Sixers sleepwalk through blowout loss to Pacers

The Sixers never got out of first gear in a miserable loss to the Pacers, dropping the first game of their road trip by a 134-122 margin.

Here’s what I saw.

The Good

— The game ended.

— Terquavion Smith and Ricky Council IV got to play extended minutes, so for a sicko like me, that made watching the fourth quarter worth it. Okay, maybe not worth it, but you get what I mean.

Council IV was the brighter standout by a comfortable margin, leaning into defenders with his prototype size and athleticism to draw contact around the basket. He managed to earn six free throws in a single quarter of action, which is tough even for the highly-polished guys in the league. More importantly, Council actually managed to hit a tightly contested three midway through the fourth, which is the biggest question mark for his game by far. One make in a random blowout is not going to change any minds, but he’s got the makings of an NBA wing if that shot ever comes, so any positive stretches from deep are a big deal.

Smith had a much tougher time of it, skunked from the field completely while throwing up a couple of airballs on deep pull-ups. But he showed better craft in the pick-and-roll than he has any right to at this stage of his career. He put pocket pass after pocket pass on the money as he probed the defense, and though Paul Reed got ripped on a couple of those, Smith had done his job as the point guard before that failure.

The Bad

— This was a frustrating game to watch for a variety of reasons, but predominantly because the Sixers looked like a team unprepared for who they were going to face. And that should be damn near impossible — they’ve played the Pacers twice, obviously, but Indiana also may have the most distinct and well-known style in the league. You’d have to actively ignore the NBA to walk into a game with the Pacers and feel surprised that they’re going to play fast and shoot lots of threes.

Going into halftime trailing because of the margin at the three-point line is one thing, and you could make the claim that “make or miss league” is all we saw in the first half. But you’d have to ignore that multiple Pacers players ran down the middle of the floor to score easily after Sixers buckets, with Philly barely in the picture as their opponent coasted in for layups and dunks. And it wasn’t like this was a problem that popped up after halftime when we could have assumed they had tired legs from being shorthanded. This was an issue from the first quarter onward, with the Sixers apparently deciding they’d lock into the game somewhere around halftime.

The transition defense was miserable, and you could argue the half-court version was worse. Philadelphia’s perimeter defenders were basically non-existent, putting Joel Embiid in a lot of two-on-ones around the hoop. While the big man wasn’t at his sharpest defending the basket, he was put in horrible positions over and over again, only sometimes coming up with the right stuff. Once you got away from him, it was much uglier. KYP was not followed in any meaningful way, nor was the idea that you needed to do more than move once on a given possession. It’s bad enough to concede a single wide-open three to Buddy Hield above the break because you didn’t rotate to him, and they managed it twice in a single half.

Look at the photo up top of Maxey reaching as he’s in the process of getting blown by. That’s a good summary of their overall defensive commitment on Thursday.

— Any guesses who might have been at fault for some of those miscues?

I just don’t have a clue what Kelly Oubre is doing on half or more of his possessions lately. He missed a layup by about four feet in the first half, but at least that one might have been tipped to give him an excuse. Asking him to pay attention for longer than seven seconds at a time was apparently asking for too much on both ends of the floor. Early in the third quarter, he made a cut to get to the paint, was ostensibly in a position to receive the entry pass, and then was somehow surprised when a pass came in his direction. How does that even happen?

Oubre is such a mechanical passer that he got the ball from Embiid in a handoff, watched his defender float in front of Embiid for a soft double, and then still threw it to Embiid instead of reading the floor. For a guy who has never seen a shot opportunity he doesn’t like, his ability to suss one out sure needs work.

He has been insanely frustrating to watch for weeks, and they need the team to get healthy so that he isn’t a nailed-on, high-minute player by default every night.

— I have lamented Philadelphia’s lack of shot creation when they’ve struggled against good competition this year, and to be fair to these guys, they were missing Tobias Harris for this one. Take the third most important player off of any team, and odds are they’re going to have some offensive struggles.

That being said, it was jarring to see how little the Pacers cared about defending anyone outside of the Embiid/Maxey duo. When Embiid hit the bench for the first time to open the second quarter, the Pacers flat-out ignored most of the guys who shared the floor with Maxey. On one possession during that run, they actually brought a trap out past halfcourt to get the ball out of Maxey’s hands, and the point guard promptly threw it out of bounds as his teammates struggled to react in time.

(Maxey buried himself with a horrible pass there, but he certainly doesn’t own all of the blame for it. Being completely unprepared to respond to a trap at halfcourt reflects poorly on the rest of the group, too.)

Harris means more than we give him credit for, but I still think the Sixers need another ballhandler regardless. Having to rely on Patrick Beverley for real minutes is fine in the regular season, and De’Anthony Melton will presumably be healthy at some point, but they could use someone with real juice off the bounce to balance the rotation.

— Philadelphia’s rebounding in this game bordered on parody as the game got out of hand in the third quarter, with the Sixers offering just about zero in the “give a shit” department. This was the number one area that I’d crush Embiid for specifically, as he reached a point where he knew this game was gone and wasn’t going to exert himself to chase it. On one play in the back half of the third, he stood flat-footed as a rebound opportunity dropped damn near to his hip level, and never came up with it as Indiana picked it up and scored second-chance points off of it.

Not singling him out here by any stretch of the imagination. Furkan Korkmaz gave up a rebound where he ducked as someone came and got it over top of him. Hilarious stuff.

The Ugly

— You guys watched the game, correct?

— You know what this boring and overly long game really needed? More replay reviews to extend it. Give me even more tedium.