4 Big Picture Thoughts on the Sixers Through 11 Games
MOC zooms out on the shittiest start to a Sixers season since everything was Jerryd Bayless' and Sergio Rodriguez's fault.
If you’ve come here feeling downtrodden about the Sixers’ 2-9 start, I just want to reassure you that I do think the Sixers will play some good basketball at some point this season. They will be a very good team when healthy. Most of their problems are things that will largely go away once they are at full strength.
But boy, these first 11 games have been rough. The Sixers have been bad at just about everything. They are 27th in 3-point percentage. They are 30th in field goal percentage at the rim and get their shot blocked at the 7th highest rate in the league. They allow the fifth-highest shooting percentage at the rim and the fourth-highest frequency of attempts. They are 28th in offensive rating, 21st in defensive rating, and 26th in net rating.
Here in this piece, I’d like to break down four big picture thoughts on the Sixers’ season so far, and try to project what this team will look like at full strength.
Nick Nurse has done a poor job so far this season
To be clear, I do not believe and have never believed that Nick Nurse is a bad coach, but I do think that he has done a bad job with this roster this season – even with all the injuries, the team simply should not be this bad.
It really boils down to this: coaches are stubborn and tend to only play a certain style, and Nurse’s particular style is a terrible fit for the current roster. A similar thing happened with Brett Brown when he was here – I thought he was a great coach for the 2017-18 Sixers, but a terrible coach for the 2019-20 Sixers. And for Nurse, his schemes have made this undermanned roster perform even worse than they should have.
I recently saw an old clip resurface from Pat Bev’s podcast in which he references a conversation he had (while he was a Sixer) with Kawhi Leonard about Nurse’s offense, which I think sums it up quite well.
“You love [Nurse’s] offense, don’t you?” Leonard asked.
“Hell yeah,” Beverley responded.
“He lets you do whatever you want, huh?” Leonard asked.
“Aw, hell yeah.” Beverley replied.
As Leonard indicated, Nurse runs an extremely simple and unstructured offense. That’s probably a good thing when your team has Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey – it’s better to just get those guys the ball in the right spots and get the hell out of the way than to run an extremely intricate offense – but when the Sixers were trying to play through Kelly Oubre Jr. and Caleb Martin as major cogs of the offense, they probably would have been better off with some structure and a hefty amount of designed plays.
Again, this is the inverse of the Brett Brown problem – his highly structured offense elevated teams with mediocre talent, but it was infuriating to watch him treat Jimmy Butler like a role player, having him stand in the corner and set screens, as opposed to just getting him the ball in the right spots and letting him cook.
Defensively, a similar issue clash exists between the type of schemes Nurse likes to run versus the ones that would best suit the current personnel. Nurse is famous for his aggressive, outside-the-box defenses, which he became known for with his wing-heavy rosters in Toronto. Even last year, the Sixers were at their best when they had De’Anthony Melton and Nico Batum in the starting lineup, who are both very high-IQ defenders who excel at flying around the floor, plugging holes and out-thinking opposing offenses. Even deep bench players, like Robert Covington, Danuel House, and Jaden Springer, all fit this scheme quite well.
But this year, watching 36-year-old Eric Gordon try to fulfill his off-ball help duties has been an eyesore. Even the Sixers’ better defenders, like Oubre and Martin, are best at on-ball defense and are somewhat lacking when it comes to off-ball playmaking and communication. And when you run a defense that is extremely aggressive in terms of off-ball help, you are multiplying the number of decisions that your defenders have to make by an exponential amount. Generally, it’s not good to scheme for bad decision-makers to have to make more decisions.
So, do I think this makes Nurse’s schemes inherently bad? No. It just hasn’t been an ideal fit with the undermanned roster that he’s had, and he hasn’t done anything to adjust to it – which brings me to my next big picture thought.
The Sixers may need a trade that helps them go all-in on a certain identity
Again, I’m going to need to see the roster at full strength before I make a real declaration here. But I definitely feel as though the Sixers’ supporting cast at the moment is full of generalists, and they may be better suited making a trade that puts them all-in on a certain identity. If you’re playing tons of lineups with the likes of Kyle Lowry, Caleb Martin, Kelly Oubre, K.J. Martin, and Guerschon Yabusele out there at the same time, it’s just not clear where their bread is going to be buttered. You’re not going to be a great defensive team. You’re not a great shooting team. They really can’t pass. There’s not an abundance of playmaking to go around. They are decent at just about everything, and good at almost nothing.
So, part of me wonders if Daryl Morey and the Sixers will eventually have to reshape this roster in such a way that carves out a real identity based around a particular skill set.
This might mean trading for an excellent defensive wing and going all-in on a defensive identity – Herb Jones comes to mind there. Maybe it means acquiring more high volume shooters and betting on no one being able to guard their offense, or even just experimenting with lineups that feature the best shooters on the roster out there together – I’ve often thought back to the start of the 2021-22 season, when the Sixers started the year on a 50-win pace prior to the Harden trade just by putting outrageous amounts of shooting around Joel Embiid. Talent-wise, that team was underwhelming compared to the current roster, but they had a defined identity, and it won them a lot of games.
