Sixers submit entry for worst half of NBA season in loss to Pistons

Joel Embiid turned in one of the worst halves of his professional career, leading the Sixers to a miserable 125-112 loss to the Pistons by mailing it in for the first 24 minutes of the game.

Here’s what I saw.

The Good

— Not a spectacular Tyrese Maxey performance, but he was one of the few guys who didn’t make me want to throw a remote through the TV.

— Quentin Grimes looked exactly as advertised on night one with the new team. He was a threat from deep that the Pistons had to keep track of all night, with one catch-and-shoot three from the wing and a nice pull-up jumper that he canned early in the fourth quarter. He was one of the few guys who seemed ready to defend on Friday night, and I can see the vision for a backcourt with him and Maxey, him and McCain, and even smaller three-guard looks with all three on the floor next season.

Whether he wants to stick around with this miserable group of suckers is another story, I suppose, but since he’s a restricted free agent, he may not have a choice.

The Bad

— Genuinely, the second half of this game only made me madder about the first 24 minutes. They are clearly the more talented team of the two that took the floor on Friday night, and merely needed to play hard for the first few quarters to get out and stay out in front.

It helps when Embiid starts playing like a guy who wants to participate in a basketball game. Starting Pistons center Jalen Duren picked up a cheap fourth foul on a moving screen early in the fourth, and Detroit simply had no answers for Embiid from that point forward. He hit them with the full arsenal for the 12 minutes immediately after halftime — turnaround midrange jumpers, foul-baiting on drives, quick moves out of the trail spot, a three on a pick-and-pop, beautiful fadeaway when he needed them. He was stuck on automatic in the third, helping the Sixers bleed the lead with 20 points in the quarter.

With their offense rolling, Philadelphia’s defense finally woke up. Rookie wing Justin Edwards played some tenacious defense to jam the Pistons up, they did a better job of closing out on perimeter shooters and had better ball pressure at the point of attack. Turns out, actually giving a damn can be a difference-maker in professional sports. If only they had acknowledged that reality sometime before the second half!

Suffice it to say that you don’t get credit from this writer for only trying half of the game.

The Ugly

— There are many candidates for the worst Sixers half of the season, but the first half of Friday night’s game is absolutely in the conversation. With Cade Cunningham in street clothes and Jaden Ivey nowhere close to a return to the floor, this Pistons team should struggle to score against anybody. The recent Sixers are a cure-all for everybody with offensive woes.

Let’s start with the face of their problems on Friday night, Joel Embiid. You could not have imagined a worse, more disgusting, more lifeless start from a guy who has hardly been able to get on the floor this season. If there is anything that should come easy right now, it’s the desire that comes with cherishing these rare opportunities to play. Instead of showing any sort of fire, Embiid slept through basically the entire first half. He was flat-footed on the glass, giving away multiple offensive rebounds on missed Pistons free throws, and his laziness on defense either provided Detroit with open shots or led to him picking up a stupid foul with a horrible reach-in. You kept waiting and waiting for something to change as the first half wore on, and he kept meandering around with the same mopey look on his face, doing nothing to change the direction of the game.

There have been times during his tenure with the franchise where misfortune was happening to him, rather than being caused by him. But I find it impossible to summon much sympathy for his team’s current plight watching him stumble through that dumpster fire of a half. He did absolutely nothing to make up for the defensive problems on the other end of the floor, either. Embiid finished the first half 1/9 from the floor and was frankly not close on many of those shots, tossing up airballs from about 8-10 feet from the basket. Their offensive flow sucked, in large part because he kept fumbling all over himself trying to hunt his own shots.

This is an easy thing to say watching as an outsider, but I would have genuinely taken Embiid off of the floor at halftime and told him he was done for the night. He is the guy who is supposed to come in and set the tone for the organization, a point Tyrese Maxey tried to drive home when he chided him for being late during a team meeting in the fall. The Sixers entered the night 20-30 on the season, and he treated this game as if it was a mere formality. It was nowhere close to good enough, and he should be humiliated that he was willing to have his name associated with a game like this. A childish approach in a situation where you need every single win you can get.

It didn’t get much better elsewhere. Their big offseason acquisition, Paul George, was supposed to be part of the solution to their problems with and without Embiid. And yet again, he was a mere passenger, just sort of gliding through the game and leaving no imprint on it. George did get to his midrange jumper and hit some pull-up shots in the first half, but he spent much of the first half getting punked by Tobias Harris, or even worse, showing such little interest in defense that Harris strode uncontested toward the basket.

(By the way, one of the worst parts of this performance was that Tobias Harris’ pregame trash talk/shade was validated. That guy stole money for a half-decade and you’re letting him emerge like a sympathetic figure. Pathetic!)

You could argue the depth of the problem was shown by watching the new guy take the floor. Quentin Grimes took the floor and showed a lot of pep in his step on the defensive end, almost immediately breaking up a Pistons possession and showing quick feet all over the floor. Several times, he looked around as if to say, “What the hell are the rest of you doing?” and while I would normally write it off as a communication problem, it felt more like a guy wondering why his new team hadn’t bothered to show up at all.

As a team, this group has been absolutely pathetic on the defensive end for most of 2025, and their transition defense is bottom in the league by no accident. They might be the worst team I have ever seen at defending after they’ve made a shot, which is the best time for defenses almost universally. They make every possible error you can make — they don’t run hard, they don’t communicate, they don’t stop ball, they don’t fill lanes.

They have very little understanding of how deep the problem is. Kyle Lowry couldn’t win a foot race against any player in the league with a 10-foot head start right now, and he spent three seconds after a Sixers make trying to politick with the refs on Detroit’s baseline. With only four Sixers players back, the Pistons rushed down the floor and scored in less than five seconds, canning a corner three as Captain Complaints puttered down the floor on his motorized scooter next to Scott Foster.

Daryl Morey put on an optimistic face at Friday’s press conference, saying that if you squint at this team, you can see the path to victory. Really? I would say that if Embiid is going to get run past by younger, more athletic players in transition during the regular season, he will probably have that happen against better teams with younger and more athletic guys in the playoffs. If you’re blowing assignments and confused about coverages in mid-February, you’re probably not getting to a high enough level to beat a real team by mid-April, even if you back into the playoffs by accident. If George can’t get by anybody now, why would it start happening for him in the games that count?

This was a complete disgrace of a performance. They played with the urgency of a team 40 games over .500 coming off of back-to-back titles. It is, in so many words, unearned arrogance. And it is that mentality that has caused me to question their approach to the season from the moment their plans for Embiid were revealed in the offseason. This is a team that has things to build and prove, treating the regular season as a complete formality. They will get the result that process deserves.

— There are times when I feel great sympathy for Nick Nurse and the clusterfuck of a roster he is asked to lead on a given night. Those times end every time I see Kyle Lowry take the floor, and definitely when they decide to go to a four-guard lineup when you may only have two playable guards in the first place. Trading for Jared Butler just to continue playing a guy who can’t move and can’t shoot is certainly a choice.

— Embiid is lucky that all Kelly Oubre did in response to this was yell at him. Making that jogging motion at him after the stinkbomb of a first half he submitted on defense would have been grounds for just about any reaction from Oubre: