Instant observations: Sixers lose nailbiter to Bucks in season opener

The Sixers battled valiantly against the Bucks to open their season on the road, but some questionable officiating and mistakes along the margins doomed them in a 118-117 loss.

Here’s what I saw.

The Good

— Tyrese Maxey had a rough start to this one, picking up two quick fouls while struggling to get much of anything going on offense. It didn’t take long for him to leave that tough start in the dust, and he broke out by doing something we’ve rarely seen from him — playing bully ball.

Matched up with a smaller guard in Cam Payne, Maxey decided to take it to his defender in the early portion of the second quarter, driving right at his chest to pick up a pair of fouls, one in the halfcourt and one on a transition possession. It’s something that he simply was not able to do as a younger player, but as he has put on weight, Maxey has had a better time of initiating and playing through contact.

Payne wasn’t the only Bucks guard Maxey picked on. Damian Lillard certainly got his on the other end of the floor, but the Sixers did a nice job of putting him in actions and punishing any miscommunications or hesitation on Lillard’s part. Maxey went on an individual scoring run in the third quarter that turned a double-digit deficit into a tight game, with Lillard on the receiving end of a good chunk of those buckets.

Mostly, this was a performance that reaffirmed my prior convictions about Maxey. He wasn’t a black hole by any stretch of the imagination, but the team was at its most dangerous when he called his own number and didn’t worry about getting the rest of the team involved. For the middle portion of this game, Milwaukee basically had no one who could stay in front of him, and Maxey’s runner/floater game was premium in the second half.

— Building off of a strong preseason run, Kelly Oubre was arguably the second-best player on the team in the first half. When you shoot 100 percent from the field, it would be hard to be much further down the list than that.

It was encouraging to see Oubre maintaining the steady, quick-decision play of the preseason. The process was simplified for him to some degree — see an open shot, take an open shot — but it’s a breath of fresh air for a guy to seize on open shot opportunities for this group. We’ve watched so many record-scratch possessions for Tobias Harris over the years that I will take instant shots from just about anybody, as long as they step into shots with confidence.

You could also see the difference it made having a long, athletic wing on the floor instead of a guy like P.J. Tucker, or smaller guards against Giannis-led lineups. When Nick Nurse tried to go to a Maxey/Springer/Beverley trio at one point in the first half, the Bucks felt overwhelmingly large by comparison and pounded Philly inside. Oubre didn’t make many standout defensive plays, but sometimes you just need like-sized players to match the opponent.

That was true on the other side of the floor, too, where Oubre played a possession of bully ball for an and-one layup late in the third. Again, you don’t want this guy having too much freedom to jack up shots and derail the offense, but his self-creation skills are going to get them out of tough spots late in the clock all season.

There will be more calls to start Oubre as he continues to thrive under Nick Nurse, and while I won’t go there yet, I’d be lying to you if I said I wasn’t intrigued by what he has shown so far.

— You’re not going to find many better ways than this to announce yourself to a national audience than Jaden Springer’s hellacious block of Damian Lillard in the first half:

Lillard would return the favor a moment later, using Springer’s physical brand of defense to draw a foul in the act of shooting (and making) a three. But even on that possession, you could see Springer bothering Lillard a little bit, forcing him to reset the offense a time or two before he finally got things lined up how he wanted them.

It wasn’t entirely clear if Springer was going to get on the floor at all after Nurse held him on the bench for the entire first quarter, and it seems like he has an uphill climb to push Patrick Beverley down the rotation. But this was a good start.

— This was a hard Tobias Harris game to grade for me because he had some absolutely infuriating possessions in both halves of this one.

For example, I am all for Harris trying to push the pace in transition, as he has a good blend of speed and strength to battle guys near the basket. Watching him pull up for a midrange jumper on a transition possession, on the other hand, had to send Daryl Morey into a catatonic state in the press box. And just like in past seasons, Harris took multiple open three-point attempts and turned them into, well, nothing. Dribbling into traffic instead of simply rising and firing is arguably his worst trait as a basketball player.

On the other hand, Harris’ ability to punish mismatches was a big asset in this one. When the Bucks dared to put smaller defenders on the floor, he took them down to the weight room and made a few big jumpers from the mid-post. More importantly, I absolutely loved the stepback three he took in the fourth quarter, and would love for him to find that confidence on a full-time basis.

— The main thing that carried over from the Sixers’ preseason campaign was their new defensive approach. Philadelphia had every right to play timid against a team with Damian Lillard at the point of attack, but they stuck with their strategy of aggressive, high-octane rotations that we saw in the preseason.

There was some pain on the back end for sure, as the Sixers continued Toronto’s trend of giving up a fair amount of corner threes. But the team buy-in for the group is there, and that’s the foundation that they’ll need to build from.

The Bad

— The Sixers look like a more complete defensive team from top to bottom this season. Unfortunately, they have a pretty limited supply of knockdown shooters, so they are going to go through stretches where they simply can’t throw the ball in the ocean. If you were hoping the first one could wait until after the first quarter of the season, too bad.

The bigger disappointment was their lack of commitment to what they talked about (and carried out) in the preseason. Their setup against Milwaukee did not look wildly different from their worst performances last season, with little off-ball cutting or movement off of their primary guys in the middle of the floor. There were attempts at secondary creation from guys like Patrick Beverley and De’Anthony Melton, but those came few and far between.

It doesn’t help that the roster basically doesn’t have a single good playmaker on it outside of James Harden, who is actively fighting the team’s President of Basketball Operations. There are guys who are decent passers in niche roles — Melton is a pretty good connective playmaker from around the elbows — but there are going to be a lot of lineups with five middling-or-worse passers on the floor at the same time. One showed up five minutes into the game, with Embiid/Harris/Oubre/Green/Melton a decent overall group with minimal playmaking equity.

They are going to have to overcome that problem through isolation scoring talent and transition play, and that’ll be a tough battle to win.

— If the choice is between putting a compromised Joel Embiid on the floor or giving him the night off during the preseason, I certainly prefer the latter approach. But with only one game under his belt heading into the year, Embiid looked like a guy who is going to have to play through some rust in order to get into MVP-type form. And it’s not even that he was bad, the Sixers just don’t look like a team that entirely knows how to play off of him within this new setup.

There is still a mechanical nature to his passing reads as he works on learning to master his place at the center of Philadelphia’s offense. Early days of course, but it feels like Embiid is passing more because he feels he has to and not because it’s a particularly smart thing to do on a moment-to-moment basis. With little cutting to speak of, it’s not like he was spoiled for choice in his attempts to spread the wealth.

If he expects his teammates to help him out, Embiid is going to need to help himself, too. His ball security was poor throughout the night, with Embiid giving the ball away through a combination of bad passes and poor awareness. My least favorite was his volleyball slap of a ball to nowhere in the second half, sending the Bucks running in the other direction.

He has historically been a slow starter, and it appears this season will be no different.

The Ugly

— For the love of god, make your free throws!

— On one of the biggest swing plays of the game, Giannis Antetokounmpo shot the ball near the basket and hit nothing but air before collecting the ball himself on the other side of the rim. It could not have been a more obvious travel unless you were part of this officiating crew or running the NBA’s official Twitter account.

It doesn’t get more egregious than this. And while that was the most blatant error they made, it wasn’t the only questionable call the officials made down the stretch of this one. The Sixers played their part in the fourth-quarter meltdown, but they had assistance from the zebras.