February 05, 2022
The Sixers had an absolute meltdown in the second half of Friday's game vs. Dallas, falling 107-98 to the Mavericks in a late-night horror movie.
Here's what I saw.
• Well, this one got away from the Sixers, didn't it? There were still some encouraging performances all the way, but hard to feel too good about the details of this one after that horrid second half.
In any case, the person you have to start with is Joel Embiid, for the tone he set in Dallas. While you don't want to see him throwing his body in harm's way too often, Embiid diving to the floor for a loose ball on the break is one of many plays that show his commitment to the group this season. Nobody would have blamed him for pulling up and living to fight another day, but he dove through and around Mavericks players to try to save a first-half possession, nearly getting a Danny Green three out of it in the end. You could tell he was ready for this one basically as soon as it started, and a 45-minute delay did nothing to dampen his enthusias.
Embiid had one of my favorite sequences of the season late in Friday night's first half. After tipping out an offensive rebound to his teammates, Embiid worked to set up post position, immediately got crowded by 2-3 Mavericks defenders, and basically just swatted the pass back out to his outlet before reestablishing position. Once he got the ball again, Embiid went into his move immediately, scoring with a finesse shot in the paint for a clean two points.
That's a nice snapshot of how Embiid is moving this year (and last year, in fairness) compared to the rest of his career. He can mix speeds as it suits him, pulling a stepback three out of the bag to punish a sinking Boban before driving at him with pace to draw a foul. Sitting back at the rim on defense is the best use of his gifts, but he also trapped Luka Doncic effectively with Matisse Thybulle, keeping Doncic down for most of the first half.
(Whether they should have trapped as much as they did is another story. The calls are his responsibility, too, and Doncic grew into this game over time with the Sixers not doing enough to mix up their looks.)
Philadelphia's eventual defeat, of course, became inevitable as soon as the Mavericks were able to marginalize Embiid in this game. Once Dallas went to a zone-heavy style, the Sixers weren't able to get him many touches on the block, and their offense completely broke down as a result. While Embiid would end up with a nice line and look heroic in a few moments down the stretch, there was nowhere near enough of him in the final 24 minutes.
• Game after game, Tyrese Maxey continues to show flashes of an even brighter tomorrow in Philadelphia. And Doc Rivers may finally have figured out that Maxey should be the guy on the floor whenever they need to sit Embiid, tapping into his creative ability with a group that simply doesn't have much without him out there.
Maxey's ability to eat space whether he's coming downhill out of a dribble handoff or a pick-and-roll helps separate him from a lot of other players his age, who tend to have one particular style they thrive and succeed out of. The Sixers ran a handoff involving him and Andre Drummond on back-to-back plays in the first half, with Maxey finding Georges Niang for a spot-up three on the first and Maxey bursting to the rim for a layup on the second. That's a hugely encouraging sign, with Maxey showing he can use the same look to generate points for Philadelphia in multiple ways.
(Drummond, it should be said, probably doesn't get enough credit for being a good partner for Maxey in whatever the set may be. He rolls hard and mostly sticks to his role when he's not trying to throw crazy passes all over the place, and he throws his weight around to give Maxey a bit of separation as he turns the corner. I think his impact is a little underrated, all things considered.)
When James Harden's name gets floated out there, I can totally understand why Sixers fans get protective of Maxey, because he manages to be a bright spot even when the team is absolutely drowning around him.
• Matisse Thybulle's defensive importance could be summed up by pointing out that Luka Doncic looked pedestrian in this game until he got more chances to attack players who are not Matisse Thybulle.
• You would think by now that the Sixers would have figured out a semi-decent plan against zone defense. Whenever a team doesn't have much success defending him, it's an automatic second-half wrinkle at this point, and the Sixers can never seem to figure it out.
The parts they have on the floor together don't really help. They really want to get the ball to Tobias Harris at the free-throw line while Embiid seals off his defender for a quick entry, but that's antithetical to how Harris sees and feels the game. He's not a quick passer or a quick player in general, so it leads to a lot of moments where Embiid creates the seal only for Harris to get gunshy on the entry, or worse yet, force the pass in after the passing window has already evaporated.
(Everything Harris does is slow. That matters even when he has good shooting nights, as he did against Dallas on low volume. You can never have enough speed on offense, which is perhaps why Harris' output is not as good or impactful as his skills would suggest.)
Decisionmaking on these possessions is just poor all around. There was a play where Harris threw the ball into Embiid with no chance of it getting there despite Maxey being wide open on a kick out; a play where Maxey had an open three and dribbled the Sixers out of the opportunity; a missed Embiid layup following Harris dawdling with the entry; and more errors than one man could keep track of while recapping a game on the fly.
There's just no reason they should be this bad, this late in the season at zone offense. The sad thing is Matisse Thybulle might be one of their best zone offense players in the sense that he's the only guy who seems willing to consistently take open threes when they become available. That's a gigantic problem, because he's the guy opposing teams are hoping will shoot the ball when they resort to using zone against Philadelphia.
