Sixers drop to 3-13 following humiliating Clippers beatdown

The Sixers got beaten up on both ends of the floor in a dispiriting, hard-to-watch loss to the Clippers. It ended with a 125-99 final score, but that sugarcoats the staggering levels of ineptitude that everyone who attended the game bore witness to.

Here’s what I saw. Go Birds.

The Good

— The game ended.

— The Spectrum jerseys are really nice and the pre-game presentation, featuring Parliament Funkadelic, was great.

Also, Sugarhill Gang performed at halftime, so that was cool.

— CHICKEN NUGGETS, BABY!

The Bad

— The Clippers came into this game with a bottom-six offense and one real creator (albeit a great one!) available to play. The Sixers spent the first quarter making them look like the 2015-16 Warriors. Really impressive stuff, and by impressive I mean disgusting, embarrassing, and whatnot.

Any number of things can and did go wrong in the first half. The first was a personnel issue — as big of an advocate as I am for Guerschon Yabusele this year, starting him head-to-head with Ivica Zubac is putting him in close to a no-win situation. Zubac was eating well to start this game, crushing the Sixers on the offensive glass to the tune of 10 points and nine rebounds before the half was over. Hard to expect a much smaller player to ward off Zubac, who has been a handful for most teams all season long.

But that was only the start of their problems. Having Andre Drummond on the floor might have helped a bit with defense and rim protection, but the Sixers’ first line of defense was so bad that you would have needed Ben Wallace at the rim to stop the Clippers from scoring. And it wasn’t an issue you could pin on the small backcourt of Tyrese Maxey and Jared McCain, with Philadelphia’s wings just as guilty of getting wiped out by screens or overpursuing as their man blew past them.

The thing that might be most frustrating at this point in the season is that they have nonexistent cohesion as a group. These role players have been put in a difficult spot this year, forced to constantly adjust to new lineups and new combinations with the stars in and out of the picture. But that’s not a catch-all excuse for poor handoffs on switches, communication breakdowns in coverage, or never attempting to get to a spot as the ball swings around the perimeter.

This group has plenty of decent or better defenders in theory, and they’re much further ahead on that end compared to the offense. But there needs to be a level of purpose and commitment there that I haven’t seen — someone should remind these guys they are 3-13. They spent Sunday evening putting minimal pressure on the ball, and the Clippers were happy to ram it down their throats accordingly.

— The deeper we get into this season, the more concerned I am about Philadelphia’s offense. The results are downright atrocious, obviously, but the process of getting into their offense is just as concerning. There is limited creativity on display, and that is where I will crush Nick Nurse for the most.

(Before we go any further, I want to offer a reminder: people view Nurse as a “defensive guy” after his run in Toronto, but forget that he came to the Raptors in the first place as an offensive-minded coach who was the coordinator on that end for Dwane Casey. No one should be settling for this being the best he has to offer because if they are, that doesn’t say much about his ability to run the team.)

It is not necessarily a bad thing for the coach of a talented, star-driven team to run a “vanilla” offense, because that allows for your talent to freewheel and play off of one another in interesting ways. Under Doc Rivers, the Sixers mostly ran James Harden/Joel Embiid pick-and-roll with consistent spacing around it. But the group that has been most frequently available is not talented enough offensively to run something like a Maxey/Yabusele handoff on one side of the floor with the other three players just floating around on the second side. There needs to be a purpose for the guys operating off-ball — either get them into some helpful spacing positions, use them as screeners, or try to tap into relocation shooting and cutting toward the basket.

The easy thing to do here would be to pummel the young guards for how their limitations inform the way they set up on offense. And I do think there’s a little bit of that here, because we saw this play out with Tyrese Maxey during the second half of last season. His decision-making still isn’t quick enough when he has to create the space for himself rather than playing off of Joel Embiid’s gravity. But that being said, that’s something that should be abundantly clear to the coach, who needs to design actions to help him out, whether he’s operating on or off the ball.

If the argument is that the Sixers want to keep the plan the same no matter who’s playing, I think that’s a bad argument. Here’s my reasoning: you’re 3-13, and the attempt at creating some continuity through consistency (even if it’s bad consistency) has produced disgusting results. Go back to the drawing board and figure it out.

— Derek and I were talking on press row during the game about some of the horrid lineups that were being put on the floor, and while I won’t absolve Nurse for all of them, it does reflect on the roster more than the coach when you look up and think to yourself, “This lineup sucks!” about 40 percent of the time.

It may have been a running joke on the podcast over the summer, but it’s remarkable that the Sixers end up in lineups with 2-3 small guards on the floor at a time and don’t gain enough shooting or ballhandling to even try to turn a game into a shootout. The compromises they have to make on one end of the floor or another are not creating the leverage to continue with them. When they bring in shooters, they get pasted on defense and the glass. When they play the Martins with Oubre, they build a house of bricks. It’s always something.

While we’re on the subject, and stop me if you’ve heard this before, the Sixers shot the ball like crap while the opponent built an early lead by making open jumpers. That’s basically the story of the season so far.

— Caleb Martin showed up to pre-game warmups with a ton of tape on his shooting shoulder, and he’s certainly shooting the ball like a guy who has an issue in that arm. He has been borderline unplayable on offense for a lot of this season. If not for the fact that he has been their best perimeter defender, they’d probably be justified in sitting him for a couple of games even if just to give him a break to rest.

The Ugly

— The sentence “Tony Brothers is a domestic terrorist” has probably been printed in this space 5-10 times, and it gets truer each time it is repeated. I don’t have a clue how or why he upheld the Tyrese Maxey foul that earned James Harden three free throws, but I don’t understand half of all fouls he calls.

— I don’t care that it lasted 1:42 of action or that it only ended up being a -1 during that period, there is no reason a lineup of Reggie Jackson/Eric Gordon/Caleb Martin/Caleb Martin/Guerschon Yabusele should ever be on the floor. Staggering your two best available players to make one available at all times is not difficult, even with Maxey on a minute restriction. And it wasn’t the last time they’d throw a lineup on the floor that excluded Maxey and McCain — we got treated to that again in the third quarter as the Clippers ran the lead up to 30+ points.

Take the low-hanging fruit, please, and thanks.

— As the arena cleared out and we sat through the extended garbage time that was the fourth quarter, there were a few “Fire Nick Nurse!” yells from the section behind our media seats. Needless to say, the people are displeased with what they’re seeing right now.