The Sixers got their doors blown off by the Washington Wizards in front of a half-empty Wells Fargo Center on Wednesday night, 119-90. Here’s what I saw:
The skinny
While it’s true that the Sixers have played a lot of competitive basketball at home in the season’s second half, the wheels are starting to fall off that train as it’s about to pull into the station. They’ve submitted some stinkers over the last few weeks, and this one would go right at the top of the list. As Robert Covington stressed after the game, “That wasn’t us out there.” On balance since the 0-17 start, I would wholeheartedly agree. In recent times, though? Ehhhh.
Without John Wall and Nene, Washington scored 35 points in each of the game’s first two quarters, and while they made some tough shots at times, those numbers are representative of how poor the Sixers were defensively. Gordie Jones (who I sit next to during the games) always says, “That’s too easy” when a team commits a defensive breakdown. Gordie said that far too many times tonight, and never about the Wizards.
After placing some of the blame on himself and his team’s youth, Brett Brown said, “Having said that there are other things going on, that’s just too many damn points. 70 points in the first half at 70-whatever percent, that ain’t good enough.”
Offensive observations
1. Let’s start with the good and single out the two Sixers that played well offensively: Robert Covington and Jason Richardson. Covington was super efficient, going 8-11 from the field, 4-6 from deep, and 7-8 from the line. In all, he tallied a career-high 27 points. Covington was excellent both spotting up behind the arc and in transition, where he made a couple of nifty drives for old-fashioned 3-point plays.
2. J-Rich went 6-7 from the field and 4-5 from beyond the arc for his 17 points, including a circus shot that beat the halftime buzzer from 26 feet. He knocked down a couple of triples when the Wizards went too far under on these sort of diagonal pin-down screens the Sixers like to run out of their basic offense.
3. Take those two out of the equation and the rest of the team combined to go 17-71 from the floor. That’s almost unfathomable. Washington didn’t do anything special besides clog the paint (especially when Ish Smith had the ball), but if you do that effectively this Sixers team has little chance to score at an acceptable rate.
4. Bad night for Nerlens Noel. He shot 2-8 from the field, and there were a couple of early-season (i.e. U-G-L-Y) Nerlens shots mixed in there. Then to add injury to insult, the rook sprained his ankle falling on Will Bynum’s ankle late in the game. Afterward, Brown said that he was both: a. concerned about the sprain b. is unlikely to play on Saturday in Chicago.
Defensive deductions
1. Brown broke down the team’s early struggles well in the postgame presser: “We were trying to blitz [Bradley] Beal and we didn’t rotate,” he said. “When you jump Beal and you’re looking for support behind it, and it’s interesting to me because our pick-and-roll defense all year has been very simple… and we couldn’t handle [the switch].”
2. Brown loves the term “vanilla” when talking about his simple schemes. Tonight he handed out some Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey to eat, which his players promptly threw up. Brown gave the Sixers the type of adjustment that teams make on the fly all the time in the playoffs and they couldn’t handle it. They were more or less trying to play the LeBron-era Miami Heat defense, which is aggressive and requires communication and quick rotations on the back line. When those things are absent, Marcin Gortat shoots a bunch of easy layups and goes 8-9 from the field.
“I thought it was hard for [the young guys] to be able to make adjustments on different players and different schemes,” Luc Richard Mbah a Moute said after the game. “I think we struggled with that.”
3. It’s hard to single out anyone when the group defended so poorly, but it felt like the terrible start allowed Washington to get into a groove and knock down some difficult looks later in the game.
