No Joel Embiid and James Harden, no problem for the Sixers. Up against a Miami Heat team coming off a free weekend, the weary Sixers managed a 113-106 win behind 28-5-4 from Tyrese Maxey and an inspiring performance from their bench.
Here's what I saw.
The Good
• Tyrese Maxey has delivered some of his best performances when his team has been counted out and he has had the green light to do whatever he wants on offense. His big rookie breakthrough came during Philadelphia's COVID-plagued game against the Denver Nuggets, and he (briefly) helped keep the Sixers afloat when Embiid was in the health and safety protocols last fall.
It wasn't immediately clear if he was ever going to reach that level on Monday. The aggression was there to open the game, and he was able to pull off some sweet moves in traffic to find his way to the rim, but his success rate from downtown didn't match his confidence, and he was in search of his jumper for the majority of this game. Even worse, his evening was marred by foul trouble, with Maxey picking up three first-half fouls that almost certainly had an impact on his rhythm. With Philadelphia already short on depth, bench guards were forced into action while he could only observe the game from the sideline.
Resilient as ever, Maxey came out of the halftime tunnel and just kept coming, eventually breaking through and delivering the final body blow that pushed the Sixers to victory.
What Maxey showed Monday is how he can remain effective even as the jumper evades him. He continues to improve as a contact-seeker and free-throw generator, which made up a good chunk of his offense up until the fourth quarter. The Heat are very good at closing gaps and shrinking the floor when you attack the rim, and Maxey did a good job of navigating small spaces, darting in and out and flashing a Euro step or two when the moment required it.
As his teammate Joel Embiid has shown you many times over the last few years, trips to the line can buy you the time you need to find the range elsewhere. All those early misses disappeared into the background in the fourth quarter on Monday night, with Maxey joining a gaggle of Sixers players who absolutely sauteed Tyler Herro in the final period. Playing him to drive, the Heat had to sit back and watch as Maxey buried them with a hailstorm of threes down the stretch, leading to chants of "Maxey! Maxey" from the home faithful at Wells Fargo Center.
The combination of mental toughness, skill, speed, and pure joy that Maxey plays with is really something special. There was a moment last year where it seemed moving Maxey was a distinct possibility in order to get Kyle Lowry on the roster for a Finals push. Instead, Maxey threw the decisive haymaker against Lowry's Heat on the second night of a back-to-back without Philly's two best players available.
As an added bonus, Maxey even came up with a hellacious chase down block in the game's closing moments, preventing Caleb Martin from scoring on a Philadelphia turnover. What can't he do?
• Playing his first real minutes since the Brooklyn massacre on March 10th, Furkan Korkmaz stepped back into the rotation and offered the Sixers a lift off of the bench. Cue The Godfather III (a sentence nobody should say in almost any context:
Rivers has had a soft spot for Korkmaz throughout his tenure here, letting him play through slumps longer than other guys competing for his role in the rotation. Given Rivers' history of getting value out of movement shooters and Korkmaz's more diverse skill set in comparison to his peers on the bench, it's not the craziest thing in the world.
In any case, Korkmaz was excellent in the first half of this one, shooting a perfect 4/4 from the field (including a pair of threes) to help Philadelphia find some offense with their two centerpieces missing. If his spell as pseudo point guard early in the year didn't drive this home already, Korkmaz's height allows him to make some passes over the top that a lot of guys on the roster wouldn't think to make, and he was able to create a few open threes for teammates against Miami.
Joining Korkmaz in the bench production department was Shake Milton, who has been in better standing than the Turkish wing lately but not by a whole lot. Given a chance to run more offense and create, a byproduct of Harden's absence, Milton put together some of his best basketball in quite a bit, attacking the rim and scoring around length to offset iffy shooting.
The beginning of the fourth quarter was Milton's moment to shine, and he put the Sixers on his back as everybody else on the floor simply hung on for dear life. Poor Tyler Herro was put in the torture chamber, with Milton hitting a number of off balance-shots in the painted area, on the baseline, and anywhere he could get to with a sliver of daylight. This isn't the first time we have seen Milton catch heat, but it was arguably the most unexpected, with this performance effectively pulled from thin air.
