Instant observations: Joel Embiid misses buzzer beater, Sixers lose NBA cup opener to Celtics

The Sixers had a shot to win their fifth straight game to open the year, but Joel Embiid’s three clanged off of the rim as the buzzer sounded, leading to a 109-108 defeat to the Boston Celtics.

Here’s what I saw.

Growing pains on offense

Up to this point, I thought the Sixers had done a decent job of living in both versions of their offense, feeding Joel Embiid in his shifts while giving the young guards plenty of opportunity to cook. But the offense was a mess for most of Friday’s first half against the Celtics, and it felt like they had no idea who they wanted to be or how they wanted to execute from possession to possession.

“Playing with pace” does not need to mean sprinting down the floor to score in transition, so Embiid can be an effective part of an uptempo team in the right circumstances. The problem is that you can feel how uncomfortable and unnatural it is for a lot of these guys to play with a seven-foot center who is trying to post up and play from the elbows and in. Embiid’s two-man game with Tyrese Maxey remains fluid, but the rest of them are still working out the timing and spacing around Embiid, and learning how to time their off-ball movement for maximum effectiveness. And that’s if they were running much of anything at all. The Sixers’ offense was lethargic for the opening portion of the game, with their guards often looking around and waiting for Embiid to get in the proper position to begin a set.

Here’s the good news: Philadelphia figured some things out at halftime. And that mostly relied on Embiid finding his sea legs and getting back to his old tricks with Maxey by his side. Save for a pick-and-roll possession with Edgecombe early in the second half, it was a long run of handoffs and combination plays with Maxey, with Embiid slithering through cracks in Boston’s defense. Though the big fella may have gotten away with a travel on one noteworthy third-quarter drive, the important thing was watching him move in space, hitting long drag steps to slide by Queta for buckets around the rim.

As clunky as it looked early, this game felt like a good sign for Embiid’s physical progress since the start of the season. He moved better in space and attempted some explosive moves on both ends of the floor, including a dunk attempt on a drive and a chasedown block that drew huge cheers in the third quarter. Navigating the minute limit is tough on both Embiid and the team, but there are signs that it will eventually be worth it, because his talent/skill remain monstrous when he has it rolling. The Celtics didn’t have to much to throw at him as he caught fire early in the second half. If he can become a part of the defensive solution, it will make all the difference in the world.

What that step forward for Embiid-centric offense highlighted is that this was not an Embiid-only problem. Philadelphia’s perimeter players took turns overdribbling and fumbling the ball into traffic, with Quentin Grimes one of the worst offenders in both halves. For all of Grimes’ strengths as a shotmaker and off-guard, he was a nightmare when handling the point-of-attack duties against the Celtics, particularly bad during a critical stretch of the game to close the third quarter. Give me point VJ over whatever the hell that was.

This team is not a finished product, and that’s fine in late October. With all the issues they went through, they had a shot to win the game as time expired, with the ball in the hands of their most skilled offensive player. Can’t win ’em all.

Clean up the damn defense

On the subject of defense, there was some Celtics shotmaking that fell in the realm of “fluke nonsense” when they got out to their huge 24-point lead. Anfernee Simons hit an outrageous fallaway three at the end of one possession, for example, and the Jaylen Brown/Payton Pritchard combo hit what felt like a million contested pull-up twos. That being said, part of the reason they were able to get going is that the Sixers offered little resistance out of the gate. When you let good offensive players walk into practice shots for the first few minutes of the game, you can hardly act shocked when they build a head of steam.

At least in halfcourt defense, you can see some signs of a young team with young players who can correct the issues over time. VJ Edgecombe has gotten caught cheating off of decent shooters a few too many times for my liking, and he’ll settle in at the right level over time. Paul George’s return will give them another wing-sized player who can switch in space, which should clean up problems caused by their guards getting caught on bigger threes and fours closer to the basket.

I am much more discouraged by their transition defense. The Sixers have struggled to get matched up and get back from the opening game onward, and the Celtics have clearly kept tabs on it since their first meeting. Every Sixers miss was a track meet for Boston, with a different mistake on seemingly every possesion. When they stopped the ball, they didn’t have have anyone running the wings. If they got two men back, it felt like Boston always had a third man running from the trail spot to coast in for a layup.

Though they were much better defensively in the final two quarters, they managed to undermine a lot of that work with poor defensive rebounding. I lost count of how many possessions turned into two Sixers fighting for a basketball that they eventually gave back to Boston. Oubre and Drummond were particularly bad there, fumbling the basketball repeatedly while under no duress. Two hands on the basketball, please.

