Sixers hold off Heat behind 30 & 10 from Tyrese Maxey

Tyrese Maxey had 30 points, eight rebounds, and 10 assists to lead Philadelphia to a 98-91 win over the Miami Heat, a critical win for the Sixers as they battle for Eastern Conference playoff positioning.

Here’s what I saw.

The Good

— Tyrese Maxey’s favorite thing to say about Joel Embiid has become part of a typical media scrum with him: “Joel Embiid is good at basketball.” Allow me to return the same compliment to No. 0, who came into this game with the perfect amount of aggression to power his team to an early lead.

There has been some debate about whether Maxey is doing a good enough job to get others going with Embiid on the shelf. It’s fair enough to evaluate him as you would any other point guard, but it sort of misses the point and the value he brings as a player. With Kyle Lowry in the staring lineup alongside him, Maxey has been freed up to play more like the combo guard that he is. There have been more opportunities to attack teams as a catch-and-shoot player, and more plays where he can blow by a closeout and get to the rim. Aggressive, downhill Maxey is and has always been the best version of Maxey, and he exploded early in this game by ignoring the rest of the group to get rolling.

One interesting thing to note as we get closer to the playoffs — Maxey had the midrange working against Miami in the first half, and there has been a more focused effort from him to attack those floor spots recently. His percentages have lagged from there, but with more time and reps, his natural scoring touch has taken over, and Maxey built a head of steam with baseline jumpers.

He was fighting it like the rest of them down the stretch, but when you come up with 30 points, eight rebounds, and 10 assists, it’s hard to find much to complain about.

— Over the last week or so, the Sixers have shown that they are plenty capable of defending if they’re dialed in. For about a month, they looked like a team completely incapable of stringing stops together. And I know that this version of the Heat is not exactly an offensive juggernaut, but the process matters to me much more than the results.

I do think Kyle Lowry has made a significant difference at times, despite not being much of a one-on-one defender anymore. Simply getting to the right spot and keeping the chain of rotations alive is critical to modern NBA defense, and Lowry has been one of their most consistent guys in that department. His timing as the low man on pick-and-rolls has been close to immaculate, which is not surprising if you’ve watched his career even a little bit.

He certainly isn’t the only guy pulling his weight. Maxey has stepped up in a big way lately, disrupting the opponent more often while battling like hell to close out effectively. Mo Bamba offered good rim protection in this game, much to his credit. Even Buddy Hield, oft-maligned as a traffic cone on that end, has put in some good shifts lately.

A reminder to myself to not let them off the hook when they mail it in on a night in the coming weeks. They’re capable of very good effort and execution, and that’s what it will require to win without Embiid.

— Kelly Oubre has had an excellent few days at the office, stepping into the No. 2 scoring role alongside Tyrese Maxey without missing a beat. Even when he has gone through some shooting slumps during the last couple of games, the process has been excellent, and Oubre has managed to increase his scoring volume while mostly playing within the framework of the offense.

Cutting has not been a strength of many Sixers players during the Joel Embiid era, but Oubre has been able to make a big difference for Philly there from basically the moment he hit the floor here. Opportunities have been harder to come by without Embiid drawing doubles in the middle of the floor, but he has a knack for timing his movement toward the rim, sneaking behind defenders for layups and dunks before they know what hit them.

It has helped to find a bit of synergy with the different lineup combinations he’s in. The Sixers remain banged up, but they’ve had most of the same guys injured for this stretch, so Oubre and Cam Payne (as an example) have started to develop an understanding.

But Oubre is getting things done all by himself, too. On a roster with little creative juice to speak of, his slashing ability has been a requirement, rather than the nice bonus it was early this year. Oubre had his issues in this game, mostly when he had to be a solo act with Maxey on the bench, but a good outing overall.

— I tweeted this midgame:

The only thing I really meant by it is that Lowry is too important for the Sixers to potentially lose him to injury from diving into the scorer’s table to beat the Heat. At the end of the day, Lowry’s desire to go and get this game at all costs was a huge driver of this win.

It helped that he actively looked to attack throughout the game, something I’ve wanted to see from him during some recent quiet games on offense. It wasn’t always pretty, but Lowry came up with one of the biggest buckets of the game in crunch time, hitting a tough layup in traffic in the final minutes.

Let it fly, fellow Kyle!

— As one of the more vocal critics of Mo Bamba on the beat, I have to give him his credit for a stellar outing against the Heat. Small-ball lineups were tried without much success in this game, so Philadelphia needed to get some value out of their bigs in this game. Bamba hit a couple of threes, played good rim defense without fouling, and even came up with a great assist as a short-roll passer during a big third-quarter run.

The Bad

— It is hard to overstate how off the rails the first seven-ish minutes of the fourth quarter were for Philadelphia. With Maxey on the bench, the Sixers needed to simply tread water until their star guard returned to the floor. They did nothing of the sort, with Miami storming back to turn this into a tight game down the stretch.

Credit to the Heat for their typical zombie-mode tactics, with Erik Spoelstra doing whatever it took to junk up the game. After sitting in zone for a lot of the game (as is tradition), the Heat hit Philly with some full-court pressure to tilt the game, and that turned out to be an excellent plan. The Sixers had back-to-back turnovers in the middle of Miami’s run as a result of the pressure, and it nearly got worse, with the Heat mad they didn’t force an eight-second violation on the next possession.

If I was going to criticize Nick Nurse for anything in this game, I probably would have bit the bullet and called an earlier timeout during that run, rather than assuming the Sixers were going to figure it out. They needed to get one of their better decision-makers on the floor sooner rather than later, and by the time Maxey and Lowry were back in the game, it had already devolved into complete anarchy.

— Coming into this one, I was a proponent of using small-ball lineups throughout the evening against Miami. The logic: Miami plays more zone than any team in the league, and putting Nic Batum in the middle of the zone as a nominal center makes more sense than having Mo Bamba or Paul Reed playmaking from that spot.

Unfortunately, their small-ball play was…well, bad.

The Ugly

— It’s your obligatory “I’m really not trying to make everything about Tobias Harris” disclaimer of the night. Got it? Good.

It is really hard to ignore how the Sixers play stylistically with him vs. without him. Without Harris, there is a better tempo, more ball movement, and real synergy between the pieces on the floor. It doesn’t always end well, but that’s a reflection of the lack of creative talent rather than the system. With Harris, the offense feels stuck in the mud far more often, in part because that’s the style of possession that you get when you play through him. He’s a good enough isolation scorer to warrant it occasionally, but you need him to be a much more willing shooter to avoid stall-outs and mistakes at the rate they add up with him on the floor.

I’ll grant him this — Harris has been in an especially bad place lately, so I don’t want to act like this last month or so is all we’ve seen for five years. But there have been a decent amount of games since the trade deadline to judge both sides of the coin, and non-Harris games just look so much smoother.

— I often give officials grief in this space, so let me offer a bit of praise for Matt Myers’ sequence late in the second quarter. Caleb Martin thought he had earned a foul in transition that never came, and he immediately sprinted over to Myers, nearly hitting him in the process of his complaint. Myers let the ensuing transition possession play out for Philly, and after Kelly Oubre knocked down a three, he T’d Martin up heading into the Miami timeout. Erik Spoelstra jumped in and started chewing him out, and Myers let him yell himself out and let it go without further punishment.

For me, that hits all the right officiating notes — you allow the other team to get the scoring opportunity and punish the excessive reaction afterward, but you don’t essentially put the offending team in double jeopardy. The home crowd wanted Spo T’d up as well,