October 27, 2022
The Sixers have managed to open the season by playing some of the worst transition defense in recent NBA history, and a hopeful contender is 1-4 as a result. There is no way to dress it up — they have been far removed from the standard of a typical NBA playoff team, let alone a team trying to win a title.
With that in mind, I wanted to spotlight a couple of things that can be easily (I think) changed in order to move them in the right direction.
(To be clear: there are a lot, and I mean a lot of people demanding for me to call for Doc Rivers' job or draw analogies to the Joe Girardi firing that helped spark this Phillies run to the World Series. If it hasn't been made clear by now, I am not a "fire the coach" guy generally speaking. While I am not blind to the potential benefits of a change in voice or ruling out the possibility of it happening down the road, I hope you all understand that I don't find it productive to call for people to lose their jobs during every tough stretch. Time and more basketball will tell us all we need to know.)
As I said in Wednesday's recap, I find that chalking basketball problems up to effort is often a lazy response in and of itself. Defending in today's NBA is harder and more complex than it has ever been, and offense has not gone up across the board in recent years because everyone stopped trying all at once. And the Sixers have real issues on the defensive end that are unrelated to how hard they play.
Their easiest fix, though, is all about effort and attentiveness. They are not just the worst transition defense team in the league, they're the worst unit by a comical margin. The 9.2 points per game Sixers opponents have added through transition is worse than their closest "competitors" by three full points per game. To put that in perspective, as NBC's Noah Levick pointed out last night, the worst transition defense in the league last season (Houston) allowed their opponents to add 4.5 points per game. They are currently two times worse than a team filled with young, undisciplined players that finished 20-62. Pretty easy to look at that and say, "That's horrendous!" even if you are only a casual basketball watcher. And only focusing on the break, mind you, would miss a lot of their worst possessions.
Fingers can be pointed everywhere, but we should start with the guy who has fewer excuses than everybody else: Joel Embiid. At his best, he is by far their best defensive player on the roster, the guy who is capable of propping up the team by himself and making poor defenders look downright passable. During his media day session with reporters, he specifically made note of the need to improve his and their defensive intensity this season to get where they want to go.
He has not come anywhere close to that standard. Seeing him come alive on offense the past few games has been heartening after a rough start to the year, the big man showing he still has one of the deepest and most dominant skill sets in the league. None of that matters if he doesn't start leading by example on defense.
If you go back and look specifically at Scottie Barnes' night on Wednesday, you will find that most of his six made field goals came on shots where no one really bothered to keep track of him. Some of those buckets are the responsibility of Embiid, who was as lackadaisical in the paint as he was closing out on Barnes as a shooter.
In transition, Embiid not getting back and helping also has downstream effects on his teammates. Instead of either running back hard and ensuring the rim is covered or picking up whatever assignment is necessary in order to maintain their integrity, Embiid frequently finds himself without a place or a purpose in transition. You can see him trying to direct guys where he wants them to be, all while ending up adrift himself.
Embiid not flying back in transition during a late October game is one thing, the sort of cost analysis a man his size has to make to preserve their body over a long season. Standing flat-footed and plodding through the paint in the halfcourt? That's a different story. The early work is not being done, and it's leaving Embiid and his team exposed as they then try to half-heartedly scramble to make up for the lack of focus. This is the guy who is supposed to be the leader of your basketball team, and he is signaling to the rest of his teammates that this is an acceptable effort on that end of the floor, and he's signaling it quite often.
Of course, he's not the only culprit here. Nobody is expecting James Harden to be Scottie Pippen on that end of the floor, but his level of give-a-crap in transition has been nonexistent, and he hasn't been up to the task as a half-court help defender, either. After Tobias Harris gets smoked and Embiid tries to step up into space, Harden stands rooted to his spot, only briefly feinting toward the rim like a pickup player trying to make it seem like they're doing something.
Communication has been a huge issue for the Sixers, too, and you can frequently see guys gesturing to teammates to be somewhere or do something that one or both guys fail to do. Tobias Harris and Embiid have been at the heart of a lot of these plays, opponents sneaking behind and around them as they try to sort out exactly where it is they're supposed to be.
Four of Philadelphia's five starters played together a bunch to close last season, and while they were a bad transition defense then, they are a completely different level of bad right now. Before we fire anybody or change the personnel, it would be helpful to see them give even 75 percent effort and execute basic switches before we declare the season is over.
But what else can be done aside from playing harder?
The easy coaching change to make is to simply play different guys. Hard-hitting analysis, I know, but it's a much simpler response than rethinking your schemes this early.
I don't think Montrezl Harrell has been any more to blame than the rest of his teammates coming off of the bench, but he has been markedly worse than his career standards on offense, leaving him without a clear path to helping the team out. Paul Reed has his warts and hasn't exactly blown anybody away in limited action to start the year, but on paper, he fills more of a need than Harrell does right now, allowing them to continue honing their switch-friendly philosophy while adding a guy with better activity and length on the back end.
(Really, I tend to agree with Rivers' broad suggestion that the Reed/Harrell minutes should probably change depending on the opponent, but he has not exactly stuck to that logic to open the year. We've already seen a couple of examples of Rivers playing one guy in the first half and another in the second, seemingly unsure of who will actually benefit the team most on that night. Given that Harrell has gotten first crack in most cases, we can infer he hasn't been up to the task even in the mind of the coach, and that perhaps that's proof enough to give Reed a chance to win the role for a few games.)
The more popular pushback among fans right now is the insertion of Matisse Thybulle into the rotation. The multi-time All-Defense guy seems like a great choice on paper to help with some of their issues, and he has gotten just six minutes of playing time across four appearances. Thybulle can be overzealous and reckless on defense, but at least his head and heart are in the game.
This one is a tougher sell on me broadly speaking — until proven otherwise, I think Thybulle is so bad offensively that he negates most if not all of the value he provides on defense. That being said, his most obvious competitor for minutes (Danuel House Jr.) has stunk it up to start the year, shooting just 22.2 percent from deep on low-ish volume. Part of the value of having a deeper roster is that you can extract constant best-effort outings from guys who know that they either need to perform or find a comfy spot on the bench. These guys have all been in the league long enough that it will not shatter their confidence, and if it does, they don't deserve minutes on a team that wants to contend to begin with.
I wish I had more complex analysis to offer on this issue than "try harder" and "play different guys," but the Sixers have been so bad that it's hard to get beyond those surface-level conclusions. I'm a regular Red Auerbach, I know.
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