Sixers submit tanking masterpiece in loss to Raptors

The Sixers managed to lose to a G-League version of the Raptors on the road, falling 118-105 to Toronto to move into a dead heat with the Brooklyn Nets for the fifth-best lottery odds.

Here’s what I saw.

The Good

— The Sixers are facing a significant dilemma coming down the stretch of this season. Quentin Grimes appears to be too good to fit into the tanking picture, but he’s not going to be convinced so sit out with so many opportunities available, and he’s probably making himself a bit more money by dominating these games as their lead guard. Grimes being this good is a positive from a talent acquisition standpoint, it just brings some short and medium term conflict.

I’ll take the talent and live with the other problems, of course. Grimes’ shotmaking will eventually cool off and I don’t particularly want to run the offense through his midrange ability, but I love seeing him make a consistent impact as a transition player. The Raptors had a brutal passing night on Wednesday, throwing the ball away from seemingly impossible angles and situations, and Grimes was almost always the first guy down the floor the other way, depositing layup after layup before Toronto could get set. When he has a chance to play alongside Tyrese Maxey and Jared McCain next season, that’ll make for some fun moments if and when they get stops. He’s a great in-game dunker, too.

There is a tinge of pain thinking about the fact that their deadline deals have been inconsequential for most of Daryl Morey’s tenure, with several talent adds doing nothing to impact their playoff hopes, only for the Sixers to add an impact guy at the deadline of this rotten season. Take it when and where you can get it, I suppose.

— Jeff Dowtin had one game with two made threes the entire season entering March. He has four consecutive games of that type in a row, and has made more threes during that stretch than he had in 28 appearances before his reemergence against the Golden State Warriors.

If I were a better person concerned with something other than draft lottery odds, I would be happier for him. Mostly, it’s infuriating given how he played when the games actually mattered, but good for him.

— The game ended.

— The Raptors are now sitting above the Sixers in the standings, seventh-best in lottery odds, with the easiest remaining schedule. This was a massive Sixers loss for tanking purposes.

The Bad

— The game started.

The Ugly

— The early word is that Lonnie Walker IV passed his concussion test after a nasty fall in the first half, so thank goodness for that. He went up for a rebound and fell hard, slamming the back of his head into the hardwood in the process. You always have to worry in those situations, and Walker took quite a bit of time to get up and walk back to the locker room. Here’s hoping it just looked bad and nothing comes up in further testing in the days ahead.

— If this is a game people were hoping the Sixers would win, we would have quite a few horrible storylines to talk about.

Let’s start here — Justin Edwards is one of the few guys people have any hope for that is still left playing, and he played like someone with an active interest in guaranteeing they could keep their draft pick. There was not a single thing he did well against Toronto. His shot selection was horrible, his efficiency was dastardly, and his defense was worse than everything else put together. Edwards has earned some love for merely trying to guard the big names on opposing teams, and trying would have been an upgrade on what he did on Wednesday night in Toronto. It’s probably not fatigue, given that he has played far less than a lot of the vets still out on the floor, so I can only assume he just isn’t locked in on a season headed nowhere fast. Not a great sign, but not the end of the world.

Edwards certainly wasn’t the only guy guilty of poor defensive habits and traits on Wednesday. Kelly Oubre might still be playing reasonably hard, but he committed some mind-numbing fouls against Toronto, allowing them to get into the bonus early in the second quarter. Jared Butler has shown close to zero desire tracking players away from the ball, wiping out any positive plays he can muster as a point-of-attack guy. Adem Bona is good for the highlight blocks, but still gets caught on the silly fouls away from the basket a little too often. On and on we go down the list, with Grimes the only guy who was mostly engaged throughout the game.

It seems funny that Philadelphia’s response to porous man defense is to go to zone as a “let’s try something different” option. Teams have shot the Sixers out of it time and time again throughout the season, and though the Raptors are a better team to play zone against than, say, the Celtics, the Sixers played a loose, sloppy zone and allowed Toronto to bomb away from three. The Raptors are one of the league’s most impotent teams from downtown, 29th in volume and 23rd in percentage coming into the game, and they entered halftime 12/23 from the three-point line. It’s not that hard to make threes if you’re constantly presented with wide-open looks.

Spoiler alert: it also doesn’t help to play lackadaisical, unfocused transition defense. The Sixers had to get back and run as a result of their own misses, and the Raptors won the track meet more often than not. I wish we could dismiss this as a quirk of a depleted roster and all the other contextual stuff, but they have been horrendous at transition defense from start to finish this year, with personnel of all kinds failing to fill their roles (and lanes) on the break.

What they lack in current on-court talent, they haven’t made up for with effort, and vice versa. There have been pockets of this season that included flashes, but they were far too brief to celebrate or hold onto. A nightmare season beginning to end, though at least the futility now is “building” toward the hope of saving their pick.

(At least they’re “ethically” tanking, I guess. The Raptors putting a healthy 25-year-old guard on the bench for “rest” is one of the most hilarious things I have ever seen on an NBA injury report.)

— I want to reserve a bit of judgment on Jared Butler, because this is a bad spot to be in as a guard (or any player) and he was coming from a Washington team that didn’t exactly have the right priorities at the front of mind. Any bad habits you played with for 2/3 of a season with the Wizards weren’t going to disappear overnight.

That said, boy, he took some absolutely ridiculous shots and played with a careless attitude on defense. Watching him miss three consecutive threes from Saskatchewan was a tanking delight, but not what you want from a guy who is supposed to add some composure at the point of attack.

— Ricky Council IV was the tank commander in Toronto, golly.