Joel Embiid had 34 points and 12 rebounds and the Spurs lost Victor Wembanyama at halftime, but the Sixers still fell 115-102 to San Antonio in a critical playoff race loss for the 76ers.
Here’s what I saw.
Big man good
If you could simply look past the score and the fact that their All-NBA candidate guard was as bad as he has been all season, there were some real Sixers positives to take away from this one. Philadelphia got decent performances from three of its most important players and hung tough against an elite team in ways that feel sustainable in a playoff setting.
Monday’s much-anticipated matchup between Joel Embiid and Victor Wembanyama did not disappoint in the first half, and it was the elder statesmen who went into halftime with the scoring advantage. While Wembanyama almost exclusively guarded Embiid during their shared time on the floor, the Sixers juggled the matchups on San Antonio’s MVP candidate, letting Embiid play higher-impact possessions against him in short bursts. While there were some moments of success for Wembanyama, including an and-one layup in the first half, Embiid’s strength advantage pushed his matchup into safe areas inside the arc, forcing turnovers and missed shots to kickstart the Sixers’ offense.
Embiid held up his end of the bargain on the other end, too, despite his inability to make threes with Wembanyama lurking to contest. He had a couple of big boy moments inside the arc, driving Wembanyama close to the rim before moving him with a pump fake and hitting a quick jumper. Pick-and-rolls were all the rage for Philadelphia, and they did a good job of mixing up the who and the how of those looks, freeing up Embiid for some practice jumpers around the free-throw line. His offensive rebounding was as good as it has been all year, with Embiid getting good early position to create five second-chance possessions throughout the game.
While Maxey is usually the man at the controls of the pick-and-roll game, Paul George got a surprising number of reps alongside Embiid, including on pick-and-rolls that flowed out of an initial pindown screen on George’s man. That was due in part to an irregular sub schedule for the big man — he came out of the game early after taking a hard fall contesting a Wembanyama drive, only to return late in the first and play the entire second quarter. It certainly helps that George’s driving ability has been back in a major way, giving the Sixers real reason to use him as the jumbo ballhandler in ball screens. Before Embiid found his rhythm in the second, it was George doing most of the heavy lifting as a scorer, bailing the Sixers out of some middling possessions with elite shotmaking from all over the floor.
The Sixers were hit with one massive strike of good fortune when Victor Wembanyama was ruled out for the second half after picking up a rib contusion in a collision with Paul George in the first half. A game that was viewed as something close to a “no chance” contest going in suddenly looked like it was in play, and Embiid kept pounding away at the Spurs with Luke Kornet and a gang of smaller players trying to hang onto him. It was a vintage Embiid quarter in the third with those circumstances, and Embiid had the Sixers in the bonus with over five minutes left in the period. He had Kornet swiping at air, and after Kornet left the game with foul trouble, Embiid even drew a foul when Carter Bryant ran him over while Embiid set a screen. It drew a huge round of applause from Kyle Lowry on the bench, and two more free throws to push Embiid over the 30-point mark for the game.
But Kornet’s foul trouble ended up working against the Sixers as time wore on, with San Antonio opting to play small and basically auto-doubling Embiid anytime the ball got near him in the fourth quarter. It left the scoring responsibilities to his teammates, who had little going all night, and they didn’t break out of their slumps in winning time, limping to the finish on a series of missed jumpers and stagnant, side-to-side possessions on the perimeter.
Not good enough from Maxey
Monday’s first half is one of the worst stretches of basketball I can remember Tyrese Maxey playing this season, a two-way disaster where his only saving grace was playmaking. And the playmaking was a positive factor, with Maxey racking up seven assists by absorbing San Antonio pressure and firing the ball all over the floor. With Joel Embiid rolling and the Sixers dialing up those aforementioned actions with PG, it’s understandable that Maxey wasn’t his usual dominant self.
But Maxey had a lot more room to get rolling on offense had he simply taken the initiative, and he basically opted out after getting off to a slow start shooting the ball. In a game where you couldn’t really afford turnovers, Maxey gave away a couple of plays in the first half on basic mental errors, including an air-mailed pass over Edgecombe’s head on their first play out of a timeout.
Although the two guards aren’t defended the same, VJ Edgecombe felt like he had a better handle on how to attack the Spurs when he got handed single coverage. Maxey was slow out of the screens and ready to default back to Embiid on most possessions, while Edgecombe played out of it with speed, letting the defense’s decision dictate what he did next. Maxey has more than enough midrange ability to do the work Edgecombe did inside the arc, but he rarely tried, and he faded from view as a scorer because of it.
Whether or not the hand is bothering him, I can’t say, but I’m inclined to believe the pinky was a problem because it was a strangely passive night even if we ignore his effectiveness (or lack thereof). Possessions that felt like obvious and instinctive attacking moments for Maxey, moments that he has crushed all season, were turned down and passed out of, leaving the offense to rot in a late-clock situation or in the hands of some lesser-qualified player. By the time he tried to get his own early in the fourth, it was too little, too late.
Other notes
— Nick Nurse playing Andre Drummond at all in this game is one of the most baffling decisions he has made all year, which is really saying something. There was no case to play him against Victor Wembanyama, who humiliated him so thoroughly that Nurse had to bench him after playing fewer than six minutes in the previous meeting. And when Wembanyama was ruled out for the game at halftime, there was definitely no reason to play Drummond at that point, not with the Spurs playing a smaller and athletic lineup that kept creating dribble penetration. I’m not sure Drummond contested a single shot at the rim in this game. For who, for what?
It’s a symptom of a larger problem of not knowing which buttons to push and when. If you’re going to fail, fail with some logic behind the decisions! Leaving Dylan Harper open as a pull-up shooter? Okay, maybe even good. Leaving Dylan Harper open in the corner for practice shot threes on catch-and-shoot reps? Bad, inadvisable!
I will be honest and say that my patience is wearing pretty thin for Nurse, who has failed to show he’s much of a value add in a lot of big moments for Philadelphia this season. Whether at full strength or battling with an undermanned roster, many of the same issues persist. When you watch the Spurs carry on and win without a top-five player, preserving their two-way identity along the way, a lot of the excuses fall by the wayside.
— A genuine get-well-soon for Victor Wembanyama, who has been even better than anyone could have hoped for in year three and who I hope gets to have his breakout playoff moment in a couple of weeks. These late-season injuries to stars have been brutal.
