Sixers blown out by Cavs in headless chicken performance

The Sixers got thrown in a trash compactor by the Cavs with Joel Embiid in street clothes, losing 126-99 to a team that is miles ahead of them in coherence and the NBA’s Eastern Conference standings.

Here’s what I saw.

The Good

— Tyrese Maxey managed to hide a lot of other nonsense in this game for about 2.5 quarters. That is the beauty of star power and, frankly, high-volume shooting from beyond the three-point line. If you can get a guy cooking from deep, you can overcome a lot of mistakes and problems created by others.

It didn’t take long for Maxey to find the bottom of the net in this one. He had eight straight points to open it and had a drive to the basket that probably should have returned another two points during the same stretch, with a late Jarrett Allen rotation seemingly spooking him out of a better shot attempt. But the early threes were a much bigger deal for a player who has run hot and cold from deep most of this season.

Unfortunately, Maxey was a nice deck chair on the Titanic that was this Sixers performance.

— Jeff Dowtin in his fourth-quarter cameo, as described by one of the great actors of my lifetime:

The Bad

— To my eye, the Sixers were the far superior team in the first quarter. Tyrese Maxey came out firing, giving Philadelphia the offensive kickstart they needed to hang with an elite Cavs team.

But most of that early success was undone with what can only be described as idiotic decision-making. Philadelphia had six turnovers after the first quarter and pushed that number to 10 by halftime, and many of those were self-inflicted wounds rather than a product of anything the Cavs did on defense. Rarely have the Sixers shown such a complete misunderstanding of who they are as players.

A few egregious giveaways that come to mind from the first half:

• Andre Drummond nearly rescued an outlet from Kelly Oubre that was thrown over 3/4 of the court, an outrageous mistake in the “KYP” department
• Caleb Martin drove through traffic and into three defenders before giving the ball away to Cleveland
• Paul George failed to post a smaller player up around the elbow before throwing a pass toward his own backcourt that the Cavs took for an uncontested bucket

Those were not the extent of the braindead plays, either. The Sixers lucked into a bucket from KJ Martin at the end of a possession where Kyle Lowry spent the first 16 seconds of the shot clock fumbling the ball. This was a team absolutely starved for creation, and asking role players to scale up went as poorly as it has for most of this season.

This was a competitive game for around the first quarter and a half, and then the game completely got away from Philly as the Cavs turned the confidence earned from transition buckets into a blistering shooting performance. That’s how thin the margin for error is against elite-level teams – they can turn a little bit of momentum into an avalanche, and by the time the halftime buzzer sounded, it was a double-digit deficit that was spiraling out of control.

I was struck during this game by how much the Sixers seemed to miss Jared McCain specifically. Obviously, he had a monster game against Cleveland earlier this season, but even if you set that aside, the reliance on guys like Kyle Lowry and Eric Gordon for secondary creation made it clear how much they miss another guy who can get to his spots and either get a quality look or find one for a teammate.

Give the Cavs credit for their ability to force turnovers and play punishing transition offense. It felt like Cleveland capitalized on every mistake the Sixers made, which is a credit to the quality of basketball they’ve played this season. That said, the Sixers served them up too many easy run-outs, and they were powerless to stop the home team once they got up and running.

— I was bewildered by whatever the offensive approach was supposed to be in this game. Philadelphia’s offensive process has been pretty bad and structureless for most of the year, but it was even more apparent against a team with good discipline and at least a couple of high-level defensive players. You need to make Cleveland feel uncomfortable and try to stretch them out, and I’m not sure I can say an attempt was made.

There was a criminal lack of movement (player or ball) throughout this game, with the game devolving into something like a “my turn, your turn” offense. Everyone on the team got a chance to try to attack against a Cavs defender from a standstill — it didn’t matter if you were Tyrese Maxey, Ricky Council IV, or Jeff Dowtin, you were going to get a chance on the iso merry-go-round.

If I were to give Nurse an out, some of this comes down to how Paul George goes about hunting his offense. The steady diet of contested pull-up jumpers is fine when he’s cooking and making basketball look effortless, but it’s hard to justify when he’s shooting tour dates. I can understand that he’s not going to make a living at the rim at 34 years old while the Cavs are playing the Allen/Mobley combo that makes life hell around the basket, but that means you have to try to manufacture something to neutralize Cleveland’s advantages. Instead, we were treated to a ton of iso ball from George and the rest of the gang.

(George, by the way, has been able to skate by on middling-or-worse offensive performances as a result of what he has contributed as a defender, rebounder, and connector. But this was a night when they desperately needed him to be a co-lead, and he appeared unable to generate much leverage as a ballhandler. Rough stuff.)

We are almost at Christmas, and the Sixers are still trying to figure out a night-to-night plan on offense. It’s within reason to say that Joel Embiid’s lingering absence hasn’t helped team synergy, but they’ve had more than enough time to develop some counters and cohesion for the non-Embiid minutes/games. It is criminal to be this deep into the season with such a hopeless offense. It should not be up to Embiid to singlehandedly try to make them a respectable, coherent-looking NBA offense.

— The Sixers’ bigs in this game were an absolute atrocity, and I suppose you could forgive them given the talent discrepancy.

Andre Drummond somehow ended up on the wrong end of two separate highlights, with Donovan Mitchell crossing him into oblivion a quarter before Evan Mobley rolled down the lane and punched one on his head.

Certainly not going to fault him for trying to make plays, but he was bad.

Elsewhere on the roster, Guerschon Yabusele has had a nice season as a small-ball five in fill-in duty, helping to solve some bench issues while dealing with injuries to their stars. But this is a matchup that is tailormade to punish his weaknesses on the defensive end as a center, and Cleveland picked them apart for a lot of the Yabusele solo big minutes. They dragged him away from the rim repeatedly and then drove into acres of space, turning into a three-point factory with little effort required.

The Ugly

— I mean, you watched the game, I presume?

— Obligatory Tony Brothers note. He didn’t do anything wrong for once, but old grudges die hard.