The biggest swing factors in Sixers vs. Raptors round 1 series

Previews and predictions have been written. Tickets and pre-game beers have been purchased. All that's left now is to decide whether you will be irrationally confident in the Sixers taking care of business, or get your Chicken Little on looking at offensive rebounding stats for the Toronto Raptors.

You all know where I stand on the series, but you can't plan for everything. Here are some of the important pivot points in Sixers-Raptors for you to judge accordingly.

Fred Van Vleet's health

Which version of Fred Van Vleet will Toronto get in this series? If it's critical for the Sixers to get star-level performances from their star players, it's arguably just as important for Van Vleet to resemble the guy who opened the year on an absolute tear.

If Van Vleet looks closer to the guy who he was prior to suffering a knee injury in mid-February, the Sixers are in big trouble. In that scenario, the Raptors have another guy who can hurt Philadelphia in the halfcourt, a dangerous outside shooter with some on-ball juice who can target Philadelphia's weakest defensive links. When it was Van Vleet vs. Maxey in an early-season matchup — admittedly a matchup that is hard to extrapolate much from — Van Vleet went bonkers, dropping 32-6-7 and stealing a win on Philadelphia's home floor.

He has been nowhere close to that guy for the past two months. In and out of the lineup with a knee injury, Van Vleet has shot worse than Furkan Korkmaz, and his output is down across the board:

The three-point shooting number is significant because it's not being driven by failure on one specific sort of shot. Van Vleet is shooting roughly equal shares of catch-and-shoot threes and pull-up threes since the All-Star break, shooting 29.4 percent and 29.6 percent on those looks respectively. If he only reclaims his elite catch-and-shoot numbers from the first part of the season, it makes a difference for Toronto, but trending in a positive direction on both fronts has the potential to compromise how Philly can defend the Raptors.

Keep an eye on this, obviously. 

Philadelphia's weaknesses vs. Toronto's strengths

There is a path to winning this series even if the Raptors are able to maintain their gaudy areas of strength from the regular season. Being an elite transition and offensive rebounding team will be less impactful if the Sixers reach something close to their offensive ceiling, where they simply have better high-end talent and firepower than the Raptors do. But the reason many are at least considering the possibility of a Raptors upset is because they are tailor-made to punish Philadelphia for their most glaring issues.

Rebounding has been a major issue for the Sixers all season. The Raptors grab the second-highest percentage of offensive rebounds in the league, and snagged them at an even higher rate against the Sixers this season. Philadelphia has had transition defense problems for two consecutive seasons. The Raptors scored the highest percentage of points off turnovers of any team in the NBA this season and the second-highest percentage of fast-break points in general. Those two features alone are enough to tilt the series. 

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At least the Sixers are aware of it. They were badgered on the subject all week at practice, and nobody tried to hide from the issue or pretend their regular-season efforts were good enough in those areas.

"Getting back is a huge emphasis, and rebounding," Danny Green told reporters this week. "We know how hard they go to the offensive glass and how fast they like to play, so we have to get back on defense and we have to box out. That's the two biggest keys. If we do that, that gives us a bigger chance, more of a chance of winning."

"Rebounding as a whole has been our weak spot in those games, "Tobias Harris added. "They have a lot of guys who crash. Traditional teams, most of them send either one or two guys to the glass, they send four or five at times. It's on all of us to make sure we get physical, we're able to bump them. That's a huge emphasis for us in this series. It was an emphasis for us in the regular season as well, we knew after the first time we played them that's what they liked to do, we just haven't been able to really execute that to the best of our abilities. Obviously now we have to be on point with that."

Can you change those issues with effort and attention to detail in the playoffs? That's the question they'll need to answer.

The non-Embiid minutes

I'm not trying to inspire another heated press conference for Rivers, and backup center only means so much in the grand scheme of things. But again, this is a matter of Toronto's best qualities running up against a sore spot for the Sixers and their fans.

Even in the regular season, Nick Nurse likes to play his top guys a lot of minutes, frequently leaving at least three starters on the floor at a time as the teams cycle through their bench players. In the minutes where Embiid tends to sit, the Raptors run lineups featuring the Van Vleet/Gary Trent Jr. backcourt along with Pascal Siakam and a frontcourt pairing of Precious Achiuwa and Chris Boucher. Those lineups are killer. The foursome of Siakam/VanVleet/Achiuwa/Trent Jr. with Boucher off outscores teams by about 16 points per 100 possessions. Swap Boucher for Achiuwa and they're still winning by about 11 points per 100 possessions. All five guys, admittedly in a small sample, were roughly 20.4 points better than their opponent per 100 possessions.

