Sixers play defensive disasterclass vs. Bucks, new Joel Embiid injury report interrupts game

The Sixers got beat up and pushed aside by a shorthanded Milwaukee Bucks outfit on Sunday, losing 135-127 on the road despite a pretty good offensive performance. Joel Embiid also became the center of attention once again, after Lisa Salters reported on ESPN’s broadcast that the big man believes he needs another surgery and a long recovery period to get his knee back in proper shape.

Here’s what I saw.

The Good

— Hubie Brown, you are a legend. A shame you had to get dragged down by the Sixers’ nonsense in your final day, but it was a delight listening to you one last time.

— If you take the Pistons game out of the equation, and I am not particularly inclined to, we have been served a giant reminder of how dynamic the Joel Embiid/Tyrese Maxey combination is over the last week. These two are blinding offensive talents who are a hand-in-glove fit together, and when they have it rolling, it is borderline impossible to stop them.

Embiid, whose disappointing Pistons performance stoked anger around the city, came out with a much more acceptable mentality on Sunday. The team had him playing out high on defense to help trap Damian Lillard, and with the big man moving around quite a bit, he settled into a shooter’s rhythm before the Bucks knew what hit them. He has not played enough games to have a “gets hot from three” type of game this season, but Embiid was guns blazing against Milwaukee, racing out to a quick 15 out the chute by hitting three different first-quarter threes.

After that, he bunkered down and started working out of his office from the elbows and the post, with the Sixers doing a good job to force the Bucks off of their preferred matchup of Brook Lopez vs. Embiid. When Milwaukee ended up needing to guard him temporarily with the likes of Taurean Prince or Kyle Kuzma, Embiid punished any crowding, reaching, or overzealous defense they attempted to play, marching to the line 10 times in the first half alone. They had no good answers, leading to a cool 24 points and eight rebounds by the time the buzzer went off at halftime.

Not to be outdone, Maxey beat him to the higher total with 26 points of his own in the first half, and he was just a lightning bolt through the teeth of Milwaukee’s defense. His pace has been a more reliable weapon in transition than the halfcourt for stretches of this year, but Maxey darted in and out of the Bucks’ paint at will, thriving with Giannis on the sidelines and unable to help as a weakside rim protector. Lopez has long been one of the league’s top rim defenders, even if he has slowed down over the last year or two, and Maxey rendered most of his help meaningless.

Even though Embiid isn’t a ballhandler who can take point guard duties from Embiid, his presence on the floor allows Maxey to have more time to move without the ball and hunt shots as a catch-and-shoot threat. That’s where he can bank some early makes and build a bit of momentum from deep, and he did exactly that against Milwaukee. It’s even better that he can do so in actions directly involving Embiid, screaming around dribble handoffs to step into an open three.

Didn’t ultimately mean much, since it slowed down after halftime, but hey, it was fun to watch for a bit!

— I am very in on Quentin Grimes as a long-term role player, whether he goes through the usual “new Sixers player shooting slump” or not. He has the right instincts for an off-ball player, more of an old school two guard who attacks with quick bursts and otherwise moves to the most favorable spot he can. He’s also one of the few guys moving with any real purpose on defense right now, though I suppose they may eventually beat that out of him.

The Bad

— The Sixers played a spectacular offensive half to open Sunday’s game and ended up down by two points to a Bucks team missing Giannis. Philadelphia’s defensive crimes have been perhaps the biggest story of their last month of basketball, at least if you ignore the usual injury-related nonsense we must deal with daily.

It’s one thing after another, a different failure from one game to the next. When they have the personnel available, we call it a chemistry problem. When they don’t have guys available, we chalk it up to the limitations of those who are left. Eventually, you just aren’t very good, aren’t very smart, or perhaps you are both. They don’t have good/successful gadget looks, either, with Nurse’s box-and-one emerging several times a game to muted results.

I will spotlight one person I have some beef with though: Paul George. A lot of people watching this game, including ESPN’s halftime crew, keyed in on what George wasn’t doing on offense. When Embiid and Maxey are burning the nets down, I simply don’t care if he isn’t shooting and scoring much. What they need from him in that scenario is to step up to the challenge in a bigger way on defense, instead of choosing to blend into the background. But that latter part seems to be all George is interested in doing.

