The Sixers decided they’d had enough of playing basketball on the West Coast and unloaded a steaming pile of horse dung in San Francisco, falling 139-105 to the Warriors at the end of a grotesque performance.
Here’s what I saw.
The Good
— Guerschon Yabusele, I will make sure people in Philadelphia remember you. I appreciate the smart back cuts and rebounding effort even as your team is getting pasted.
The Bad
— If the Sixers have a worse defensive performance under their belts this season, I am struggling to think of it. Even with the low expectations of a back-to-back scenario, you figured they would get the most out of the legs they had with the team in desperation mode at the start of 2025. Nope!
Pick a guy on the roster and you can find something they did wrong. Golden State absolutely destroyed the Sixers with back cuts in this game, even on possessions that appeared to be going well for the Sixers. For instance, Embiid picked Steph Curry up on a switch while the Warriors guard was on his way to the rim, and he herded No. 30 back to the perimeter before a double came from Paul George. They had stopped Curry in a good spot, until Caleb Martin completely lost his man and stood flat-footed as Curry whipped a pass for an open layup.
As has been the case for most of this season, Philadelphia’s transition defense was abhorrent. This is the one area where I’ll really ding Embiid, because he had some brutal, half-hearted possessions running back in the first half, and you cannot afford that when playing a Curry-led team. Even if he’s not the guy who ultimately takes the shot, Curry is going to drag defenders around the floor with him and open space for drives in early offense. With Embiid only partially in the picture and his teammates following suit, the Warriors walked in for points that you would have called embarrassing if the plays had happened once or twice. Dear reader, it happened far more often than that.
You’d be hard-pressed to find five or more plays in this game where the Sixers got a great effort out of a perimeter player while dealing with a ball screen. Putrid effort.
— If I was harsh on Maxey after the loss to Sacramento, I suppose I should have saved my real venom for this despicable performance. If there was an obvious fatigue-based excuse to point to here, maybe you could say he could get off with a warning, but his mistakes were mostly errors of execution. This was a guy who did not have it, could not find it, and burying the team with suspect decision-making. He shot when he should have passed, passed when he should have shot, and so on.
Thursday’s first half featured three of the worst layup misses I have seen from Maxey in his career. We have grown used to watching role players like Caleb Martin smoke layups with nobody contesting the shot, but Maxey is normally someone you can count on to make the freebies. Not so in this one, and unfortunately, those open or open-ish layups represented a pretty big chunk of his shot attempts.
I am also growing a bit tired of listening to and watching him complain about calls that he is never going to get. You lot are allowed to be upset that one of “your guys” can’t seem to catch a break, but there is no grand conspiracy against Maxey as a player that prevents him from getting calls. He ends up on the baseline looking up to the sky and the refs over and over again, and it’s because he does not initiate contact well enough to draw fouls. Teams have found effective ways to defend him inside the arc because he is limited as a passer, making it easier to time rotations and contests accordingly.
While his defensive stats look great coming out of this one, I thought he was a big part of their early problems on that end. I will give him some grace after playing 42.5 minutes the night before, but he was lazy on closeouts early in this game, which allowed the Warriors’ shooters to get hot and stay hot.
— I am going to write a bunch of nice words about Joel Embiid and then use it to make a negative point. Ready?
With some issues we’ll get to below that don’t go unnoticed, this was largely a good outing from Embiid. He rebounded the ball better than he has most of this season, he moved in space effectively, and he eventually got into his stuff from the free-throw line and in after a rough start from the field. Embiid deserves to be held accountable for his lack of effort in transition defense, but I think that was the only area where you could say his level of “want to” was off of the pace. Otherwise, I think he was committed to trying to pull them back into this game even as it was clear that they were trying to scale the face of a mountain in tennis shoes.
The problem, then, is in Philadelphia’s approach to this season. They continue to stick to the ballyhooed Plan that stops Embiid from playing in back-to-backs and congested parts of the schedule. That might have been something you could get away with if Embiid hadn’t missed the opening period of the season (plus more time), dropping the Sixers far behind the conference leaders in the standings. But the Sixers are splitting the baby right now. They are still selling the idea that they are doing things with the playoffs in mind, while remaining outside of the playoff picture with plenty of hurdles ahead. They lose without him, and then absolutely must win the games with him, lest they create this cycle of torture we’re all going through right now.
Let’s just take the Sixers at their assumption that you can make the play-in games with a fairly poor record. What have you seen from this team that suggests they’ll be able to limp into a do-or-die situation and be counted on to win an important game or two? What have you noticed that says they would buck the trend of THE NBA’s ENTIRE HISTORY to go from a low seed to a team that can win a title? This is a team still operating as if that goal, the championship goal, is all that matters. Great, but that means you can’t pick and choose the games that matter for the rest of the year. Either you are gearing up to compete with the big boys, or you’re not.
— Speaking of unserious approaches, I get that he is not the ideal guy for the job but Clippers fans were probably laughing it up watching Paul George hang out on the floor while Jeff Dowtin was tasked with guarding Steph Curry.
The Ugly
— I am once again bringing up Kyle Lowry being useless in a Sixers recap. I will reiterate for probably the 25th time, I don’t blame him for being ineffective as a small guard deep in his 30s. I blame the coach for starting him and relying heavily on him.
We are at the point where I think it is a borderline requirement to get another playable guard in here. It’s the right thing to do from a basketball perspective, because they badly miss Jared McCain’s production, and it’s the right thing to do when you consider that it may be the only way for Lowry to get benched entirely. Nurse starting him in the second half was pure comedy, but at least it didn’t last long, I guess.
— Here’s a bigger question about the head coach: I am not convinced that he is the style of coach the Sixers need for this team. That doesn’t mean he’s a bad coach, it doesn’t mean he won’t be successful here, but I am starting to think he is a weird fit with the personnel and needs they have.
Nurse, at his core, is a guy who wants to play simple, free-flowing basketball. I don’t think that’s inherently a bad thing, and in fact, it’s sort of how I would like teams to play on a broader level. You let smart and talented players feel their way through possessions. The issue is that the Sixers don’t have a collection of high-IQ players or skilled passers. They don’t see the floor well as a team, which means that a lot of possessions end with an isolation attack or a player hunting a switch after the initial weave of DHOs leads to nothing.
What they seem to need is an offense that schemes them open, that is more deliberate with its actions and off-ball movement to form some type of synergy beyond, “Let’s hope the talent wins out.” There are certainly some pet plays that the Sixers run, and I even like a few of those. I’ve highlighted when they’ve used a flare screen for a PG look from the left wing in recent postgame shows. They have a HORNS look for a duck-in or fake duck-in that has worked relatively well early in games. But there are long stretches of games where they just default to the aimless, let-the-stars work style. Embiid’s pick up points are too far out as a result of what they’re running (or not running), one of many problems that are bogging down the offense.
Maybe that ends up working out in the long run if they get a consistent run of games with everyone healthy. Even then, the Sixers need to get the right guys on the floor, and Nurse hasn’t been great at that. Kyle Lowry, it must be repeated, started once again. Guerschon Yabusele, who was one of their only positive performers in the first half, played just 11 minutes. Eric Gordon was coming off of one of his best performances in months and didn’t make his first appearance until nearly halfway through the second quarter.
Fans always want blood when things go wrong, specifically the coach’s blood. And I am not someone who calls for it basically ever, as I put coaches low on the general blame list. Not doing it here. These are just some thoughts that I can’t escape watching the Sixers right now.
