Sixers drop to 1-3 following ugly loss to Pistons

The Sixers shot poorly, got beaten on the boards, struggled in transition, and generallty struggled to play basketball in a terrible 105-95 loss to the Detroit Pistons.

Here’s what I saw.

The Good

— It is a small bit of solace in a poor team performance, but this is the type of game the Sixers are going to have to get from Tyrese Maxey basically every night without their other two stars. He gave them steady scoring with basically nothing else working around them, it was just a fruitless endeavor with how poor they were everywhere else.

It did almost no good and did not show up in the box score because the Sixers were bricklayers and not basketball players, but this also was the best passing game of the season for Maxey by a comfortable margin. He did an excellent job of reading where pressure was coming from and when on his drives, and threw a nice variety of passes depending on the situation. There was a rocket pass through the air that they squandered on a first-half possession, and some nifty bounce passes through traffic that were ultimately wasted on their shooters.

A good outing, but they would have needed more than good to come close in this game. So it goes.

— I think there are very real holes in Jared McCain’s game on both ends of the floor, but he has two key traits that make him worth playing:

• He’s young enough to actually move
• Teams respect him enough as a shooter that they have to play up on him

Even with McCain’s limited handle, that second thing gives him a chance to do a little damage as a situational driver. Nurse turned to him in a second-half situation where they needed a spark, and McCain picked up a couple of buckets in the paint and was unfortunate not to make one or two more on tough bounces off of the rim.

I also think he brings a level of tenacity on defense that will show up more over time despite McCain struggling mightily with isolation defense at the moment. The loose ball he dug out after stoning Cade Cunningham in the post on a fourth-quarter possession was a big momentum play, or at least it would have been if this team had a pulse for most of the game.

(Of course, celebrating McCain for a bad shooting performance tells you a lot about this game.)

— I would play Yabusele more minutes as a forward even with his current role as the backup five. Can’t get worse!

The Bad

— Philadelphia’s most glaring problem right now is their complete inability to make threes. They were dead last in the NBA in three-point percentage coming into the game, and while Maxey’s cold start to the year has a lot to do with that, Philadelphia’s role players aren’t exactly helping to bridge the gap.

It was fair to worry about this being a problem even if Embiid and George were ready to start the year. Kelly Oubre and Caleb Martin have their gifts as role players, but both are streaky shooters with severe, borderline unwatchable stretches as catch-and-shoot guys. And with Tyrese Maxey operating as the lone star, they have to spend too much of their time spotting up and trying to preserve what little spacing they have so that Maxey has a shot to attack in the middle of the floor. It’s either that, or they’re playing four-on-three because somebody doubled Maxey at the point of attack, which still requires at least a couple of role players to stay spaced out while Drummond or Yabusele navigate toward the hoop.

That Maxey was able to do anything of consequence on Wednesday night is a small miracle. Martin missed two threes on the same possession in the first quarter (though on second glance, one must have been a long two with a foot on the line), and Oubre continues to clang open threes off of the iron to start the year. They haven’t been getting much of a lift from the bench there, either. Jared McCain is playing limited minutes, Eric Gordon has run mostly cold, and KJ Martin does not want to shoot jumpers unless it is necessary. Spoiler alert: it is necessary.

If you’re trying to spin it in a positive way, you would point out that many more of their threes will come from Paul George once he’s on the floor, and that Embiid will create shots that are more open than the ones their role players are getting right now. But frankly, shot quality wasn’t really a problem for most of their game against Detroit. Maxey did a good job of moving the ball away from pressure and finding open shooters, and these guys just can’t capitalize at the moment. It’s absolutely something to watch as they get healthier and move deeper into the season.

And I don’t say this to give the Sixers a pass for their uninspired transition defense and poor defensive rebounding, but I think it’s hard to ignore the draining effect crappy offense has on the rest of a team’s output. When you’re hoisting miss after miss and running into a brick wall on that end of the floor, it is a huge shot to the spirit. It makes it feel harder to do the normal things, to sprint back on defense with a feeling of, “What is this all for?” I am a big enough believer in the personnel to think they will get it together on defense. And the stars will absolutely make the offense better. But they need to develop a coherent plan for games like these, because the current one is basura.

— Let’s just add this below that section: Caleb Martin and Kelly Oubre were straight-up bad in this game, regardless of their respective roles.

— There are some parts of the Andre Drummond experience that are better than I remembered the first time around. For instance, I had mostly forgotten how disruptive he can be with his hands, and though he didn’t pile up steals in this game, he junked up a bunch of Pistons possessions and forced at least a turnover or two by attacking drivers with his hands.

But boy, it can be a rollercoaster with him on both ends of the floor. He toggles between looking like the greatest rebounder I’ve ever seen in person and a guy who somehow loses one-on-one battles to players much smaller than him (in height and in weight). Play-to-play, he’s out of position on defense more often than not, with wild closeouts and shaky space defense leaving the rest of his teammates in no man’s land.

Nobody is expecting him to light the world on fire on offense, but it would certainly help if he could just start making some four-footers. The free-throw shooting has been ugly as always to open the season, so teams have felt free to hack him constantly around the basket. All of these warts will be hidden better in a smaller backup role, but they were front-and-center right now.

— In Drummond’s case, at least I have confidence in him being a productive player in a limited role. I do not feel wonderful about either of Eric Gordon or Kyle Lowry at the moment, even if they probably fit better into the full-strength lineup. They look old and slow without the extra cover provided by Embiid and PG, and I’d lean toward giving McCain even more minutes in the weeks to come.

The Ugly

— I think the worst part of this opening stretch of the season is that we are learning (and enjoying) absolutely nothing about what this team is supposed to be. Nothing about how they integrate a star wing, nothing about George’s chemistry with Maxey on nights without Embiid, nothing about how the role players fit in the full-strength lineup, just a whole lot of nothing.

With George, it’s a bit different in that his preseason injury was a freak play they weren’t going into the season preparing for. But anybody who is mad, frustrated, or defeated by this impotent start to the season is completely justified in feeling that way. It has been a miserable ride so far, and it needs to improve quickly. They do not have the wiggle room to piss games away against bad teams, unless they’re already resigned to a lower seed and a brutal playoff path to think about getting to the Finals (lol).

— If you were inclined to go to a Sixers-Pistons game on a Wednesday night in October without Joel Embiid and Paul George, I have to imagine you were on the high end of Tobias Harris frustration. And I certainly understand why you’d want to boo him during pre-game introductions a little harder than the average player, given how instrumental he was in a lot of their recent playoff failures.

But I will admit that I thought booing him on every touch in this game was a tad over the top. I think that’s a distinction that should be reserved for the return of some true franchise villains. When Ben Simmons returns to the Wells Fargo Center, that’s a guy who deserves to be given the 48-minute treatment. I will date myself to younger readers, but I think of Eagles franchise enemies like Jeremy Shockey as people worth that type of energy. I don’t think of a guy like Harris, who was overpaid and very frustrating, but ultimately a solid professional.

(That said, you do whatever you’d like, these are the musings of a guy with a very different relationship with the team than most of you have.)