Joel Embiid delivers in primetime Sixers win over Nuggets

Joel Embiid served the Denver Nuggets a classic performance for the second year in a row, scoring 41 points and adding 10 assists to lead the Sixers to a 126-121 win on national TV.

Here’s what I saw.

The Good

— You had to know Joel Embiid was going to be revved up for this one, given the magnitude of the individual and team matchups. And I thought you felt that a bit too much early in the game, with Embiid forcing up a few hero-ball shots that could have been shared with teammates. He ignored Nic Batum in the corner with Jokic maybe 20 feet away from the sharpshooting forward, which stood out as the worst miss.

But, well, there’s a reason this guy has the green light and acceptance from his team to play hero ball. He is an absolutely ridiculous shotmaker and has somehow turned himself into one of the all-time great scorers after only picking up the game as a teenager. It doesn’t get any less wild as time goes on.

The Nuggets certainly tried a lot of different things to try to slow him down. He victimized Nikola Jokic early, going on a run of seven-straight points in the first quarter, and Denver quickly pivoted to Aaron Gordon on Embiid. Gordon had his moments, but there were limitations to that matchup in plain sight — Embiid could basically shoot over him whenever he wanted, and though Gordon is burly, he is not strong enough to stop Embiid from getting where he wanted to go.

Perhaps the most encouraging piece was Embiid’s handling of double teams. As single coverage became borderline impossible to get away with for Denver, Embiid had basically anybody on him as the first defender, including guys like Kentavious Caldwell-Pope. The Nuggets were sending a second or third guy automatically out of those looks, and Embiid did a superb job of resetting when necessary, hitting a timely skip pass, or just making the easy one to Tyrese Maxey when Denver screwed up their rotations.

(Speaking of, what the hell was Denver doing doubling one pass away with no rotation to Maxey? Certainly a choice!)

There was everything to play for when Embiid and Jokic came back in with 7:28 to play, following a made Marcus Morris free-throw to tie it up. And with the game on the line, just like last season, it was Embiid who reigned supreme in the battle of the bigs. He hit an and-one jumper from the midrange with Aaron Gordon reaching in, leading to a classic DX chop…

…and followed that up 40 seconds later with a monster three over Jokic’s outstretched arm. If the game had a signature sequence or moment, it felt like that was it.

Two years in a row of busting Denver’s ass on national TV. Wonder what would happen if he played anybody good, I guess we’ll never know.

— Tyrese Maxey being able to not just meet but exceed Jamal Murray in a shotmaking contest would have seemed like an impossible outcome during his rookie year. And with the form he was in shooting the basketball in December, it would have seemed impossible even a week or two ago, even if he was making up for it elsewhere.

But after a great game against the Rockets, the Sixers got him going very early in the second half of their back-to-back. Empty side pick-and-roll, which was a money play for Philadelphia early in the season, reemerged early against Denver. The Sixers kept spamming the Maxey/Embiid two-man game in the first half, and with the Nuggets hoping they could stop or slow down the big guy, Maxey was able to prey on some openings in Denver’s defense early.

The Nuggets also didn’t pay Maxey the proper amount of respect in the first half — Kentavious Caldwell-Pope went under a screen on a ball screen set for Maxey, and No. 0 stared that action down with disgust before canning a pull-up three. Jamal Murray blew a rotation late in the half that should have saw him picking up Maxey, which led to another wide-open three for Maxey that he promptly dropped.

While Maxey’s shooting on stepback jumpers may be volatile, there is no circumstance in which you should be just conceding space to him. He is too damn good and too damn deadly from deep, and once he made that clear to Denver, he started pasting them with blow-bys to the rim and up-tempo pushes in transition.

While he would fade a bit in the second half, it was more a result of Embiid taking over than anything else.

— This is several orders of magnitude more difficult than Nic Batum made it look:

I would argue he should get at least half of the assist Joel Embiid got credited for on the pass. The footwork and release combo here is outrageous.

