The Sixers nearly gave away a win in a putrid third quarter against the Indiana Pacers, but a closing kick from Tyrese Maxey and strong contributions from Joel Embiid and Anfernee Simons led them to a 114-109 road victory.

Here’s what I saw.

The Sixers’ offense has not been good enough

I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn when I say that this offense has been wildly disappointing to start the year. Nobody expects Philly to run a Warriors-esque motion offense or eschew isolation possessions entirely, but there is a lot of standing around and slamming of heads into walls. They are fortunate to have heads made of steel, but that doesn’t mean they can’t add variety and clean up the game plan.

The only good news is that Joel Embiid — the iso-heavy hub at the center of the attack — has done a pretty damn good job of playing with a sense of urgency inside the arc, whether that has been attacking as a scorer or playing setup man for the rest of the group. He had his best scoring stretch of the season in the first half against Indiana, wasting almost no time or footsteps to get to his spots, rise up, and hit jumpers. The Sixers found him at spots all over the floor, attacking from deep post spots as well as his pick-and-roll comfort area at the nail, and he was quicker to rise and fire than we’d seen in his previous three appearances this season.

That decisiveness created opportunities for the others around him, as the Pacers needed to respond to an Embiid touch quickly or risk giving him an immediate clean look. As Indiana converged around him, Embiid started a few swing pass sequences that saw the ball ping from LeBron James to VJ Edgecombe to Tyrese Maxey and to others in the rotation, and some of those plays ended up back in the hands of Embiid, who drew fouls on an undersized Indy frontline hanging onto him whenever possible.

Embiid tends to be the hardest guy to figure out a style of play around for new players, so it’s encouraging to see them already hitting him on a high percentage of plays when he has established deep position. LeBron has been a cheat code in this regard. The 41-year-old has often been the man at the top of the key when Embiid sets up shop on the block, and a quick reset to the strong-side passer (often Maxey or Edgecombe) darts right over to James, who is tossing Embiid perfectly lobbed entries within the first two weeks of the season.

But that’s the end of the positive for me on offense. Attacking otherwise has been majorly reliant on attacking in transition, and that should not be the case for a team with this much firepower. Their three-point shooting has been a struggle overall, and Indy spent chunks of Wednesday’s game cheating from the corners to load up around the paint, with Philadelphia mostly overcoming that through talent from the midrange.

One of the biggest early stories is that LeBron’s scoring has largely been MIA, and as the Pacers went on their 17-0 run to surge into the lead early in the third, LeBron was at the center of particularly spooky possessions on offense. He would eventually provide Philly with the run stopper on a jumper from the left wing roughly halfway through the third quarter, and he was not alone in the missed jumpers department, with Edgecombe and Brown both clanging open threes of their own during that run. But expectations are higher than “just one of the guys” for LeBron on offense, and he hasn’t shown much ability to impact positive offense in the halfcourt so far. His burst out of the post has not been there, making it hard to punish one-on-one matchups or draw help to open up his playmaking. Although his vision has been good enough to find assists anyway, the Sixers need him to start creating separation to open up more opportunities for their shooters, insofar as they have them.

In real time, I think you’re seeing why it may be more difficult than it sounds on paper to just “ride the hot hand” on any given night. Tyrese Maxey struggled early for the second straight game, but the Sixers weren’t going to go away from him entirely, even as he struggled to get free or convert on his opportunities when they came. While he started to find his footing as the second half wore on and ultimately provided the closing kick, the trickle-down effect was the offense moving away from Embiid, who was the focal point of all their best work in the first 24 minutes. The offense bogged down for most of 12 third-quarter minutes accordingly. When you have to keep feeding all the stars because each can argue for being a No. 1 option at any time, it’s harder to shift into run-stopping mode, where you go bread-and-butter sets built around one or two stars.

That style of offense reemerged late, with Maxey and Embiid playing a ton of two-man game as Maxey ultimately hit the closing buckets in the final minute. The contrast between the two Maxey makes in the final minute was telling. The first was hard work, Maxey crossing into a pull-up beauty, and the next was a wide-open jumper up top after they simply got the ball to Embiid with a mismatch and waited for the double to come. The offense can be so much easier than they are making it look by using all the talent they have on the floor:

I love that they have the talent to pull a game like this out of the fire, and hate that they can get in their way to the degree they did, nearly allowing a banged-up Pacers outfit to steal one.

Their calling card continues to be their defense, where they stacked up a few big plays over the course of the fourth. A KCP defensive effort sprung Jaylen Brown for a bucket in transition in the thick of the comeback, and a VJ Edgecombe strip on Siakam was perhaps the most important play of the game, leading to free throws and a bit of breathing room as the clock ticked closer to zero. We can celebrate that part of the game while acknowledging that they got away with one on Wednesday night, and they need to figure out what the hell they want to do and be on offense.

Other notes

— Mercifully, the lid finally came off the basket for Anfernee Simons, and his four first-half threes helped the Sixers overcome their worst turnover stretch of the season. As many in Portland promised after learning Simons was signing in Philly, he put together a dizzying stretch where the ball was barely in his hands before it ended up in the net, with the Sixers seeking out the hot hand and feeding him while the rest of the group built a house of bricks. He was one of the only reasons this game remained within striking distance early in the fourth, as the stars finally began to get their act together.

—Indiana has been one of the league’s fastest teams under Rick Carlisle and really tested the Sixers’ ability to get matched up properly early in the shot clock. VJ Edgecombe and Anfernee Simons were both victims of those crossmatches, with Pascal Siakam eating them alive in the first 6-8 seconds of the clock. Good and purposeful offense from Indiana, bad job of avoiding that issue by Philly.

— For Jaylen Brown, this was a pretty disorienting performance, because I came away from the first half absolutely incensed by his ball security and then looked up to see he had 15 points and seven rebounds on just eight shots. It shows you how much can be wiped away by shotmaking talent, and Brown has certainly been one of their most influential figures in early offense, as he punished Pacers mismatches and scored a time or two on second-chance points against a scrambling Indiana team. Still, the giveaways and clock-bleeding possessions are adding up.

— Dean Wade was straight-up horrid in this game. Five fouls with 0 points is an impressive feat not many get to pull off, I guess.