As Damian Lillard began to get it going in the second half, the situation was crying out for a player like George to spend the bulk of his energy chasing around Lillard. Is his best perimeter matchup against Lillard? No, but he serves more of a purpose trying to make Lillard work than he does hanging out with Kyle Kuzma in the corner while Lillard attacks rookie Justin Edwards. Edwards did his best and competed hard, but he was drawing dead, and the typical rookie mistakes you see guys in his spot make were punished by a longtime master of the craft.

If you are going to blend into the offense to help facilitate things for the top guys, cool, I’m down with that. But the bar is then going to be much higher on the other end of the floor. I’m not here to count George’s money for the next four years, but that contract requires you to take some “ownership” of the team and the situation. Try to make something happen rather than acting as if you are just along for the ride. Clippers media and fans warned of this habit before George signed here, and having that warning doesn’t make it any less infuriating to watch.

Anyway, George isn’t the only culprit here. Embiid has improved some of their at-rim defense, but his reluctance to get out to the perimeter to contest a three is a killer with how the league works today. Tyrese Maxey is having a good defensive season relative to his past, but he had some space cadet moments away from the play in this one. Kelly Oubre spent much of this game getting absolutely smoked on the perimeter, with the Bucks settling into an effective drive-and-kick game with minimal drivers to speak of.

Here’s the underlying reality — I don’t see a group that is prepared to scratch and claw and battle hard enough to pull this season out of the fire. The question is not so much about how the year ends, but whether they try to salvage something out of it that may help them in the long term. While we’re on the subject…

The Ugly

— In the middle of what should have been a fairly normal broadcast sending off the legend Hubie Brown, ESPN reporter Lisa Salters dropped a bomb regarding Joel Embiid’s health. Nothing is normal around here, obviously.

As Salters discussed Embiid’s troublesome knee and the process of trying to get ready to play, she noted what Daryl Morey said in Friday’s press conference, that this is eventually a problem that should subside and become more manageable. That has been the company line for most of this year. Except Salters followed that up with a line we will debate around here for a while, that Embiid believes, “It will likely take another surgery and a long recovery period.”

If that is accurate, I cannot properly express how colossal of a failure it would be on about six different fronts. Most notably, it would be a complete failure in how they are handling the rest of this season. With your pick in jeopardy, contention odds slim to none, and a clear case to shut Embiid down to allow him to have surgery, their choice is and has been to just keep pushing him out there and pretending that nothing is wrong. It would be the most obvious time to shut him down since he has entered the league. Play the young guys, sit the vets, and pray you can save your pick and add a high-upside young player in the draft.

It’s such a mystifying gap in what they’ve said publicly vs. what this report would mean that it seemed there had to be a gap in communication here. But as of this writing, there has been no follow-up from the team, no walking back of the report from ESPN, and a whole lot of panic in Philadelphia. Things are fine!

The Sixers don’t need to be lying here for things to be bad, mind you. If there is a pronounced disconnect between what the player thinks would be good for his health and what the team thinks is required for him to get back in his best possible shape, that is the start of what could ultimately end up being “the final battle” on Embiid’s health. You need look no further than Kawhi Leonard’s final year in San Antonio for an example of what happens when there is a divide of that nature between a player and the organization. Plenty of people around Philadelphia are prepared for the Sixers’ next life without Embiid, but if you end up in a situation where he is still viewed as a severe injury risk and he wants out because of a medical disconnect, you are in big trouble.

So we’ll have to wait and let this one play out because this is a monumental problem if Salters’ reporting is accurate (and I have never known her to be anything but a professional, no-nonsense reporter).

— I have never watched a team worse at playing defense after made shots than this season’s Sixers. They constantly turn the situation you want to be in as a defense into a complete adventure, and we are far too deep in the season for it to be this hopeless. Playing poor transition defense on misses and turnovers is hard enough to overcome.

At the end of one of their best offensive quarters of the year, a two-man demolition from Maxey and Embiid, Maxey canned a pair of free throws to push the lead to 39-38. And right as Maxey sank the second free throw, the Bucks were already getting down the floor to exploit Philly’s disconnected transition defense, forcing a deflection out of bounds to set up a last-second play. Moments later, Kyle Kuzma got the ball for two points to close it out, and the advantage tilted back to the Bucks.

Too many moments like these all season.

— The Milwaukee Bucks are not a good offensive-rebounding team without Giannis, in part because they don’t put a premium on chasing after them. They absolutely destroyed the Sixers on the offensive glass. They had 14 second-chance opportunities with nine minutes left in the third quarter. I think they might have had six offensive rebounds on a single possession in this game. Horrendous.