Paul George scores 2 points in Sixers' loss to Nets

Paul George scored two points in a 100-96 Sixers loss to the Brooklyn Nets. I promise that is not a misprint.

Here’s what I saw.

The Good

— I am enjoying the Quentin Grimes experience so far, even if I am probably glossing over some plays that would drive me insane if he had been here all season. He’s playing hard, he’s a good athlete, and he has helped them out on the defensive end. Those things are worth celebrating in a fairly dire situation.

— Kelly Oubre, I respect your commitment amid this awful season. There are some head-scratching decisions and moments where I wish he was more of a passer, but he is one of the few guys who has maintained any sort of competitive juice throughout their roller coaster of a season.

If Paul George wasn’t going to take the shots, Oubre was certainly going to seize the moment, and I give him credit for being opportunistic with his offense. Oubre popped up as a cutter for all four quarters, sneaking along the baseline or waltzing right down the middle of the floor if the Nets lost sight of him. He also remains a dangerous player as a slasher in the halfcourt and transition, and Oubre did well to play with enough physicality to create separation around the rim without putting himself in danger of offensive fouls.

— Good Justin Edwards game.

The Bad

— Part of Philadelphia’s problem on defense is they just have no good plan without Embiid on the floor. Every option comes with its own set of problems. We can run through the list real quick:

• Guerschon Yabusele juices the offense and is a good passer in the halfcourt, but they have no chance to protect the rim or rebound with most lineups they put on the floor with him at center.
• Andre Drummond had some moments in this game where his size and physicality mattered, but he undercut that with a series of bozo moments and plays. One possession saw him making a clear one-handed shove of a Nets player running down the floor because he was pissed off that he didn’t get a foul call on the other end. Ridiculous.
• Adem Bona is a piece for the future and a guy who brings athleticism and energy to the table. He’s also not a great rebounder and committed a defensive foul on the first possession he played on Wednesday.

You’re going to struggle to put together a competent defense if you don’t have a single center you can trust to be a positive force there.

In related news, it is not fun watching a basketball team get punked on the glass night after night after night. The Sixers gave up 15 offensive rebounds to the Nets, who weren’t exactly running out dominant bigs.

— Is Jeff Dowtin occupying a two-way spot for a reason other than Nick Nurse liking him?

The Ugly

— Paul George is just not a serious player, man. It’s one thing for him to fade into the background when Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey are taking 50-60 shots combined. It’s one thing for him to struggle to be himself while battling injuries. But I have had enough of the floating through games nonsense. The other big names were not there on Wednesday night. You were the guy on the floor. How do you end up scoreless at halftime? Better question, how do you only take three shots in that first half?

There needs to be some level of responsibility shown for a guy who was given $50 million a year to be a core piece of the franchise. I’m not asking him to shamelessly jack shots no better how bad his efficiency is or to force up bad shots just because he’s the biggest available name on the floor. But you do have to just throw caution to the wind a little bit and stop getting baited into playing setup man when you’re surrounded by role players and guys who frankly wouldn’t be on the floor if the roster was healthy. Deferring to the likes of Maxey, Embiid, Kawhi Leonard, James Harden, or Russell Westbrook was defensible. But even alongside those other guys, George could routinely put together big-time performances and seize control of the offense for long stretches of games.

Some of the blame ultimately has to go to Nick Nurse, who appears to have absolutely no plan to make the most of George’s skill set. I’m not sure he knows how to maximize off-ball shooters at all, frankly. For stretches of their dire first half, George did little more than stand in the corner, with other, theoretically less talented players running things from the top. With all due respect to Edwards, who had some nice creative flashes against Brooklyn, asking him to run pick-and-rolls with Drummond while George hangs out by the sideline is beyond confusing. The extent of their creativity for off-ball shooters comes from flare screens for George early in the shot clock, otherwise it’s a lot of spamming dribble handoffs or making swing passes around the perimeter out of drive-and-kick moments.

But George is also far too passive. Long before he dealt with a double team — and those eventually came after halftime — George was kicking early-clock passes out to Andre Drummond spotting up from three. In crunch time, he stood off to the side while Quentin Grimes controlled the offense. There is no meaningful urgency you can sense or see.

There were plenty of skeptics of George being worth his contract when he agreed to the deal with Philadelphia in the summertime, but I’m not sure his biggest critic would have expected this bad of a season. He just looks completely overwhelmed by the situation, content to ride along as a passenger rather than trying (and likely failing) to turn it around by playing a bit more “me first” basketball. And that gets at something that I think was misjudged when they signed him — George’s personality doesn’t seem to be a match for the requirements of a third star on an Embiid team. He knew coming here that he would have to play a bigger role on nights without the big man, yet he has rarely shown that he understands that with his play on the floor. I don’t see the personality of a guy who is going to push this team toward the top, or anywhere close, and that was what a “third star” plan needed to accomplish.

Perhaps that tendon tear on his left hand is more meaningful than he and the team are letting on, making him hesitant to hunt his own offense or ineffective when he does. That would be a meaningful excuse — I’m not one to tell guys if they can or can’t play. But if that is the case, there is absolutely zero excuse to have him out there. He should be getting his time off, the team should be getting closer and closer to packing it in, and you should be trying to at least maintain the facade that he could be an effective player again when he’s healthy. That matters for his own self-confidence, it matters if you want to trade him, it matters for the morale of the other guys on the team looking at him for a source of strength, and it matters as you think of the task they have to convince role players to sign up to come here to actually win.

It has been a colossal failure of a first season for George in Philadelphia, and it seems to be getting worse as time goes on. I don’t know if there’s a single person enjoying watching him play, and it’ll take a long run of lights-out basketball to wash the stink away from this start.

— I don’t think Nick Nurse has been dealt a below-average hand this year, let alone a good one. Very few coaches would take this current roster situation and turn it into a team capable of winning meaningful games with any regularity. That being said, someone would have to look real hard to find evidence that he should be the guy after this season. Philadelphia is bad on defense, bad on offense, bad on “special teams” plays, and incompetent with and without their stars.

I don’t think he deserves all of the blame or anything close to that, but if you are still operating as if you want to try to contend in the short-to-medium term, there is a standard of inventiveness and creativity that Nurse simply isn’t meeting. We saw some of that last season at times, and almost none of it now. Teams seem prepared for any sort of curveball Nurse attempts, perhaps because his curveballs have mostly been playing four small players at a time, bleeding points like it’s going out of style.

The biggest indictment of Nurse is that the Sixers came into the year expecting to have less of Embiid — not to the extreme degree we’ve seen, but enough that there should have been an alternative plan developed for how the team would play when their main star isn’t healthy. We are at the All-Star break and they are getting bullied by the likes of Day’Ron Sharpe. There are less than 30 games to go, and there is no discernible plan to generate good looks with George as a shot creator.

— The Nets played perhaps the worst final minute in basketball history and still won.