As soon as the Sixers selected Jahlil Okafor in last June’s NBA Draft, a bunch of questions were raised. One of the obvious ones was, “How is a throwback post player going to fit on a team that finished first and seventh in pace in each of the last two seasons?”
Two games in, it’s still very much a work in progress. Just listen to Brett Brown’s comments after Friday’s 99-71 loss to the Utah Jazz.
“We can not play slow,” Brown said. “I think that we can’t play slow. As good as Jahlil can be, that bothered me a lot. We had 15 assists out of our 19 only made baskets. I think we need to play with speed. I think that we’re going to have to find that balance.”
Sixty-three shot attempts is a seriously low total. CSN Philly’s John Finger did a nice job illustrating how small a number that is in his recap:
Instead, the Sixers had 19 turnovers and fired up just 63 shots, the fewest by the team since April 19, 2006, when they took just 61 in a loss to Charlotte. It’s also the eighth-fewest shots attempted by the Sixers in franchise history.
Only once during the draining Doug Collins era did the team attempt 63 shots (01/14/11). Here you have Brown, who says the phrase ‘pace and space’ approximately once every ten words, the last person in the world who wants to play at a snail’s pace.
88.1 possessions made for the slowest game on the young NBA season, per StatMuse. Utah deserves a lot of the credit for turning the game into a slugfest, as their other game against Detroit is also second on the list.
Still, last night was also tied for the fifth-slowest game of Brown’s tenure in Philadelphia. He prides himself on getting his team to play fast. Against the Jazz, Brown thought the Sixers didn’t run because they want to get the ball to their new anchor down low. Quinn Snyder is channeling his inner John Chaney.
“They have Jahlil Okafor,” Brown said. “They just saw him dominate an NBA game 48 hours ago with that volume of points in his debut. It’s hard to explain it any other way than I’m trying to. You’ve got to balance post and pace.”
While Okafor was a factor, allow me to disagree with Brown a little bit and say something that he can’t really say: The Sixers played at such a slow pace last night mostly because none of their perimeter players can create their own shots. Repeatedly in the first half, the Sixers weren’t coming close to creating any offense until there were only a few seconds on the shot clock. Why test Rudy Gobert until you absolutely have to?
Okafor, who Brown is forced to play through without Robert Covington, played against a tough frontcourt and was getting doubled on post-ups. The other players couldn’t make enough plays.
“At times, [the offense] definitely got stagnant,” Okafor said. “There’s no denying that.”
Nerlens Noel agreed with his frontcourt partner that the offense was stagnant in the half court, but he offered another solution.
“I think we should have gotten a lot more fast-break points and opportunities,” Noel said. “But that starts on the defensive end, being able to rebound the ball and get some steals.”
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