Unfortunately, many of those attempts went to guys who teams are mostly happy to see shoot, guys like Thybulle and Furkan Korkmaz, who promptly squandered the opportunities in front of them.
(The Korkmaz fascination from Rivers is a huge sore spot among fans right now, and believe me, I understand the desire to see absolutely anybody getting a chance over him at this point. Isaiah Joe and Shake Milton have shot poorly all season themselves, but they have also not had the same opportunities to play high-leverage minutes the way Korkmaz has. Anyone who wants to see one of them in Korkmaz's spot to the point that Korkmaz is not involved at all, I am not going to argue with you. I just want to see somebody actually shoot well from the bench aside from Niang or Green before I think it matters.)
Miami didn't have the same excuse for looking like trash, and they managed to keep up with Philadelphia in the lowlights department even as they surged to a big lead early. Bam Adebayo, who is typically very good, shot a jumper off the top of the backboard from around 12 feet away, and moments later threw a pass to absolutely nobody in transition to give away what should have been an easy Heat bucket. This was not exactly a playoff-caliber performance from either group, with Miami coming into the game with a lot of their best players listed as questionable.
This is one I look at and simply say, "Oh well." Once Harden was shelved, most of the juice for this game was gone anyway. Onto the next one.
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