March 30, 2022
The Sixers got an A-level performance from James Harden and battled the Milwaukee Bucks to the very end, but they were unable to overcome a dominant effort from Giannis Antetokounmpo on Tuesday night. The loss to Milwaukee has some potentially important consequences — the Bucks now own an important tiebreaker if the teams end up locked in the end-of-year standings, leaving the Sixers vulnerable as everyone jostles for positioning to end the year.
But let's take a quick look at what jumped out of me from this game, with Harden's effort rising above all the rest.
If you're asking me what really mattered from Tuesday night's game, it's how Harden looked by about 1,000 miles over everything else. The end result, the crunch-time execution issues, Rivers' rotations, all of that is not even close to the importance of the Sixers' perimeter leader looking closer to the guy who competed for MVPs every year. I would go so far as to say nothing else mattered at all by comparison. That is how important it is to see Harden playing high-level basketball against high-level competition.
Harden's first game of 30-plus points in a Sixers uniform came against a somewhat unlikely opponent, a team often coasting on defense this year who nonetheless wanted this game badly. Seeing Harden come out of that game with an efficient, productive performance probably would have felt more inspiring in a win, but didn't go unnoticed in the loss.
Getting Harden to attack in the first place has been a struggle early in his Sixers tenure, and it hasn't always been a clear if that's a product of a lack of burst or his own attempts to fit into an existing team. The Sixers have stressed to Harden that they don't need the latter out of him, and a half-hour meeting between Harden and Doc Rivers on Tuesday reiterated the expectations they have for him.
"He basically just told me to go out there and just be you," Harden said. "That was kind of my mindset today, so it felt good just to have that confidence from Doc from here on out."
Over half of Harden's makes came inside the arc on Tuesday night, and getting him to attack with anything other than a stepback jumper has been a struggle at times for this group. Early in this one, Harden sought out matchups with Khris Middleton as much as possible, putting the Bucks wing in a blender with methodical use of the crossover and then playing through contact at the rim:
As Harden himself would note late Tuesday, his mindset was less about playmaking and getting everybody else involved and more about being on the hunt and letting any playmaking opportunities come to him naturally. By the time it was all said and done, Harden nearly racked up double-digit assists anyway, using the attention he drew scoring the ball to find openings all over the floor.
"I thought he was in a good flow and good rhythm," Tobias Harris said Tuesday. "He got to the free-throw line early, got a couple of shots to fall early on, and he just stayed in that flow. He was great tonight and kind of just kept rolling with that. We need that out of him every single night, and I thought he did a great job."
It's fair to question whether Harden is the same player without the ability to consistently get to and finish at the rim. His numbers in the restricted area are worse than in any other season he has had since he was a 20-year-old rookie in Oklahoma City, and his volume around the basket has dropped pretty substantially over the last two years. Both of those things are problems for a team that lacks options to put pressure on the rim.
Of course, there are times when Harden is also going to need to punish a team for sitting in the wrong sort of coverage against him, and that's where the stepback comes in. For much of the evening, the Bucks sat in drop coverage and doubled Embiid off-ball once he set the screen in pick-and-rolls. When Harden has Brook Lopez scrambling to close on him in space, he has to punish opportunities like that, and he did so at an expert level Tuesday night:
It was all working against Milwaukee. If this Harden shows up in the playoffs, they have a chance to go beat anybody.
The Sixers do not possess a great backup option for Giannis Antetokounmpo no matter what they do. Joel Embiid is a huge piece of making sure they always have help for whoever the primary defender is, and they were ultra fortunate to get away with a lot of Georges Niang on Giannis in the previous meeting between these teams. Beyond that, you're choosing from a lot of bad options.
Rivers opted to go with the Paul Millsap option on Tuesday night whenever Embiid sat on the bench. Milwaukee's MVP responded with 15 consecutive points between the end of the third and start of the fourth, pushing the Bucks to within two points of Philadelphia to set up the endgame. To borrow from Hideo Kojima, fission mailed.
The strangest part about it was Rivers' explanation regarding the backup big rotation after the game where he seemed to suggest Paul Reed, who many fans have wanted more of a look at, had struggled vs. Giannis in a previous meeting.
"I thought Millsap in the first half was good, in the second half he struggled. Didn't like [DeAndre Jordan], almost went with Paul Reed, that's who we went between. But in Milwaukee, that was a tough matchup for Paul with Giannis."
The problem with that explanation? Reed did not play in the previous meeting against Milwaukee, and in a shorthanded effort against the Bucks with the team suffering from COVID problems, Reed did an admirable job in a backup role against Giannis. I have reservations about Reed vs. Giannis due to the weight and strength gap between the two players, but so far, any concerns are purely hypothetical.
