Matisse Thybulle Is My Biggest L in Years
I was as wrong about Matisse as I can remember being about anyone in my years of inaccurate Sixers takes and predictions.
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So it looks like I'm in the minority within the RTRS family with my generally shrugging reaction to their playoff elimination earlier at the hands of the Miami Heat a couple weeks (months? years? hard to say) ago. Fair enough: It's tough to argue that it wasn't a pretty humiliating and infuriating couple of games that sent the Sixers home after they'd seemed to recapture the series momentum. I guess it's largely that I can't get too worked up about this team as underperformers when, nearly to a man, they all performed about as I expected them to.
Joel Embiid was brilliant when healthy and erratic when compromised, and struggled a little to get high-percentage looks down the stretch even at his best. Tyrese Maxey was electric when given space and opportunity to get loose, but had difficulty producing (for himself and particularly for others) against top defenses in the half-court. Tobias Harris was awesome but prone to cold spells and incapable of bending over for loose balls. Georges Niang was invaluable when his shot was falling and unplayable when it wasn't. Paul Reed was miles better than DeAndre Jordan but occasionally took himself out of the play (and sometimes, by result, out of the game) by trying to do too much on both sides of the ball. James Harden helped the team greatly in first halves but could not have been much less reliable as things got tight late. Some single-game performances might've felt out of nowhere in either direction -- particularly those of the singularly chaotic Danny Green -- but on aggregate, basically everyone was who we expected them to be.
Except, of course, for Matisse Thybulle. And even that is probably just a problem with my personal perception: Plenty of Sixers fans had given up on him long ago, but I still believed the best version of this team required him playing, and that eventually he would prove as much. But after these playoffs, I really have no choice but to take the hit here with him -- I was as wrong about Matisse as I can remember being about anyone in my years of inaccurate Sixers takes and predictions.
Not that I really expected all that much from Matisse in these specific playoffs. Even if he'd been able to play for the whole Raptors series, I was skeptical he'd really be able to contribute a ton with the Sixers needing greater size to match up with Toronto's biggest offensive weapons and playmaking to get around their thicket of long, rangey defenders. It was fairly clear by the end of the season that Danny Green was the more playoff-ready option as the Sixers' fifth starter, and that was fine -- well not fine, because we should never have had to rely that much on a 47-year-old whose brain occasionally turns to mashed potatoes, but whatever, it was what it was. Still, you thought against Miami's more perimeter-focused offensive attack, Thybulle would eventually make his impact felt -- creating turnovers, frustrating shooters, maybe even getting out on the break on occasion.
Nope. I mean, some of those things happened occasionally, but never enough of them, never in any kind of momentum-building (let alone momentum-swinging) stretch. Any irritation he caused Miami's guards was dwarfed by the annoyance he generated among Sixers fans with careless fouls, screen deaths and poor gambles. And the couple times we really needed him -- I mean really needed him -- to hit a wide open three, he bricked it, and you knew that that was that for him potentially being any kind of offensive contributor in that game. That was felt even more acutely in Game Six, when he actually made a couple nice plays to pick the team up after Green's series-ending injury -- then clanged one from the corner and was essentially never heard from again. He had his chances right till the end; that he proved wildly incapable of taking advantage of any of them is one of the biggest reasons why that end came as quickly as it did.
Now, there's question of whether Game Six may go down as his last in a Sixers uniform. Nobody seems to know for sure exactly how much the Sixers value Matisse -- whether he's really on the block or whether he would only be moved as a necessary part of a bigger deal -- but any talk of him being untradeable, as he may have been deemed with some degree of credulity earlier in his career, is now pretty well off the table. Certainly Process Trusters are long past throwing their bodies in front of any prospective deals for him, as there's probably not a single Sixer (at least one with a chance of still being on the team next year) who has a lower approval rating among the fanbase right now; at least Harden had Game Four. The Bulls want him? Sure, can we have Zach LaVine? No? Well, how about Tony Bradley back? How about a second-rounder in June's draft? Fine, how about just a hot dog next time we're in town? Don't be stingy with the toppings, now.
This is some degree of exaggeration, of course. Matisse still does have some degree of value; few defenders offer his game-changing explosiveness and athleticism. There's a reason why he's been voted All-Defense twice already, even if it's not as good a reason as folks who don't have to watch him the whole season think it is. And he did legitimately have a pretty good run as the Sixers' fifth starter this season, particularly once Harden arrived -- he scored six points a game with 52/39/90% shooting splits in 23 games after the All-Star break, one of his best offensive runs (amidst admittedly paltry competition) as a Sixer. There's a chance that if his vaccination status doesn't make him a part-timer-by-necessity in the Toronto series, he stays on as the Sixers' fifth starter, never falls out of the groove he was in for much of March and April, and becomes a legitimate contributor to the team's playoff run.
It's not a very good chance, though. No matter the type or size of opportunity he's gotten in his three postseasons since arriving in Philly, Matisse has failed to produce when the games matter most -- and with the rest of his game continuing to run hot and cold without much obvious season-to-season progress, it's hard to expect much in the way of imminent change or evolution. After all, he's old for his age: Despite still having a year left on his rookie contract, Thybulle is already 25 -- just a year and change younger than Jahlil Okafor, if you can believe it. He's still young enough that it'd be unfair to consider him a closed book, but the Sixers would need to make a serious regular-season commitment to Matisse and his development for there to be any chance of trusting him in time for next year's playoffs at this point, and we just might not have the time or room to make him that kind of priority. Besides, we already learned the hard way once that it takes more than wishing your super-talented, defensive-minded young athletes would develop an all-around game for them to actually do so.
Would I be this soured on Matisse right now if he hadn't stepped on the anti-vax rake before the playoffs, dispelling any remaining adorableness that may have otherwise prejudiced me and other Sixer fans to continue to give him extra chances? Maybe not. It's hard to tell if the charmlessness of his COVID take makes me unfairly predisposed against Matisse or merely removes the veneer that prevented me from seeing him as the player that he really was. And even with all of this, there is still a part of me that hopes we don't get any good trade offers for him, that we're forced to give him another extended look next season, and that a humbled version of him puts in the work he needs to just to get the rougher parts of his game up to the level of "acceptable trade-off." It's the difference between him commanding an eight-figure annual salary and him barely even being credible as an NBA rotation player, so you'd have to think that if it's within him to get there, he'll get there.
Maybe he's just not gonna get there, though: at least not yet, at least not here. Three seasons is a long time to not show any real, trustable growth or progress, and eventually you just have to cut bait with the knowledge that you're doing the smart thing, even if you’re ultimately made to look stupid down the line. And if the Sixers aren't willing to take their L for Matisse, I am: I was wrong that his sky-high defensive upside outweighed his dirt-low offensive production; I was wrong that he would improve his game (or even just figure out his role) enough to find ways to mitigate his weaknesses and leverage his strengths; I was wrong that he could be the kind of player who helps his team win a playoff series. And if the Sixers keep him around and he's no-showing like this again in the postseason for them again next year, I'll have a whole lot more to be angry about at the end of it all.