I don’t know what it is, but even when they’re operating on all cylinders, I don’t have a ton of fun watching the Wizards play. OVERALL GRADE: B
1. Nerlens Noel Alley-Oop from Ish Smith: Even when they lay an egg, these two guys are good for one of these per night. Smart wrinkle by Brown to sneak Grant along the baseline, because Gortat thought his defender would provide the weak-side help. This was one of the very few times that Washington wasn’t able to pack the paint. Grade: B
This was the play that cut the deficit to 11 points, which was as close as the game got in the second half. There are a couple of things to like about this one: Great anticipation by Nerlens to step in front of the lazy pass, and of course, a super emphatic finish from Jerami. That one had a little anger involved. Grade: A-
Stat stuff
Sixers’ offensive rating with Furkan Aldemir-Nerlens Noel on floor: 104.3
Sixers’ defensive rating with Furkan Aldemir-Nerlens Noel on floor: 121.3
These stats are from the six games and 94 minutes they’ve played together since March 29th, which marks the start of the “Nerlens at the four” experiment. Offensively, the duo has been surprisingly decent, but holy hell have they been awful on the other end of the floor. Being a bad defense is one thing, but the Sixers are hemorrhaging points when Aldemir and Noel play at the same time. Small sample and all, but if Noel was paired with four guys from my rec league team (note: I don’t have a rec league team), I wouldn’t expect us to surrender that many points.
I haven’t checked yet, but anecdotally Noel’s block and steal numbers also have to be way down as Brown predicted they would be.
Player of the game
I tried to get Covvy Covster to talk about being Mr. Efficiency after the game, but he wasn’t having any of it. “I stood out as far as making shots, but as a whole, that wasn’t us out there,” Covington said, repeating the night’s theme. “Our offense was getting guys open shots, and not just me.”
That might be true to an extent, even though the Wiz locked the Sixers up for large stretches. You could tell Covington mainly didn’t want to talk about himself when the team played so poorly, which is admirable. Still, nobody else scored 27 points on 11 shots. That’s some James Harden-type stuff right there. Post-Trade Deadline Standings: Noel 10, Covington 7, Smith 6, Thompson 4, Grant 3, Robinson 3, LRMAM 1, Sampson 1, Richardson 1, and Canaan 1.
Pregame notes
With only one week and four games remaining in the season, talk of the future naturally dominated Brett Brown’s pregame media availability. The first bit of news is that Nerlens Noel won’t be participating in summer league, which I would opine the 6-foot-11 forward has earned by showing surprising durability in his rookie season. Noel has played in 75 of 79 games thus far.
Tom Moore of Calkins Media caught up with Noel in the locker room prior to the game (admittedly, I was watching Joel Embiid workout. Go read Tom’s full story):
The Sixers will again compete in two summer leagues, but the Rocky Mountain Revue (Utah) will replace Orlando as the team’s pit stop before heading to Las Vegas. This was an easy choice. Everybody in the world would much rather be in Salt Lake City than Disney World at that time of year.
Speaking of that Embiid workout, he really went hard in the paint (ba-dum-chhhh) for about a solid half hour. But before the 7-footer got started, he warmed up loosely by showing off some of his futbol chops. I thoroughly enjoyed the display, which reminded me of the old Tiger Woods commercial where he bounces a golf ball on an 8-iron a bunch of times and eventually whacks it out of midair. Here’s gambler extraordinaire/poker player/awesome Twitter follow Bob Voulgaris’ take. I guess he was watching a stream:
When asked about Embiid “graduating” to 2-on-2, Brown joked (but not really) and said the next step is 3-on-3. That sounds about right, but I’m not an analytic or anything. As of now, Embiid is only playing against members of the coaching staff like former Villanova star Curtis Sumpter. The head coach believes the team’s top draft pick last season is getting pretty close to taking the floor with his peers.
“Playing with higher quality of players, playing with teammates, those types of things, I think is probably eight to ten days away,” Brown said. “Bottom line, he’s moving in the direction that says that we’re getting closer to making a final statement on summer league.”
Watching him now, it would come as a pretty big shock to me if Embiid couldn’t play in three months, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see what that final statement is.
Brown also mentioned that he’s going to get on a plane and visit Dario Saric in Turkey after the season. Good call. That boat trip is brutal, let me tell ya.
Tweet of the night
It seemed like everyone that I usually pull material from was snarkily tweeting the Phillies game. I can’t blame them (well, for not watching the Sixers game; the Phillies game is still a pretty questionable choice). How about that Aaron Harang, huh?
Anyway, these Hinkie-worship shirts absolutely kill me every.single.time. Like, I was legitimately laughing at loud when I first saw these guys.