The Sixers almost blew a 20+ point lead in the second half, but Bradley Beal’s 60 points were not enough to stop Philly from taking a 141-136 victory over the Wizards.
This is what I saw.
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The good
• Philadelphia’s offense has been a joy to watch so far this season. Sure, there are assets that their inexperience shines through together and they look like a team that didn’t get a proper training camp. But an average trip across the floor is fun to watch for Philly this season, something I couldn’t have imagined when we looked at a team starting four different players who wanted the ball in the post.
While some (okay, a lot) of their Wednesday night success was due to Washington being a toxic defense dump, these guys just play a great brand of basketball. The ball rarely sticks, there are far fewer wasted dribbles and jammed belongings, and even when certain guys have it, they still want to play for the good of the group.
Take Seth Curry, for example, who came out to absolutely set the game on fire and never gave in in the first half, dropping 20 points in the first two quarters. Even in the middle of his stove, there were opportunities for him to call his own number and let it fly that he passed to find a better shot for Tobias Harris or Danny Green.
(I’m divided over Ben Simmons’ decision to reward Embiid for running off the floor in the first half. Curry was wide open on the wing and felt it, so anyone who thinks he should have got the ball I will don’t argue., but you have to keep stimulating the big boys when they run.)
They live their head coach’s mantra, which doesn’t matter how they score and who score, as long as they put points on the board.
• Curry really deserves a spotlight for his Wednesday play and the insane numbers he’s putting on to kick off the year. He’s definitely going to come back to Earth at some point – no one shoots 50+ percent of three at this kind of volume for an entire season – but man forces his opponents to make really tough decisions.
On Wednesday night, he turned in the unlikely closer of Philadelphia in the fourth quarter, shaking off a quiet third period to lead the Sixers at moments in crunch time, taking advantage of the visitors’ leaking defense. The Sixers should at least have made sure he got the ball more, with Curry open to a few swing passes that never really came his way.
The only criticism I have of him is the same one I had during the first piece: it’s okay if he plays a bit more selfishly. Being team-first is a good thing, but no one would be upset if one of the top shooters in the league took some questionable shots in the middle of a heat.
• Joel Embiid was on his way to what appeared to be a clunker of a performance at the start of Wednesday night’s game, missing his first six shots and ruining several possessions in an almost comical way. After returning from the bench, he was given the opportunity to shoot a technical free throw, which was apparently all it took to turn the night around for the better.
Five consecutive marks later, Embiid was in the zone, combining the passing he had flashed in the first fifteen minutes with the killer scorer instinct he has in one record. This take on Thomas Bryant was just plain disrespectful:
Embiid would come in 15 points by the time the first half was over, and it was a much more typical night for him on both sides once he was on his feet.
It was his insertion into the game in crunch time that really got Philly over the top in the end. The Sixers held on by a thread after the Wizards finally punished them for not killing the game, and Embiid came in to provide some stability at both ends of the floor.
The big man’s improved fitness level showed up when it mattered most, with Embiid dominating in the paint and still summoning the energy for a massive transition block in the final minutes of the match. He wasn’t the only one to produce Wednesday, with any imagination, but there were echoes of past games tonight, with the feeling that Embiid was the only one standing between the Sixers and a total breakdown.
There weren’t many rebounds on a night with that many hot shots, so his line doesn’t look like a typical Embiid night, but it was yet another dominating effort. The frenzy continues.
• Shake Milton was arguably the (admittedly short) preseason player and put on a show on opening night, but he has had a hard time shooting the ball in the weeks since. Milton came into the game with a score of 27.3 percent from the depth, bouncing back in front of Philly’s back-to-back, a welcome sight with their best player struggling early.
The third-year guard set himself up the old-fashioned way – at the free throw line and with the game in between, twisting and turning in the arc with the help of Dwight Howard to clear a path. Milton was the only one who didn’t quite fall off the couch on Wednesday, which is the nicest thing you can say about someone from the second unit.
The bad
• Interestingly, Rivers never seemed interested in having Ben Simmons guard Bradley Beal.