The Sixers are so bad at zone offense that it seemed like that goaded them into trying out a zone of their own against the Mavericks, and as if to make a mockery of how easy it is to beat zone defense, Dallas just carved them up. Philadelphia absolutely lost control of this game in the third quarter, toggling back and forth between styles with absolutely nothing working, and the Mavericks fans justifiably went apeshit as Luka Doncic swung the game in their favor.
Plenty of blame to go around here. Doc Rivers can't make his players take open shots that are there or see the floor any better than they're capable of. But with all the evidence we have of who and what works against zone (which is to say, no one and nothing), perhaps it's time they try a new look or a new personnel grouping if teams try to use that against them. Trying to use Harris as the middle-of-the-zone target and passer is a defensible enough decision at the outset, but it's past time to shake up their core zone offense principles.
(Arguably the worst side effect of Dallas playing zone came at the other end — Rivers subbed out Thybulle instead of shadowing Doncic's minutes with him as he had in the first half, and the Mavericks teed off on Philly during that stretch, which shouldn't be a huge surprise. At this stage of his NBA life, Danny Green is way out of his depth as a defender against players of Doncic's caliber, and the Sixers were carved up as soon as they didn't have an elite defender to deal with Dallas' best player. Who could have guessed?)
• The individual defense concerns I have from this game are almost too plentiful to list. I'm not sure why the Sixers were committed to overhelping off of guys in the corners, but Luka Doncic does not exactly need a written invitation to spray passes all over the floor and hit guys in their shooting pockets. You're just asking for trouble by lacking discipline in how far you are from your man, and the Mavericks punished them there in order to get back in this game.
Seth Curry's defensive reads, for one, have been an outright disaster lately, and the mental side forces him to dig out of wholes he does not have the ability to recover from. Even Matisse Thybulle would struggle to close the gaps he'd need to in order to impact certain plays.
It genuinely looks as though Curry has no idea where he's supposed to be or rotate to on certain possessions, either because he genuinely doesn't know or because he moves there so late that it's functionally indistinguishable from not knowing. While the Mavericks are not the offensive juggernaut they were when he was there a few years ago, they have a lot of guys who will punish you if you leave them open, and his overhelping and brain cramping did not do the Sixers any favors against Dallas.
Other than failing to make a shot and picking up four fouls in nine minutes, Isaiah Joe's first-half stint went great, why do you ask?
While I will concede that he didn't exactly get a friendly whistle from the crew in Dallas, Joe puts himself in jeopardy quite often, trying to get up into players and often getting burned for it. That's a tough way to play even if you're a veteran who has earned some benefit of the doubt, and doubly so when you're chasing around guys like Jalen Brunson, a savvy player who can and will punish you for reaching or crowding their airspace. There's the potential for a rotation player in there, but it's going to take a lot more polishing to get it out of him.
Even Tyrese Maxey, who had some good moments as a help defender in this one, spent long stretches of the game getting absolutely torched. He gets wiped out by screens, drifts too far from his man at times, and practices some of the same bad habits as other teammates. He doesn't have the size to get away with poor decisionmaking, but he's also young, so my expectations for him are pretty low.
Anyway, I digress. Piss poor night on defense in a lot of ways.
• I would categorize myself as a Danny Green defender, broadly speaking, but his play was bordering on accusations of point shaving in this one. Don't think there was a single thing I can confidently say he did right in his time on the floor.
• What kind of rinky-dink operation is Mark Cuban running in Dallas that they can't even get a working rim in their arena? It was bad enough that this game got pushed to a 10 p.m. start on the East coast, and then we had to sit through a delay while they figured out how to set up the goal of the game.
The Mavericks somehow made a bad situation worse in the process of fixing the rim, and when the camera focused on the backboard after returning from commericial, the players started laughing at how off it all looked, with Luka Doncic even walking over to the scorer's table to tell the ESPN broadcast that the problem had been made worse.
I suppose it's a good thing that they had a spare ready to go, but that didn't get us the time back that everyone wasted on the crew trying to fix a problem that never should have existed. What an absurd situation. I could do the stereotypical beat writer thing and complain about the late start time being obviously bad from the start and talk about how it impacts my life, but I sleep like a vampire a lot of the time anyway, so I just hope you all bailed and enjoyed the rest of your Friday night.
At least the Sixers found a way to stay occupied during the delay, forcing the Mavericks into a no-win game of tic-tac-toe on Twitter before Dallas resorted to cheating.
🚫◾️◾️
— Philadelphia 76ers (@sixers) February 5, 2022
◾️❌🚫
❌◾️❌
Seriously, this is how dull it was. Now I know how all the baseball psychos feel watching west coast Phillies-Dodgers games that last for seven hours.
(The only winners here — anyone at a bar where they have drink specials during Sixers games. Godspeed tonight and tomorrow morning, my friends.)
Follow Kyle on Twitter: @KyleNeubeck
Like us on Facebook: PhillyVoice Sports
