October 25, 2015
Context is everything. This is precisely why Brett Brown isn’t too bummed out that his best offensive player will be on the shelf for a couple of weeks.
“Truly, if you told me when Robert [Covington] fell that he was going to be out for a few weeks, I would have hugged everyone around me and said thank you,” Brown said. “Anytime you see somebody wincing and holding their knee, you think the worst.”
Anyone that watched Friday’s game (perhaps even by a means of questionable legality) can understand Brown’s message. Covington will reportedly miss a couple of weeks with a sprained MCL, but the injury initially looked like it could have been a lot worse.
While Covington recovers, the question turns to how the Sixers compensate for his loss. Even if the answers aren’t particularly clear, they have no choice but to try.
“It’s not like we’re a high-scoring team to begin with, so you can take a real punch in the gut,” Brown said. “But you keep moving.”
Brown was happy with the defensive effort in the Sixers’ 81-65 loss to the Boston Celtics on Friday, but admits the team has “a long, long ways to go offensively.”
No kidding. As fellow hoop blogger Steve Von Horn said on Twitter, the Sixers looked like a rec league team trying to get into their sets. Boston’s two ferocious perimeter defenders, Marcus Smart and Avery Bradley, applied suffocating pressure on the Sixers’ ball handlers.
For the game, the Celtics forced 23 turnovers. Keep in mind that the performance came with Covington playing 24 minutes, a luxury the Sixers won’t be provided with for the next few weeks.
“Nobody is crying around here,” Brown said. “This is not a pity party. We will take what we have and we will coach it. And we will try to find a way to go win.”
Covington’s impact can sometimes go under the radar. Per NBA.com, the Sixers’ offense cratered in 2014-15 without the rookie swingman: In the almost 2000 minutes that Big Shot Bob was on the floor, the Sixers scored 96.1 points per 100 possessions. That still would be the worst mark in the league, but it’s at least closer to your run-of-the-mill 30th-ranked offense. When Lord Covington wasn’t on the floor (about 1500 minutes), the Sixers scored 90 points per-100.
That’s, um, it’s really, really bad. Let’s just stick with that. So who has to step up in Covington’s place?
“It’s usually shooters, isn’t it?” Brown said. “You’d think it’d be Hollis [Thompson]. But I feel like it’s hard to pin it on somebody, especially Jahlil [Okafor] and Nerlens [Noel] and maybe playing more through them.”
Brown went on to mention a Grantland article on the Sixers that at least partially mentions how post-ups aren’t an analytically sound strategy in today’s NBA. Over the past few seasons, the Sixers have always taken the right kind of shots, but they just can’t make them.
Without Covington, Brown might have to play exclusively through the Sixers’ two young big men. Honestly, I’m not sure he has any other choice.
For the first time in close to a month, shooting guard Nik Stauskas practiced. He went at “fifty-percent intensity level” and spent time running on the anti-gravity machine. Here’s some award-winning crap photography of that:
Brown wouldn’t say whether Stauskas would be ready for Wednesday’s opener in Boston.
“Normally when you have sat for a month, it’s going to take anybody [some time],” Brown said. “I don’t even know a timeline to put on it where you actually start playing in some type of rhythm.”
USA Today’s Jeff Zillgitt passed along an interesting nugget that would likely be bad news for players like Pierre Jackson and T.J. McConnell:
Also looking to bolster depth at point guard, Sixers contemplating claiming Ish Smith before he clears waivers, I've been told.
— Jeff Zillgitt (@JeffZillgitt) October 25, 2015
Ish Smith started 12 games for the Sixers at the end of last season, averaging 12 points and six assists per game. In particular, he seemed to have good chemistry with Nerlens Noel in the pick-and-roll. I wrote about Smith at length here back in March.
Follow Rich on Twitter: @rich_hofmann