And right now, the Sixers have no calling card for their supporting cast. It’s a bunch of jack-of-all-trades, masters-of-none. Maybe when Embiid, Maxey, and George are all healthy, we will realize that that’s actually the exact right dynamic. But given how poorly they’ve started, I think it’s fair to wonder if reshaping this roster to have an actual identity would be in the team’s best interest.
Everyone will shut up about Joel Embiid in about 5 games
It’s been a rough month or so for Joel Embiid. He has taken his lumps from the national and local media for his lack of availability and the team’s lack of transparency around it. I get the frustration that a lot of Sixers fans and national pundits have with him – I think it’s pretty inexcusable that the team wasn’t more forthcoming about his health status, and I get why some of his quotes throughout the off-season have been off-putting.
It seems to me, though, that the frustration with the off-court stuff has bled into consensus on him and his game reaching some sort of a low point – and that doesn’t make sense to me.
I just feel the need to remind everyone that all of this shit will turn on a dime once Embiid rips off a handful of games where he looks like himself. As long as Embiid looks to be in good shape and plays roughly to the level that he has over the past few years, all of the noise will immediately die down. While I get the frustration with him, he is simply too good for people to talk about him the way they are at the current moment – with some people referring to him as Phoenix Shaq.
This guy is, without question, one of the three best regular season players in the league. He is a walking, one-man 50-win season when healthy. I worry about his ability to stay healthy, and I get the frustration with how the last month or so has played out, but let’s not go insane with our perceptions of how good this guy actually is. I would not be at all surprised if every national media member is talking about Embiid and the Sixers much differently in, like, five games.
Yabusele and McCain are for real
If there’s anything good at all to take away from this horrendous start, it’s that Guerschon Yabusele and Jared McCain have definitely proven that they are rotation-caliber players and can help this team in significant ways.
At this point, calling McCain a rotation-caliber player is probably selling him short. He has been outrageously good – if he keeps playing at this level, he almost has to be in the starting lineup.
Even for me as someone who was reasonably positive on McCain throughout draft season, I’m shocked by how well his game has translated to the NBA. The most surprising thing to me is the fact that his mid-range game has transferred exceedingly well – he has hit several Chris Paul-esque fallaway mid-range shots in the pick and roll, shockingly unbothered by bigger, longer defenders getting a hand in his face. McCain isn’t exceptionally athletic, but his relatively high release and his ability to get off the ground quickly make it damn near impossible for defenders to block him.
He is high-IQ, exceptionally smooth and deceptive with the ball, and uses his strength extremely well. He is some sort of Malcolm Brogdon / Fred VanVleet / Patty Mills hybrid. I predicted in the preseason that he would get traded, but I’m now almost at the point where I think he should be untouchable. At the very least, we need to see him next to Maxey for an extended period before making any decisions.
Crazily enough, I think you could make a strong case that both McCain and Yabusele should start next to the Sixers’ big-3 – in a way, Yabusele’s size would help make up for having McCain at shooting guard, and McCain’s shooting would help make Yabu at the four more palatable. An Embiid post-up with George, Maxey, and McCain around him, with Yabu in the dunker spot, is something that I imagine defenses would have a ton of trouble with. The bigger question is whether McCain and Yabusele can guard their respective positions well enough to deserve being full-time starters.
Regardless, it’s something they should at least experiment with. Who would have thought that these two guys would be making compelling cases to be in the starting lineup?
Mike O’Connor is the best O’Connor in basketball writing. Previously of The Athletic, you can find Mike on Twitter @MOConnor_NBA. Mike’s writing is brought to you by Body Bio, supplements based on science, focusing on your gut and brain health.
MOC ... thanks for actually saying it. Nurse has done a bad job of coaching this non-star group, which I assumed would be an emphasis when we went into the season knowing Embiid and George would not be playing a lot of back to backs. Personally, I like the idea of moving McCain to a 6th man role when Maxey is back, primarily to give us someone to drive the offense when the starters rest and maybe keep minutes down for that group - but I think he and Maxey could certainly play together. Thanks - enjoyed this article.
Your proposed starting lineup makes the most sense to me. Oubre's best position is SF. Caleb Martin is not a 4, at least against starting units. Who else but Yabusele and McCain? Eric Gordon maybe.
I'm a Nurse guy, but your criticism is fair. He's been dealt a bad hand, but the lack of energy and disorganized offense is unacceptable. Maybe that's the reason he plays Dowtin so much; he's looking for a point guard who is younger than 38 to organize things.
Do you see a consolidation trade this year? This only makes sense if McCain is included- who else does anybody want? Caleb Martin is the only other guy I can think of outside of the 3 stars. But now McCain is untouchable because of the salary.