Nic Batum catches fire in Sixers' wild play-in comeback vs. Heat

Nic Batum hit six threes to help spark a monster comeback for the Sixers in the play-in game, with Philadelphia surging past Miami for a 105-104 victory.

Here’s what I saw.

The Good

— Is this the first time in recorded history that a free chicken promotion swung the momentum of an important basketball game? No matter what arena you’re in around the league, free stuff for missed free throws promotion crushes. But you’ll rarely see that sort of thing matter in a meaningful game…until Wednesday night.

Caleb Martin stepped to the line in the third quarter with Miami nursing a double-digit lead and (seemingly) in complete control of the game. After Martin missed the pair, the Sixers suddenly sprang to life — the next possession led to an open three for Nic Batum, which led to a Martin turnover, which led to a Buddy Hield transition bucket. A Miami timeout was not enough to stop the bleeding, with Embiid playing jumbo point guard to set Hield up for an open catch-and-shoot three, and he nailed it.

The third quarter (and really, the entire second half) was all about the role players for Philadelphia, which doesn’t tend to be a thing we say about the Sixers in the postseason. Frankly, they were doing their best to carry a star who did absolutely nothing of note during the most electric stretch of the game.

Hield has been in and out of the doghouse for a lot of the regular season stretch run, thanks to his streaky shooting and unreliable defense. But after a fairly poor start to this one, he looked like a player reading the game faster than everyone else. He and Batum combined for a lot of excellent combination passing on the perimeter, bending Miami until they eventually broke, conceding the open three.

(He had a rough missed layup that a lot of people will remember from this game.)

— Speaking of seeing the game faster than anyone else: Nic Batum! In a game where everybody on both sides lost their damn minds at one point or another, Batum was simply in the zone in the second half. He battled Butler admirably on defense, waving his arms like one of those parking lot balloon men to stop Miami’s No. 1 option from ever getting a good look at the basket. He did a masterful job of navigating the game on the other end of the floor because, in the moment, it seemed impossible that he could keep getting open amid a heater.

Even as Miami realized that they needed to track No. 40 a little closer, the traits that we raved about with Batum all year came back to the forefront. The quick release made it damn near impossible for the Heat to get a good contest off in time, and his ability to use a single dribble to sidestep, create a fly-by, and then launch a three helped him get off a make he had no business canning in the fourth quarter.

We spent the middle of the season worrying about Batum’s movement coming off of a hamstring problem. In their most meaningful game of the year to date, he managed to make what was basically a no-look putback layup in crunch time, bringing the Sixers to within one with just 4:12 to play. And that wasn’t even the craziest play of the quarter from the Frenchman, as Batum came up with a massive block on a three-point attempt from Herro, basically turning the game into a free-throw contest from here on:

Winning player.

— Kelly Oubre did not have the greatest game he has ever played, but if you want to look for a place where the energy changed in this game, I think you owe at least part of it to him. He defended like an absolute psychopath in the second half, unleashed by Nick Nurse to do, well, basically whatever was needed at a given moment. Full-court pressure, weakside rim help when the center got beat, off-ball madness, you name it and he was able to offer it.

While Oubre bit off more than he could chew with some silly fouls in the fourth, relegating him to bench duty, he still left his imprint long before the and-one layup in crunch time. Dawgs do dawg things.

— Joel Embiid is not going to escape blame for how this team unraveled in the first half. For much of the first 24 minutes, he was a passenger in this game, and he was fortunate to get a massive lift from his boys in quarter No. 3.

When the Heat had their first bit of success in the zone, Nick Nurse quickly pulled Paul Reed from the game to get their best player back on the floor. Embiid did little to nothing to help them out. He did a poor job of feeling and responding to pressure in the middle of the floor, and his finishing around the basket left a lot to be desired. Embiid did the hard early work to put Bam Adebayo in foul trouble, drawing two on him in the first five minutes of the game, and then completely failed to exploit Kevin Love as his primary assignment.