Five years ago I saw that I wanted to put him on a guy like Russell Westbrook, when he was an athletic freak who could compromise your defenses. Today, the former MVP is more of a paper tiger, a man who still deals damage but often shoots his team earlier from of a game.
I could even understand the original decision to have Danny Green with him in a like-for-like matchup. But it became clear pretty quickly that the Green-Thybulle combo offered very little resistance, and what better for your first-team All-Defense man than letting him follow a guy who blows out the lights?
Despite Beal’s 32 points in the first half, Rivers didn’t budge and Beal continued to cook in the second half, reaching 50 with a few minutes left in the third quarter. He did it every way he could: hitting pull-up threes, scoring on cuts, gabbing at some free throws – it was quite an offensive display for a guy whose team was outdone most of the night.
Philly comfortably outperformed the Wiz for a while, but the strategy seemed mostly pointless because Washington didn’t really have anything (or anyone) else, and the Sixers seem to have a ready-made solution to the problem. Wouldn’t you rather take your risk with, say, Rui Hachimura hitting you, a man who sometimes guarded Simmons on Wednesday?
The Sixers did nothing to stop the attack, and had it not been for the combination of hot fire and Washington’s terrible defense, they might have paid for it. Washington crawled back into a game they had nothing to do with in the beginning, and the decision not to make Beal’s life any more difficult will be a big talking point after the game. At least he finally got cold in the fourth, and if you’re charitable, Rivers might just try to tire him out in the first 36 minutes.
(By the way, holding on to his guns is kind of the Doc Rivers MO, for better or for worse. Get used to its kind of thing.)
All that said about the allocation problem, Simmons didn’t really do much to change the game in the second half as things started to get out of hand. Rivers keeping him off the Beal quest is one thing, but his attacking limitations reared their ugly heads after a first half where he was actually quite effective as an attacker.
In the first 24 minutes (and in the last eight or so with Embiid), Simmons was able to control the pace, both on the half-court and transition, reacting to different Washington buckets with quick scores the other way . He was active on and off the ball, creating for himself and others. Then halftime struck, and the openings that were there closed a bit, and Simmons’ lack of ingenuity on the half-way with the ball in his hands slowed Philly’s attack to a crawl.
I give him credit for this – he helped Philly put it together in a short amount of time with a great matching game with Embiid, rediscovering his form when they needed it most. But then again I thought he was a passenger too much of the game.
Philadelphia’s defense as a team was not that good, even apart from Beal’s performance, and it was the first night you could say that effort really affected them. Late rotations, reluctance to fight through a screen, and worst of all, a few plays where the Wizards just got past them in the transition and got easy scores for their troubles.
On the back-to-back front and against a team they seem to know clearly how to execute in crunch time, I’m not going to read too far into it. But I was somewhat interested in how they will fare against high-ranking guards when they get to the more difficult part of their schedule, and this wasn’t exactly a good data point in that regard.
• The biggest culprits in the lost lead were just about everyone on the bench. Outside of Milton, just about every other man of the second unit was lost at sea to the Wizards. Dwight Howard was ineffective on the defensive, Tyrese Maxey never had the ball enough to do much with it, and Matisse Thybulle was the unfortunate victim of the Beal show, who tried his damnest and still came far short.
And this was with Rivers staggered his lineup a bit more due to injuries in the rotation. Tobias Harris and Simmons were the guys who spent time with couch-heavy looks, neither of which was enough to keep them going. Ugly night for the supporting cast.
The ugly
Fair warning: I wrote the paragraphs below before the Sixers choked most of a big lead to the Wizards, so yes, there are definitely more negatives than this after that hopeless defensive effort.
If the only real complaint you can have about a team in their first eight games is that you want to see them prove themselves against some “real” competition, then you know they’ve got off to a great start.
They will be tested in the coming week. Thursday’s game against Brooklyn isn’t all that exciting with Kevin Durant out, but that game will be followed by a meeting with Denver and Nikola Jokic, the upstart Atlanta Hawks, and a pair against Jimmy Butler’s Miami Heat. It gets a little more interesting, and I welcome the opportunity to judge this team against higher caliber opponents.
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