A mixed Maxey bag

It has been hard to find much fault with how Tyrese Maxey is playing basketball right now. He appears to have graduated from a three-level scorer with noteworthy holes to a player who doesn’t have major weaknesses to pick at. He is playmaking at a high level, getting to the free-throw line, and still unleashing the same pull-up threes and speed rushes to the rim that have become his signature over the years.

It’s the physicality and foul-drawing that has caught my eye the most to open this year. Maxey has done a much better job on basically every front there — he’s avoiding layups that have him fall away from the basket, he’s initiating contact more frequently, and he has finally picked up some of the dark arts, highlighting fouls with rip throughs and other arm swings.

That said, I would have loved to see him play with that same style when it counted the most against Boston. Some fans in the arena were hoping for a foul call on Xavier Tillman on his missed shot at the end of regulation — didn’t think that was the case from my view — but the bigger problem was settling for a tough runner against a guy who he should be putting in jail if he has him in space. Late-game offense is easier to talk about than execute, but I didn’t love what he ended up with there.

Maxey was also brutal protecting the basketball in this one, throwing the ball away on a handful of second-half possessions that they simply needed to score on. It is usually one of Maxey’s greatest strengths, and he picked up assists left and right against Boston, going against his reputation as a suboptimal playmaker.

Please remember the rookie exists

The Sixers are going to have to learn sooner rather than later that they can’t let VJ Edgecombe be a side attraction — or worse, fazed out of the offense — to let less important players cook. When he is heavily involved in the offense, they have looked pretty damn good. When he gets pushed off to the side to humor the vets, it’s when their worst stretches of basketball tend to happen.

To Edgecombe’s tremendous credit, he still manages to make stuff happen even as other players lose sight of him or the offense sticks him down in the corner. He had multiple assists that came immediately after his own offensive rebounds, flying through the air for a loose ball and still keeping the presence of mind to look for his shooters on the perimeter. 20-year-old rookies who do that instinctively as a guard are as rare as it gets.

But he’s a good enough offensive player that he shouldn’t have to carve out his lane from scrap heap touches and late-clock situations. His early pick-and-roll game has been pretty terrific, with Edgecombe showing a ton of juice as a midrange shooter that we never saw at Baylor. PHLY colleague Derek Bodner said midgame that it might be the way his game compares closest to Jimmy Butler — he does an excellent job of staying low and protecting the basketball before exploding out of his stance and squaring his shoulders toward the basket.

Even after barely touching the ball in the fourth quarter, Edgecombe came up with a huge catch-and-shoot three with less than a minute to play, inspiring an explosion of noise in South Philly as loud as any other heard on Friday night. His line says everything: 17-5-5 on 7/11 from the field and 2/4 from the field is outrageously good for a rookie who was low on touches for most of the evening. Get him the ball more.

Two-way Oubre

I am not sure I can give Kelly Oubre enough praise for how he has started his third season in Philadelphia. While a small piece of it is driven by elite three-point shooting, not exactly his calling card, he’s doing just about everything else right. He has been one of the only defenders worth a damn on the perimeter, he’s contributing on the glass, and he has shown the perfect balance of aggression as a scorer, playing awesome downhill basketball without hijacking the offense.

As the Sixers tried to make inroads after a dominant 1.5 quarters of Celtics basketball to open the game, it was Oubre who had his handprints all over the comeback effort. He had a pair of physical slot drives through Celtics pressure, one of which was rewarded with an extra free-throw when Oubre connected on the and-one. On the other end of the floor, he was the first guy to do anything to bother Jaylen Brown, stonewalling him for a late-half turnover that should have led to a Philly runout if not for a Justin Edwards error. There aren’t a lot of possessions that go by without Oubre making some sort of positive play, which is crazy to think given his reputation before arriving in Philadelphia.

There have been some debates about who the fifth starter should be once Paul George returns from injury, with Quentin Grimes’ offensive upside providing an argument for their current bench guard. But the more these guys play, the more it seems clear they should just leave Oubre well enough alone and think harder about what their bench groups should look like.

Other notes

— What more evidence do you need to see to understand that these guys will not quit on a game? Some previous Sixers teams would have packed it in down 24 points while playing stinky basketball. These guys didn’t even blink.

— Justin Edwards needs to spend some time out of the rotation the second Paul George is available to play again. When he isn’t hitting shots, he isn’t doing almost anything at the moment. Edwards somehow created a defensive reputation out of a few good moments during his rookie year, which ignored that he was largely terrible on that end during last year’s minutes. There hasn’t been much, if any improvement in that respect.

— He got one to go in from the corner, but I do not need to see Andre Drummond shooting threes in anything other than a desparation situation with the shot clock expiring. The guy who airballed a six-footer should not be launching multiple threes per game.

— The officials did not seem to have their best stuff in this game, I’ll simply say that. Must have been the pressure of the NBA Cup.