12 Minutes of Fragility: Why Can’t the Sixers Survive the Third Quarter?
Beckett dives into the Sixers’ uncanny ability to forget how to play basketball out of the halftime locker room.
“Ah, a nice, relaxing Sixers game…” I’ll take things that have never been said for $200, Ken.
The Sixers this year have been consistently forced to battle down to the wire, with the quantity and quality of those adventures already evaluated in this column. But one of the biggest reasons they keep finding themselves in cardiac situations is simpler: they are either lighting a perfectly good first-half lead on fire or digging themselves into a hole with disastrous third-quarter play.
The Sixers’ third quarters aren’t just bad. They’re fragile, and they reveal how little margin for error the Sixers have as a team. When the offense stutters for even a few minutes, the entire ecosystem collapses.
The numbers are genuinely stunning. The Sixers have a –18.0 net rating in the third quarter this year. Since the NBA began tracking quarter-level net ratings in 1996, this is the second-worst third-quarter mark ever recorded. The only team worse? The 1997-98 Denver Nuggets, who went 11-71. The rest of the company in that neighborhood isn’t exactly playoff-adjacent either.
And the gap is (almost) as alarming as the ranking. The difference between the Sixers in the third quarter at 30th and the Pacers at 29th (–8.8 net rating) is the same as the difference between the Pacers and the 15th-ranked Blazers. They aren’t just last. They’re in their own universe of bad third-quarter basketball, more than twice as bad as the nearest team.
Monday night against Portland makes for perhaps the cleanest example. They walked into the locker room up 65-64. They walked out and promptly lost the third quarter 49–22, effectively ending the game. (Luckily, the Knicks game didn’t even require a third-quarter collapse: The Sixers were kind enough to handle that by halftime.)
When numbers are this drastic, there’s no one-size-fits-all explanation. This is a catastrophic failure at multiple levels. But one issue stands above the rest: the offense.
In the third quarter, the Sixers are scoring 105.2 points per 100 possessions. That is not only the worst third-quarter offense in the league; it is the worst offensive mark any team has averaged in any single quarter this season.
Most of it comes down to shooting. The Sixers have both the lowest three-point percentage and the lowest two-point percentage of any team in the third quarter. Their effective field goal percentage drops by almost four percentage points compared to the rest of the game — a swing that, if flipped the other way, would put them near the top of the league in efficiency (we can only dream).
If you can’t make shots, it’s going to be hard to score. Riveting analytical analysis, I know.
The confusing part is that there’s no obvious structural shift. They’re taking similar shots. The rotation is nearly identical to the first quarter, where they rank 14th in net rating and look perfectly functional. It’s not fatigue, unless the team has collectively agreed to treat the third quarter as an optional cooldown before ramping back up in the fourth, where they rank sixth in net rating and suddenly remember how to operate again. They are fully capable of playing competent basketball both before and after this nightmarish twelve-minute window.
Other weaknesses don’t spike dramatically. They’re a little worse at offensive rebounding. A little worse at defensive rebounding. A little sloppier with the ball. Free throws dip slightly. All of that matters, but not nearly enough to explain a historically broken offense. The shooting crater is doing the heavy lifting.
So what could it be?
It could be effort — something that would surprise absolutely no one after the last couple of games — where they simply don’t re-enter with the same urgency. It could be halftime adjustments, with opponents taking away their first options and forcing them into Plan C faster than they’re comfortable. It could be rhythm, with starters sitting for 15 real-time minutes, cooling off, and never quite regaining flow. It could even be psychological, with one or two empty trips leading to visible tightness, rushed shots, and possessions that feel heavier than they should in February.
Whatever the exact cocktail of reasons, we now have the equivalent of 18 full games’ worth of third-quarter data. This isn’t a two-week blip. There is clearly something about this stretch of 12 minutes that tanks their efficiency.
Now that’s not to say the defense has helped. The Sixers rank second-to-last in defensive rating in the third quarter as well. They’re fouling much more often here, and, similar to the offense, there is a notable gap in opponents’ shooting in the third quarter to all other times. But the defense is just normal bad, while the offense is structurally broken.
And importantly, bad offense feeds bad defense. Missed shots turn into run-outs. Live-ball turnovers turn into cross-matches. When you’re constantly taking the ball out of your own net or scrambling after transition leaks, it becomes exponentially harder to string together stops. Then you’re attacking against a set defense on the other end, which makes clean looks even harder to generate, and the cycle continues. That’s how a few quick swings turn into a 20-point avalanche.
This is what fragility looks like. Not just missing shots, but missing shots that cascade.
In a strange way, the most impressive part of all this is that the Sixers are still competitive on the whole. To be a functional team while essentially spotting opponents an entire fourth of the game most nights is almost an accomplishment in itself.
But there’s a ceiling to that level of resilience. You can survive rebounding weaknesses. You can survive bench inconsistency. You cannot survive giving away 12 minutes every night. And until the Sixers prove they can stabilize those 12 minutes, every “nice, relaxing Sixers game” will remain firmly in the realm of fiction.
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I feel like this post misses a very possible, perhaps likely, though unsatisfying explanation: variance. You mention the biggest issue with the 3rd quarter is offense. And on that side of the ball, it’s primarily they aren’t shooting well. As far as I understand it, that is mostly variance. Sure, it’s possible opposing defense come out better and the offense comes out lazy. But I mostly don’t think laziness means you miss shots. No NBA player is “lazy” when entering the shooting motion.
Now, as you note, it’s possible they are lazy in a way that causes them to run offense more sloppily and generate worse looks. But that could be investigated with shot location tracking data I assume.
Above that specific point is, I think, a bigger one about how much shooting variance now affects game outcomes compare to how little people want to acknowledge that. I have long had this issue with Spike and Mike (love you guys!). Whenever the Sixers get absolutely shelled from 3 during a game and the talk about it on the podcast it’s that the team was lazy and left shooters open, gave them 2nd chances etc. All those things may be true and by all means crush the SIxers players and coaches for it! But it probably matters less than crazy variance.
Take the terrible Knicks loss the other night. The Knicks shot 50% from three for the entire game. Do you know how many seasons in his career Steph Curry, the greatest shooter of all time, hit more than 50% of his WIDE OPEN threes? Once. Every other year, the greatest shooter ever, when left wide open, performed worse than the Knicks entire team that night.
I agree the Sixers players like shit against the Knicks. But when an entire team, in a game context in which many shots are contested, shooters better than the greatest shooter ever…you lose. Like, that’s kinda all there is to it. If the Sixers had been less lazy would they have lost by less? Might they have pushed the Knicks three point shooting down to 45% Maybe! Then the Knicks would merely have shoot better than MOST wide open Curry seasons…and the Sixers still almost certainly lose lol.