What you missed from Sixers vs. Celtics while watching the Phillies playoff game

The Sixers and Celtics played a snoozer of a preseason game across the street from a Phillies playoff game, with Boston emerging as 112-101 winners in a game that featured exactly zero of either team’s stars.

Since you were likely as fired up for that game as I was, here’s what you missed from the other Philadelphia sporting event on Wednesday.

The Good

— The pace the Sixers are playing with on turnovers and misses has been simply fantastic so far in the preseason. Nick Nurse’s Raptors teams basically had to run in order to score the last couple of seasons, so it wasn’t immediately clear if the mandate to push the pace would come with him to Philadelphia. Spoiler alert: it has, and Tyrese Maxey is going to be a central part of that.

The results did not always skew in their favor, with Maxey getting turned away by Derrick White in transition on one noteworthy first-half play. That being said, the Sixers were able to create quite a few quality looks after Boston misses through nothing more than purposeful transition play. Perhaps more encouraging was their ability to follow up misses in early offense with a couple of offensive rebounds, a sign that they were getting down the floor in groups instead of trying to fly solo.

This wasn’t Maxey’s greatest individual outing, perhaps because he had to try to force the issue as the primary scorer. Still, there were a few “wow” plays for him on offense, between some pristine jumpers and a strong rim attack or two. I don’t know that he needed to play 28 minutes in the second game of the preseason, but what do I know?

— I certainly haven’t seen enough to declare Danny Green “back” after he looked off the pace at the end of last season, but he is moving well out there right now, and that’s far more important than whether shots are going down or not. He’s far enough removed from his knee injury and subsequent surgery that this should be his new normal. Or, I guess the new normal is the old normal. Whatever.

The reason Green was a valuable player for so many years wasn’t tied to elite athleticism in the first place. But getting closer to his baseline allows the off-ball intelligence to show up a bit more. Right after checking into the game in the first half, Green darted into a passing lane for a steal and (somehow) took the turnover and scored all by himself on the other end. There were more hustle plays as the game wore on, with Green coming away with an offensive rebound, a loose ball in the backcourt, and some other 50/50 plays by beating younger players to spots.

Green still knows exactly what his wheelhouse is on offense. He cuts baseline to baseline (“The Greenhouse” as it was often called) just waiting for a defender to lean the wrong way, and suddenly he’s open for a corner three he barely needs space to get up. But Nurse seems inclined to let him expand his role a bit, and Green nearly completed a lob to Mo Bamba for a jam on a play in the first half. A lot of good stuff from him.

— If Kelly Oubre played like he did in the first half of this game on a regular basis, the Sixers would have had no chance to get him on a minimum deal this offseason. And that, of course, is the infuriating part about Kelly Oubre’s career. The flashes are tantalizing, but no one has been able to get him to buy into a defined role for a full season.

Oubre’s contributions on the defensive side of the ball felt repeatable if nothing else. He certainly wasn’t perfect — there were some lapses in concentration away from the play that led to Boston back-cutting him — but Oubre has bought into what Nick Nurse is selling at a foundational level. He’s playing with his hands high constantly, his stunts toward the middle of the floor have been well-timed, and he has done a fairly good job of getting into guys without fouling.

The flashier contribution was his standstill shooting, with Oubre catching fire from beyond the arc and sustaining that for the entire first half. He gets himself into trouble with self-created shots and putting up some tightly contested shots when he should move the ball, but there was very little of that against Boston. This is a version of Oubre that can swing a game in Philly’s favor.

— File this under “Nick Nurse things” from the preseason: Philadelphia decided to play a full-court press out of a Boston timeout early in the third quarter, and the Celtics were not even remotely prepared for it. Oubre and De’Anthony Melton swarmed Payton Pritchard in the corner and forced the Cs to burn another quick timeout, which seemed to delight everyone back on the Sixers’ bench. After that second timeout, the Sixers continued playing pressure defense and forced a risky pass over the top on the inbounds, which Tobias Harris picked off around halfcourt.

We saw the Raptors nearly climb out of an unwinnable hole against the Sixers using a press a few years back, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that ends up in their regular arsenal this season. Cool to see them working on this stuff early.

The Bad

— The backup centers have been pretty bad for Philadelphia in the first two games of the preseason, to the point that I am worried about them as a big-picture concern. More specifically, I think a lot of people may find out that life without James Harden will be rough on the bigs. When Paul Reed and Mo Bamba are asked to do a bit more than they should on offense, bad things are going to happen.

At least Paul Reed was able to settle into this game after looking sort of like a headless chicken for the first 24 minutes. Bamba has yet to do much of anything since joining the team, looking clumsy on the offensive end while failing to leverage his length much on defense. Nurse talked some before the game about the Sixers needing to clean up unnecessary fouls, and then Bamba committed a foul climbing over someone’s back 94 feet from the basket in the first half. That won’t go over well.

In any case, both guys are doing a bit too much on offense and could use a proper table-setter to get them shots that are more in their wheelhouse. Which is to say, shots around the rim for Reed and standstill jumpers for Bamba.

— What will this offense look like when Philadelphia’s offensive centerpieces are on the floor? Maybe it’s more important to ask what it looks like with Joel Embiid on the floor since we don’t know if James Harden will ever suit up for this team again. In any case, that’s the big question to answer at the moment, because it is a work in progress overall.

Philadelphia’s transition game has been juiced up a bit, which is a big positive, but the democratization of the offense has so far led to a lot of side-to-side stuff in the halfcourt. On possessions where it ends up in the hands of someone like Tyrese Maxey, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as a dribble handoff can lead to him turning the corner with a full head of steam going. For their slower and less capable ballhandlers, it has often been a road to nowhere, with some clunky drives turning into bad, forced shots from odd angles.

Embiid’s presence will change the geometry of the floor entirely. The ball is going to end up in his hands as everyone moves around him, hopefully leading to more easy assist opportunities for Embiid on cuts toward the rim. So all I will say for now is that movement for the sake of movement isn’t inherently good, and there will probably need to be some tighter control of who gets to attack, when that happens, and where on the floor it should start from.

— Tobias Harris threw two passes to people in the 15th row, one in each half. While I can appreciate that he is probably excited to be able to do more in this year’s offense, he’s going to have to take a little mustard off of the passes.

— My first official prediction of the season: I think Patrick Beverley getting minutes over Jaden Springer is going to be the first “What the hell is Nick Nurse doing?” battle of the season for a lot of fans. And I will probably be on their side for that one if that’s how it plays out because I’d rather see Springer work through some growing pains in the hopes of getting some end-of-season dividends.

The Ugly

— The Celtics were playing their third game in four nights. The Phillies were playing a playoff game — a great one, at that — across the street. The Sixers’ next preseason game isn’t until next Monday. There was absolutely no reason this game needed to be played on this night, and yet!

This was such a mailed-in effort from most people in the building that the piece of the scoreboard that shows current lineups and part of the box score wasn’t updated from somewhere in the second quarter onward. Either something was broken, or someone couldn’t be bothered to pay enough attention to the game to see who was playing at any given time. Place your bets on which is more likely to be the case.

Salute to the Sixers for broadcasting the baseball game inside the arena up until about 30 minutes before tip-off, though. All of us who were here got to watch them lay the smackdown on ATL before our game had even started.

Also, sorry to go on this Phillies tangent but this absolutely rules: