After a 37-point quarter to open Sunday night's game against a shorthanded Toronto Raptors team, you'd be forgiven for thinking the Sixers were going to cruise to a victory. James Harden was picking apart the visitors, and the Sixers looked the part of a team finding their footing and balance, days after a decisive victory over the Mavericks.
What happened from there was nothing short of a complete and total meltdown. Shots stopped falling, the ball stopped moving, and the Sixers got shellacked on the glass, with Toronto ultimately pulling down 20 offensive rebounds in a game decided by five points. Doc Rivers struggled to hide his disgust after the game, noting that the Raptors using competitiveness and athleticism on the boards was something they'd gone over in great detail pregame, and something that came up in his pregame chat with the media.
"Ran nothing the entire night. No posts, no rolls, no drives, the first quarter I think all but two of our points were from driving to the paint. From that point on, we just stood out on the perimeter," Rivers said. "Didn't execute anything, even out of timeouts. We just had a very poor executing night offensively. You know it's funny, they had all these offensive rebounds and score all these points, yet they only had 93 points. We have to be better offensively, tonight we were not."
"I didn't think we had the right approach. Don't know why, but we didn't tonight. Thought everyone just stood around and watched each other play."
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Lately, there have been two main factors in the crosshairs when things go poorly for Philadelphia — their bench play and their head coach. I'm not here to talk you off of either of those corners. Their second unit has been miserable and the coach has shot himself in the foot for no clear reason. On top of that, teams are treating multiple starters on the floor as guys you can simply ignore when it matters. On the offensive foul that ultimately decided the game, the Raptors outright ignored Tobias Harris in the corner in favor of contesting Harden's drive, an indictment of Harris at the end of an ineffective, gunshy performance:
| Lineup | PTS. per 100 possessions | Points allowed per 100 |
| Embiid + Harden together | 122.5 | 105.7 |
| Embiid on, Harden off | 93.7 | 106.0 |
| Harden on, Embiid off | 113.0 | 117.6 |
Most concerns about Embiid and Harden playing off one another have melted away. Even with a starting lineup that has problem spots on both ends of the floor, the Sixers have managed to put up elite numbers with both stars on the floor. If replicated over a full season, those marks since the All-Star break would put them at the top of the league in offensive efficiency and right behind the Celtics for the league's best defense on the season.
On the other hand, losing the Embiid minutes this badly seems borderline impossible when you consider his body of work this season and the continuity they have in those units compared to anything involving Harden. A group with Embiid, Tyrese Maxey, and one other player with a pulse should be enough to outright win minutes vs. bench groups, at the very least draw even.
Some of that comes down to Embiid decisionmaking. He has certainly been better as a roller than a lot of people believed he is capable of, but being a decisionmaker and playmaker on-the-move is still a work in progress. Maxey can pretty consistently hit him on the short roll to get Embiid the ball at the free-throw line with room to operate. It's on Embiid to identify the best path forward from there. On this play, for example, it's well within reason for Embiid to hit Georges Niang in the corner with four Raptors in the paint.
A pull-up jumper with no clear contest from the free-throw line is a perfectly defensible shot for the big man, who has killed from that area for years. But he built his MVP case by keeping the team connected on top of scoring the ball at will, using the attention he draws to bring the best out of everyone else. He can't lose sight of that when Harden hits the bench and it turns into his show. Those configurations are not an invitation to put up any and every shot he can before he gets a rest.
The Sixers struggling to win the Harden-only minutes is a little more understandable on multiple fronts. Those lineups have to build continuity and chemistry that can't be faked, they feature a second starter (Tobias Harris) who has frequently struggled to impact games since Harden's arrival, and there are players whose place on the roster were questioned before they ever played a minute for Philadelphia. DeAndre Jordan, whose play was poor enough to get tossed from the rotation of a bad Lakers team, has become the default backup center in spite of frequent mental mistakes, effort issues, and slapstick comedy moments.
That last item can't always be blamed on Jordan by himself, though. He was one half of perhaps the lowest Sixers moment in Sunday's game, a turnover that defied belief in real-time. With Jordan coming up to set a screen for Harden and waving Philadelphia's point guard in his direction, Harden opted to throw a pass right as Jordan began the process of setting a screen, leading to, uh, this:
"For me personally, I got to play better," Harden said Sunday evening. "As far as like turnovers, some of them were careless. Helping rebounding, just small things I can control, I got to do a better job of that, and I will going forward," Harden said Sunday evening.
We can't do things like call Harden a genius passer or creative savant and then suggest, as Doc Rivers has recently, that he is only capable or willing to run two different Sixers plays after being with the team since mid-February. It's insulting to Harden's basketball IQ, which has still shown up quite frequently over these past few weeks as they've searched for a way to improve coming down the stretch. Harden's no more responsible for a lineup featuring Jordan, Niang, and Reed on the floor at the same than I am, but there's a noticeable difference in the offense when Harden plays purposeful, pacy basketball instead of bleeding the clock.
As a collective, there are better ways to facilitate success available to them. Philadelphia opened Sunday's game against Toronto going heavy out of pick-and-rolls, gashing the Raptors as they toggled through different defensive looks. Those dwindled in frequency the deeper they got into the game, in favor of tough, isolation basketball that didn't serve anybody well, regardless of the lineups on the floor. The coach, as noted previously, wears his share of the blame for not having them go back to that productive well more often. But this is part of the deal you make in building a team around Harden and Embiid, aware of their respective habits and tendencies as players. Willingness to change and adapt as the moment (and lineup) dictates is part of why they make the big bucks.
The good news for these two is that both are obviously still capable of having a gigantic impact on games. Even on their worst nights, they inspire fear in opposing teams and draw enough attention to create openings for teammates right until the final seconds of a game.
The Sixers have to find ways to leverage that better. Their offense cannot default to standing around and hoping Embiid or Harden do something, whether they're together or apart. Philadelphia only has 12 games left before the playoffs begin, and they could very well end up with a brutal postseason draw depending on how they finish the year. And figuring out how to continue thriving with just one star on the floor will be of monumental importance from April 16th onward.
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