If you are looking for an out for him, the Sixers did a poor job of getting him the ball in the first place. With the big man stationed in the middle of the zone and asking for the ball, he was met with a lot of side-to-side passing that accomplished nothing other than wasting seconds on the clock. You could make an argument that they could have brought him out to the perimeter (perhaps in the corner?) to space the floor and open up some more space in and around the paint. But no matter what you thought they should do, inertia was the wrong choice.

All of that being said — to Embiid’s credit, the Sixers continued to look for and play through him when it mattered. Smaller Heat players tried to attack him in space, and Embiid was up for the challenge basically every time, turning would-be drives into bogus runners and floaters in space. Embiid did a better job of leveraging his strength, establishing position in soft pockets of Miami’s defense to play quarterback in the middle of the floor.

And as you’d expect, they needed his scoring late! He hit a huge three early in the fourth quarter, followed that up with another one to pull them into the lead late, and all of that set up the two biggest plays of the game.

The first — an Embiid offensive rebound that he soared for in traffic, which he somehow gathered, rose up with, and deposited in the basket for an and-one, drawing the second-loudest cheer of the night. The biggest was left for the follow-up act, when Embiid threaded a beautiful pass to Kelly Oubre in traffic, with Oubre left to do the rest.

It’s a play he couldn’t and wouldn’t have made early in his career. Not his best night, but he rallied when it counted. That’s what stars are supposed to do.

The Bad

— In the last meeting between these two teams down in Miami, Philadelphia’s zone offense was a problem only in the sense that they missed shots. The ball moved well, they made smart decisions with the basketball, and then they just failed to end the possession with a make. If missing shots had been their biggest problem on Wednesday night, they would have been fortunate.

Indecisiveness is a death sentence vs. Miami’s 2-3 because their discipline and communication out of that look is already ahead of the rest of the league. There was plenty of blame to go around for Philly’s horrible end to the first quarter, but the first person I’d point to is Tyrese Maxey.

It has been rare for him to have the deer-in-the-headlights look, but after missing some early shots, Maxey second-guessed what would normally be a series of easy decisions for him. He stepped out of at least an open three or two at the top of the zone, and when possessions crept toward the end of the shot clock, he didn’t seem to have much of a plan, dribbling into multiple Miami defenders in the hope that a solution would present itself along the way. Nick Nurse and Sixers players said early this week that the Heat’s zone is a challenge for guards when initiating the offense because of how high and hard they play it. And Maxey made those words ring loudly in the first half — a season of great ball security turned into choppy possession after choppy possession.

Whatever prep work they did to attack Miami was completely inadequate. Frankly, I was surprised they didn’t just spam the 2-3 for the duration of the game after how well it worked in the first half. Maybe they figured the Sixers would snap out of it eventually.

The Ugly

— A big game against the Miami Heat? You had to expect that Tobias Harris was going to have at least a humiliating moment or two in this one, two years after “TOBIAS HARRIS OVER ME?!” entered the NBA canon.

(It is worth noting that is an invented thing in Jimmy Butler’s head that didn’t happen that way in Philadelphia, but still!)

His moment came midway through the second quarter when he initially earned some cheers for an offensive rebound. And then he ended up missing not one, not two, not three, but four different layups with Heat defenders hanging around him around the basket. It brought some memories back of Game 7 against Atlanta a few years back, when Harris missed a lot of cheapies around the rim.

But I would like to come to his defense on this one. While he might have smoked those shots around the rim, the activity and “want to” were there for him. When he missed those shots, he didn’t hang his head and hide in the corner, and instead came right back for a putback layup shortly after that brutal sequence. Harris then turned a fast break into an easy bucket for Paul Reed, using some physicality to draw a second defender before the assist.

When Harris got booed for the smoked layups, I understood it, but on a human level I felt for him. As I say quite often in this space, I will stick up for and find time for anyone who fails but fails while fighting valiantly. Unfortunately, the rest of the game basically confirmed why they were booing him, and he got benched in crunch time, deservedly so. The locals knew what was coming, I suppose.