For some people that will (deservedly) be where the anger begins and ends. If the head coach can't keep track of who was good against certain players and when, he's not living up to an essential part of his job. And not giving the young backups a shot is, as we have noted here many times, a major disservice to the coach and the team.
Slowing down Giannis, as Embiid would eventually point out after the game, is not a one-man assignment. And in that sense, this was a collective failure rather than something Millsap needs to wear alone. Instead of showing Giannis a crowd, the Sixers' supporting cast left the assignment to Millsap and Millsap alone, meaning that if the far superior athlete was able to break through the first level, it was basically guaranteed points at the rim for Milwaukee.
There were some downright horrendous possessions during this run, the above clip being one of them. If you want to argue they should have sent more aggressive doubles and put pressure on other guys to perform, I'm not going to argue with you, though it should be noted that Giannis' 15-point run featured pull-up jumpers and free-throws drawn on offensive rebounds, which have little-to-nothing to do with the defensive assignment.
Here's unpopular opinion No. 1 of today's article — the Sixers' issue was as much about not punishing the non-Giannis minutes as it was about slowing down Giannis. Their lineups with one star on the floor have not been as good as they need to be, the Embiid-led minutes especially, which has been a surprise after years of Embiid absolutely dismantling bench units. Neither Jrue Holiday or Khris Middleton were anything spectacular in this game, and with Embiid playing most of the third quarter, there was a window where they could have blown this game open to make it much harder for Giannis' run to be impactful.
Frequent opportunities to make Milwaukee pay went by the wayside. Giannis checked out with the Bucks down 10 midway through the third, and with Embiid and Harden both on the floor, the Sixers' lead was trimmed to nine before Milwaukee's star came back. When Giannis checked out of the game following his huge individual scoring run, Embiid returned with the Sixers up two. Giannis came back to close the game a few minutes later and the score was tied, Philadelphia's offensive success not enough to make up for defensive miscues on the other end. Those are minutes the Sixers need to win decisively, and they outright lost them in the second half, even if the margin was slim.
One member of the team saw it otherwise after the game.
Sitting at the podium after the loss, Joel Embiid served up some red meat for all the hungry Doc Rivers critics out there. With an opportunity to offer his thoughts on what went wrong in the fourth quarter, Embiid looked around for easy targets:
Reporter: What do you think went wrong in the fourth quarter?
Embiid: The game really changed when I went on the bench. I didn’t think we did [a good enough job] at the end of that third quarter, beginning of the fourth, their best player scored 17 in a row or whatever that was. I didn’t think we did what we had to do. They made that run and they cut the lead, and they gained some momentum and it carried over.
...
Reporter: Is there anything specific you think you guys could have done better to slow down Giannis during that stretch you mentioned?
Embiid: I mean, I was on the bench the whole time. When I was on the floor, I really made sure I was always there to help. I thought we didn’t follow up that strategy, we didn’t build a wall, and he had a lot of freedom to just attack and get whatever he wanted. That changed the game. Maybe next time, just match up the minutes.
Is Embiid wrong about when the game changed? No. Did the Sixers need a better plan against Giannis and the Bucks during the time where he was on the bench? Yes. Am I tired of seeing Rivers play washed-up vets instead of giving their young guys a chance? 150 percent.
None of those things mean that this is the right forum or right time for Embiid to air those grievances as the leader of the franchise. His candor is something I treasure as a member of the media who relies on it to get a complete picture of what goes on with the team. That doesn't mean I think it's the right thing for him to do with weeks left in the regular season and a grueling playoff run ahead of them.
Leadership is not just saying and doing the right things when it's convenient or easy. It's being able to swallow your pride and avoiding potshots after you were outperformed and beaten by another MVP candidate on your home floor. It's understanding that the strides in off-court leadership, the months of saying the right thing when your team suffers a defeat, all the goodwill you've built up can be undercut by one tough moment. White lies can sometimes be better than a few small blips of honesty that help you feel better momentarily.
If you're asking me what the most likely outcome is for this team, it's an exit before the conference finals that begs questions of the roster construction and their choice of head coach. Should that happen, Embiid will have a golden opportunity to use his voice to point the franchise in the direction he feels it should go. But until/unless that happens, his job as the MVP candidate and the best player is to keep everybody in the boat as one collective unit. And that also includes executing better himself in crunch time, where he had his woes against Milwaukee, and leveraging second-unit minutes as well as Giannis did on Tuesday night.
Seriously, I cannot recommend the experience enough if you have a chance to get tickets to a Sixers-Bucks game. He was a high-level player for a long time even before this year, and he has added even more to his game in the last couple of seasons. That guy hitting off-the-dribble jumpers in crunch time on top of everything else he does feels borderline unfair.
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