That's a potentially massive problem for a Sixers team that has struggled to find any sort of bench chemistry following the Harden trade. Their most successful minutes have either come on the rare occasion where Harden catches fire from deep or the combination of Tyrese Maxey/Tobias Harris manages to carry the offense with individual shotmaking. More importantly, Rivers has to show he's willing to commit to Paul Reed playing some backup minutes in that spot. DeAndre Jordan's defensive awareness and spotty effort would be eaten alive by that hard-charging group, though Reed's propensity to foul is a real concern in those minutes. The Sixers have to find a way to not bleed points during these minutes, lest they repeat the failure of 2019.

Matisse Thybulle, MIA

Doc Rivers' philosophy on planning for Thybulle's absence has been, in his own words, to not spend much time on it yet. They have two games to try to win at home first, and if they can get out to a 2-0 lead on their home floor, it will take pressure off of them to steal one on the road down one of their important rotation guys.

"No difference in preparation, because the first two games Matisse is playing. That's one thing as a staff we decided, we'll cross games three and four when we get to games three and four. I want to prepare for games one and two, I don't want to have a second plan and distraction," Rivers said at practice this week.

(This is the first, and by my count only time so far that the dreaded D-word has been used regarding the Thybulle situation. Everyone has said the "right things" about supporting him even if they disagree or are disappointed with the situation, but maybe that's a bit of truth slipping through.) 

A one game at a time philosophy makes perfect sense, but there is plenty of urgency to figure out a plan with Thybulle unavailable. Here's the simple data for you to work with — Philadelphia outscored the Raptors by just under nine points per 100 possessions with Thybulle on the floor this season, and in the 121 minutes without him, they were worse than the Raptors by 6.6 points per 100 possessions. The offense was slightly worse with him out there, naturally, but they posted defensive numbers that were basically elite.

Trying to use the data to make a point here is damn-near impossible. Thybulle appeared in just two Sixers-Raptors games this year, so his on-off numbers are skewed by an early-season game with a ton of COVID absences (his included), a contest that prominently featured Seth Curry and Andre Drummond. All four of these games are noisy from a data perspective, for that matter. Harden only appeared in two games, the Raptors and Sixers both had important players injured in basically every meeting. Draw a firm conclusion at your own risk.

That being said, you don't need to have perfect data in order to be concerned here. Thybulle is their best (and arguably only) wing athlete in a matchup where roughly 90 percent of Toronto's roster is composed of wing athletes. Even if we assume that putting Danny Green in that spot will bolster their spacing a little bit, losing him for the road games guarantees that they're down an important defensive piece in a matchup where they desperately need him. 

How does James Harden look?

If you could provide the average basketball fan with a look at James Harden's final line of this series before the games are played, they would probably be able to tell you how it ended. Harden puts up efficient scoring numbers and fills up the stat sheet? Sixers are winning easily. Harden struggles to find the range and has a high turnover count in a six-game series? Philadelphia is probably going home and making some potentially significant changes in the offseason.

You win with your best players all of the time, but especially in the playoffs. It seems pretty likely that Philadelphia will get a high-level series out of Embiid, perhaps a tick below his play against an average opponent, but certainly enough to win with. Embiid managed around a 29/11/3 line for the season against the Raptors, and his one standout performance in December led to a painless Sixers win.

Harden, on the other hand, suited up against Toronto three times this season, once with the Brooklyn Nets and twice with the Sixers. His numbers have been subpar by his standards — 19.3/7.7/10.3 on roughly 41 percent shooting (22.2 percent from three). His playmaking has been there, but the final meeting in Toronto set off a lot of alarm bells as a result of his inability to beat switches and win one-on-one battles as the perimeter lead. Will it be a one-off issue or a sign of things to come?

There's a lot on the line for Harden not just in this series but in these playoffs, as he looks to deal with the greatest dark mark on his legacy. Harden has all the individual accolades, raw production to match some of the game's all-time greats, but no ultimate triumph in the postseason to show for it. In fact, Harden has been a central figure in some downright spectacular playoff failures during his career, and though his overall playoff struggles are overstated, he only has so many chances left to shift his legacy narrative.

If you ask Harden, those are not concerns he's thinking about as the playoffs get underway, nor is he worried about the hamstring that has required a lot of maintenance since he injured it last season. The play-in game was a blessing for a lot of guys, Harden included, who used this period to do sprinting, work in the weight room, and stretching to get himself right. Based on how he looked out of the All-Star break, perhaps that extra bit of rest and ramp-up is all he needs to look like James Harden.

Any concern he has about what it all means, what the work has been for, what is riding on this series and this run is being kept to himself. 

"Pressure? Nah. I feel good," Harden said after practice on Thursday. "I'm ready to hoop. Nothing to it."

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