Sixers win stunner over Cavs behind Paul George, Tyrese Maxey

Paul George had an enormous second half for the Sixers on Friday night, dropping 30 points on the East-leading Cavs to spark a 132-129 win Philly desperately needed. Tyrese Maxey co-starred with 29 big ones of his own.

Here’s what I saw.

The Good

— Tyrese Maxey has been open about his desire to get his teammates going in the early stages of games, knowing that the time will come when he can hunt his own shot. Evidently, he believes that practice has gone on long enough because Maxey came out firing from the opening tip against the East-leading Cavaliers.

It has been tough to explain some of Maxey’s shooting struggles this season for the same reason it’s hard to figure out why he was white hot in the first quarter on Friday — when Maxey has it rolling, it doesn’t particularly matter what type of shot he’s putting up or where the jumpers are coming from. Catch-and-shoot looks, pull-up jumpers, wing threes, trail threes, they all go down easy. It only took one, an open three he stepped into in transition, to take the lid off of the basket against Cleveland.

The Cavs certainly tried to dissuade him from being the star of the show for Philadelphia, throwing zone looks and traps at him periodically (hilariously, Donovan Mitchell picked up a three-second violation as the low man in a zone on one first-half possession). And Maxey did a nice job of navigating that reality, playing an effective drive-and-kick game to set up shooters and keep the ball swinging around the perimeter.

There’s a little bit of “Chicken or the egg?” going on here. Would Maxey be having a better passing season if his teammates had hit shots at a normal-to-high clip early in the year? Or are his teammates shooting better because he’s making more incisive passes lately? It may well be a mix of both, but in either case, Maxey deserves some credit for making inroads as a playmaker on a roster that isn’t exactly loaded with weapons.

The third quarter was not Maxey’s finest hour, as he settled for a few too many wild attempts around the basket. He would end up spending a lot of his time recycling possessions and working off-ball while George played the part of leading man. But he had done his job at that point, and a good point guard understands that sometimes your best course of action is to simply get the hell out of the way.

— Paul George is an enigma the likes of which I have never covered. I struggle to figure out what’s going to happen with him from one possession to the next, let alone one game to the next. He feels as likely to commit a heinous turnover as he is a defense-splitting pass, and there was plenty of the former in Friday night’s game. When the Cavs sent two at him in the post on one first-half possession, he fired a crosscourt pass that must have landed in at least the fifth row, the ball sailing well over Eric Gordon’s head on the opposing wing. And that wasn’t the only ugly giveaway of the night.

And yet, great shooting can paper over all cracks and make you forget about a hell of a lot of mistakes. The Sixers believed they were getting a sharpshooter when they inked George to the big deal this summer, and he’s finally starting to resemble that guy more often than not. He had a game-changing quarter in the third — after a brutal first half, he put together a 3/5 stretch in the third and shot his way right back into the game.

The importance of George’s outside shooting to his driving success could not be more clear. As he began filling it up against the Cavs, they had to start playing him higher and higher, giving him real estate to claim with one or two purposeful dribbles. Cleveland even began trapping him toward the end of the third quarter, daring anybody else to try to beat them.

You would forgive Sixers fans for thinking he was going to eventually run out of steam — I’m not sure they’ve seen a big-time George game on their floor that ended with anything other than misery (like that Knicks game in mid-November). But George saved a little bit in the tank for the final push, canning a huge momentum three with the building already rocking from a big Sixers run to open the quarter. With Jarrett Allen in his face, George stared down the big Cavs defender and dropped a stepback three in his eye, pulling the Sixers out in front by four before a Cleveland timeout:

He may have been bored by the brief moment he had to play center in the third quarter, but otherwise, lights out half for George to power them to the win.

— If there has been any silver lining from this nightmare stretch of the season, it’s that the Sixers may have unearthed another rotation player in Justin Edwards. Wing-sized players who can shoot do not exactly grow on trees, and it’s his ability to get shots off in a hurry that helps to set him apart. If you give him a bit of daylight on the perimeter, he’s got a great chance to put it in the hoop.

In a version of this team where they have everyone healthy, that would be valuable enough, but Edwards has shown he can be trusted with some basic self-creation, which will be a must when teams begin giving him the respect he has earned on the perimeter. He had a closeout attack in the third quarter that is as textbook as it gets, with Edwards exploding past the overzealous defender and going all the way to the rim for two. Though he lost the handle on a similar play in the fourth, Edwards managed to recover and zip a well-placed pass to Jeff Dowtin on the weak side, salvaging the possession after all.

And I like Edwards’ competitiveness on the other end, even if it’s leading to some silly fouls here and there. He is consistently mixing it up with guys on the glass, and the desire to be a useful defensive player is within him.

— Kelly Oubre’s commitment to rebounding the basketball has been outstanding for most of the last two months. They have been in desperate need of help on the glass while playing small ball almost exclusively, and he competes his butt off there.

Speaking of rebounding, watching Guerschon Yabusele bully Jarrett Allen out of the way for offensive rebounds only raises my admiration level for him. He left it all out there once again.

— File this under “signs of small progress” but the Sixers absolutely tore apart some zone looks in the second half of this game. Easy to do so if you make shots, but they did a great job of creating open looks even if you divorce them from the results. They were hitting quick passes in and out of the post, and Maxey did a good job of getting them set up from the perimeter.

— Adem Bona appears to be correcting some of the “fatal flaws” he was dinged for in the pre-draft process. He looks more comfortable on offense when he’s doing something other than simply finishing plays when many were skeptical he could do things as basic as executing dribble handoffs at the top of the key. Some real craft is showing up in pick-and-rolls, with Bona showing good placement and impact with his screens to free up Maxey.

I also liked what we saw from him on the defensive end in this game, with Bona sinking down in a stance and making himself wide to discourage passes behind or around him. He picked up one first-half steal and nearly had another as he prowled around on the backline, making the Cavs think just a little bit before firing another entry pass around him. More importantly, he got through the first half without fouling, showing that he can do his job and be in the right positions without careening into opposing players.

— Who the heck taught this team how to shoot?!

— The pro-tank crew won’t be happy, but gutting out this win with no Embiid and a bunch of rotation guys out of the lineup is a gut-check performance I wasn’t sure this group had in them.

The Bad

— I don’t have a lot to complain about from this one. It was a good effort from just about everybody, and an entertaining game on top of that. Given the state of the team in recent weeks, I will take that any day.

The Ugly

— How in the world do you leave Ty Jerome open in the corner in a four-point game while he’s sitting on 30 points? Concede the lane and let them have the two in that situation, good grief.

— I’ll tell you what isn’t ugly, the Cavs offense.

After Tuesday’s loss to the Denver Nuggets, we took the Sixers to task for an absolutely dreadful defensive performance. While Nikola Jokic is an offensive wizard, the Sixers basically rolled out the red carpet for Denver and allowed them to pummel Philly on the break. I don’t think that was the problem for the Sixers in this one — even without Evan Mobley, they were an absolute buzzsaw on offense, driving and kicking and swinging and cutting until they eventually found a pretty good look. When the Sixers got them to settle for a mediocre shot, the Cavs often shot them out of a good possession, with Donovan Mitchell and especially Ty Jerome just bombing away from the perimeter.

(It does seem a bit unfair that Cleveland has so many good guards and the Sixers are forced to choose between the pu pu platter of backups.)

I admire the leap they made as a team this season under Kenny Atkinson, who took them from a fun, if ultimately harmless Eastern Conference team to a real threat to go to the Finals. It was nice, though, to watch another team unable to inbound the ball late in the game.