Batum didn’t have the loudest game in the world from a stat perspective, but he felt like one of the most important players of this game for the volume of hustle plays and 50-50 balls that he either outright won or prevented Denver from getting to. On multiple occasions, Batum earned ovations from the home crowd for flying into the picture and disrupting a Nuggets play, and he deserved every bit of the love. Tremendous player.

— Tobias Harris had an up-and-down game, but goddamn, he might have saved the whole evening with his stretch from the start of the fourth quarter until Embiid rejoined the lineup. Christian Braun tried to match him step for step in the mid-post and he just had no chance, with Harris hitting tough jumper after tough jumper from the midrange to keep the game from slipping away.

They do not win this game without that stretch.

The Bad

— To open the game, the Sixers went to a defensive strategy that served them well under a different coach (and with a different roster). Rather than using Joel Embiid as the primary defender on Nikola Jokic, the Sixers rotated between Tobias Harris and Nic Batum as the primary defender. Joel Embiid, who spent that time sagging off of Aaron Gordon on the perimeter so he could roam toward Jokic and protect the paint.

It’s a strategy I generally endorse, though I’m not sure the Sixers could have done a worse job of playing it for the first 1.5 quarters of this game. Off-ball rotations and attentiveness were basically non-existent, and that applies to every guy on the floor, Joel Embiid included. Embiid has been excellent to downright dominant in that roamer spot in the past, but he struggled to keep track of Gordon, allowing him to slip in for some easy buckets at the hoop (not to mention some avoidable free throws). The Sixers were shooting the absolute hell out of the ball and never created separation, in large part due to this.

Give the Nuggets their credit for this: I thought they did an excellent job of engineering switches in the second half as the Sixers tried to stay in that roaming strategy. Jokic came alive as a scorer because he was able to draw Maxey and Beverley on his hip over and over again, and with the little guys flailing around trying their best, he just hit easy touch shots from 12 feet and in to push Denver back in front.

But that was not the most annoying defensive subplot of the night…

— Philadelphia’s defensive rebound was downright atrocious, across the board and for most of 48 minutes. Again, give Jokic his share of the credit for being an absolute bear down there, because he had great positioning and timing to come up with some putback attempts. It’s one thing for a big man, a great one at that, to leverage his gifts there.

They probably win this game going away with an even mediocre game on the glass. But they allowed too many long rebounds, too many uncontested glass crashes, and too many Nuggets players to slide into better positions without trying to box out or even jump for a rebound. Not sure where the effort has gone here, because they were a strong rebounding group to open the year.

— I do not need to see Kelly Oubre hero ball or early shot-clock threes against an opponent of this magnitude. Or in general, but definitely not in a game where it’s a possession-by-possession battle.

Stretches like the one he had late in the third are why he wore out his welcome at previous stops and ended up being a minimum-contract guy with no guarantee of playing time. He had made some solid contributions in the first half, and then began the sequence that allowed Denver to roar out in front to end the third because he had no interest in passing. The missed catch-and-shoot threes hurt, but they’re shots you’ll live with. Killing the flow of the game without having the results to match is unacceptable.

— You really felt the weight of Philadelphia’s shorthanded lineup and the back-to-back as this game wore on. With Nick Nurse needing to buy guys some moments of rest, he had to turn to the likes of Furkan Korkmaz to get through this game. That is, in the kindest way possible, not where you want to find yourself in a game that matters.

De’Anthony Melton’s back injury is going to be something we have to monitor for a bit, I’d imagine, so the Sixers need to figure out both a short and intermediate plan to cope without him. Trades are (likely) coming, but they are leaning a bit too hard on the likes of Patrick Beverley at the moment. And Pat Bev has been pretty good.

The Ugly

— The officiating in this game caught a lot of grief on social media whenever I checked in during timeouts, and I can’t say I agree with how it was characterized.

It was a weirdly officiated game in some ways — there was a lot of contact that they let go around the rim on drives and rebounds, which I think came out in the wash. Embiid probably avoided a couple of different foul calls defending Jokic near the basket, and Jokic got away with some pushing and shoving for offensive rebounds on multiple occasions. I am all for letting the big dudes throw their weight around. But they got a lot more finicky away from the basket, calling touch and phantom fouls