In the past, we've seen this duo do a bit of damage (just a bit) by taking pressure off one another with their respective talents. Neither guy can/should be trusted in a lead role from the perimeter, but if you combine their ball-handling, passing, and shooting in one package, they have just about enough to get by. They're a big reason Rivers has trusted all-bench groups to get it done on their own the last two seasons, and while I've never been a big fan of the approach, they made him look smart for the decision for at least one evening.
Whatever got into these two, it's a reminder of how much of a lift the Sixers could get from even one of these bench guys finding a groove and contributing as they come down the stretch.
• When the Sixers are able to clean the defensive glass and convert a stop, it turns out they look like a reasonably competent defensive team. I would not have bet on them to look like a decent rebounding team in this context — they were down Embiid and Harden and up against a rugged Miami group — but they were able to turn Miami into a one-shot team for a lot of the night, and that's a win in and of itself.
The encouraging part about their effort on the glass was that it wasn't a product of one guy or even a grouping of guys to get the job done. Players up and down the lineup got involved as rebounders, even guys who you typically expect to get bullied on the glass. Despite having tired legs from the night before, guys were attacking the ball in mid-air and mixing it up with Miami. Korkmaz, among the many other things he offered, soared through the air for a few contested rebounds, using his length to make up for whatever he lacks in strength on the interior.
Rebounding is a team effort, and these guys made sure to band together in a tough spot.
The Bad
• Paul Millsap getting the starting nod was mocked pretty loudly by a lot of people (and I suppose quietly by this beat writer), but I don't think he did much to draw scrutiny throughout the night. He offered reasonably competent minutes at the pivot, competed on defense, and offered at least the threat of floor spacing, opening up space for the Sixers in the middle of the floor.
DeAndre Jordan, on the other hand, was a moving target whenever he was on the floor. Plus-minus has rarely lied as loudly as it did in this game, where Jordan was the beneficiary of Milton and Korkmaz rediscovering themselves on the offensive end. For a time in the middle of the fourth quarter, Miami needed to do nothing except run pick-and-rolls that put Jordan in space, throwing lobs over his head to Bam Adebayo for easy buckets.
(The Sixers, mercifully, had a player to hunt on the other end. Herro was BBQ chicken in space no matter who had the opportunity to take him on in the fourth quarter.)
I don't think it's accurate to say Jordan doesn't compete, because he kept a bunch of plays alive with taps out to teammates and a bit of dirty work around the rim. The problem is that he switches off mid-play far too often, looking like a 2K player whose internet cut out mid-possession. No bueno.
• I don't think it's overstating it to say that Danny Green's downturn may be one of the most important developments of this season for the Sixers. Without a reliable two-way player to bring in off the bench or even spot start depending on the matchup, the Sixers are stuck with a series of bad choices if Matisse Thybulle is playing poorly. Do you bring in Georges Niang and kill your perimeter foot speed? Do you play another guard and go small and unathletic? There's not a defensive option to be found, unless you give serious consideration to using Paul Reed as a wing, and lord knows I don't trust him to shoot.
Even with a pair of made threes, Green's lack of footspeed and his suddenly suspect decision-making came into focus, with Tyler Herro absolutely torching him on a few possessions in Monday night's game. They have to hope he can rediscover some semblance of form before the playoffs.
• Note to Tobias Harris — Paul Millsap is not the guy you throw a lob to in transition at this stage of his career.
The Ugly
• Someone with more time and interest in this specific thing should look it up — I can't remember a team drawing the same opponent in three separate back-to-backs during a single season. The Sixers managed to win one of those, one of their most impressive wins of the season, but it was a pretty crazy scheduling quirk that seems like it'll loom large in the end-of-season tiebreakers.
• Going to Paul Millsap and DeAndre Jordan as your two big men in this game is absolutely insane. It's exactly what I expected Rivers to do, and Millsap probably exceeded expectations for most people watching the game, but it's still insane. Being totally unwilling to take a look at the young guys further makes no sense when you consider how poor the play has been behind Joel Embiid as of late.
• This has nothing to do with the Sixers' game, but the Dallas Mavericks had a rain delay in their game against the Minnesota Timberwolves. What kind of Mickey Mouse operation are they running down there? First, they couldn't get their rims right, now they can't keep the building dry. What's next?
• I simply do not believe in Miami's ability to score against playoff defenses. They're a tough team that deserves respect, but I could see them getting absolutely strangled by a team like, for example, the Boston Celtics.
Follow Kyle on Twitter: @KyleNeubeck
Like us on Facebook: PhillyVoice Sports