The Sixers needed 48 minutes to survive a poor Pistons team, but would eventually end up winning 114-110 on the road thanks to more than 30 points from Joel Embiid.
This is what I saw.
The good
• The Pistons decided for much of the evening that they were happy playing a single cover against the Embiid. I don’t know what their advanced scouts have been seeing this season (maybe little!), But it’s clearly not the best strategy to curb Philly’s MVP candidate.
On Saturday night, Embiid only ran between the Pistons players and forced the smaller defenders to wrap him up, hack him, or knock him down in their shooting attempts while flying at the free throw line. He worked easily with Mason Plumlee, the former big man of the Sixers, Jahlil Okafor, and scored another 20 occasional points in another first half, harassing Detroit while barely sweating.
In the past, it felt like the best Embiid games had to come when the Sixers did almost nothing but play it. He and his teammates have found a better way, throwing favorable confrontations when Embiid has them, but they don’t live or die with him creating something out of place.
I’m in camp thinking that it doesn’t really matter how well Embiid plays or doesn’t play when he’s available back-to-back, because those games will never make it to the playoffs. That said, it’s a testament to the improved way he has in that he could go out and master the way he did on Saturday night. The shots didn’t drop him along the stretch, but Embiid made up for it by playing an outrageous defense on the edge in the final minutes, eliminating several possible cubes for Detroit.
Even if we set it aside, putting 30 or more is a light job for Embiid right now, and that’s not something that should ever be taken for granted.
• Was a big quarter all it took for Ben Simmons to get his season running on offense? He looked like a completely different player in the first half against Detroit after the strong finish against Boston, finally getting the looks the Sixers have been feeding him hard all season.
Nowhere was it more evident than on the low block, where Simmons absolutely brutalized Pistons ’smallest defenders on every occasion. Suddenly they removed from the toolbox movements we hadn’t seen him try, like forgeries and running hooks.
And that meant a team effort: Embiid seemed hyper-aware of the need to keep Simmons on a roll, leaving him out of the paint space on several occasions so Simmons could go to work. Even when Detroit tried to pick up Simmons in the backyard to prevent him from building a steam head, his running mate was willing to let him go free:
That’s why it’s frustrating to see people happy that it’s barely clearing statistical thresholds to pick up triple the doubles. Simmons is absolutely capable of filling the scoreboard when he plays with an attack mentality with the ball in his hands. In fact, he finds it easier to find open teammates if teams need to respect him as a scorer.
As has often happened over the past two seasons, Simmons was also the head of the effort department, busting his ass on defense with many other players dragging on the second night of a straight road. Rivers still seems reluctant to use him as a “best player,” perhaps because he doesn’t try to wear Simmons to the No. 1 opposing task every night, but once he set him free from Detroit’s Jerami Grant, he was basically a wrapper Grant’s night. Simmons just stabbed him to the ground up and down.
(And hey, great free throws in times of crisis for Simmons, who has always had problems on the fringe. It’s good to see him calm and collected when he counts.)
• Seth Curry didn’t make a single three-point shot was amazing, but he has such a reassuring influence on the ground that it’s easy to see why the lineups that include him are cooking this season. I guess that’s the commitment of his occasional reluctance to let him boot deep: Curry is measured at all times, making high-quality shots almost exclusively and rarely missing a teammate’s chance to have a better appearance.
Your skill level certainly helps. With the big guys paving a way for him with screens, Curry gets to the basket enough and threatens the mid-range enough to keep everyone honest. Very nice player to watch in attack.
• I want to say it mostly as a compliment: the Sixers only offered ** ** about half of this game, but now they have the ability to beat it even when they don’t have their best stuff. This seemed like the kind of win a younger Sixers team never seemed to close the offer, mostly because they were kind of all or nothing.
For a long season, a loss here or there against a minor opponent will not kill you. But Philly got into the habit of giving away too many of these games in the past, struggling to find the midpoint of intensity between “National TV game vs. a contender” and “Saturday night back to back against the Pistons on the channel.” NBC Sports backup. “You don’t need your best to beat Detroit. But you have to put in a professional effort, and finally Embiid and Simmons are starting to see how to achieve that.
(On the other hand, it’s not great that the stars had to play deep in crunchy times in the second half of a back-to-back.)
The bad
• Okay, so you can’t actively worry about sections of the game and avoid criticism altogether. There were some ugly stretches of this game for Philly, with perimeter defenders allowing for very easy penetration in the first half of the game, and it would be nice to see the Sixers blow a team like this early to rest the boys. in the second part. Oh well.
• Doc Rivers will have to figure out exactly what he wants to do with his bench because the pieces seem pretty unknown at the moment. Between the reintroduction of Furkan Korkmaz and some natural volatility for the secondary players, the Sixers bench was an absolute mess for the first 24 minutes against Detroit.
If Rivers has decided he wants to continue with the starting lineup, the top two players on the perimeter of the bench should be Shake Milton and Tyrese Maxey. It looks like the latter has lost his place to Korkmaz, a guy Rivers has confessed his confidence in returning to camp, and it will be an advanced experience based on Korkmaz’s work so far this year. Maxey hasn’t burned the nets recently, but he was the only player on the bench to score in the first half, a striking statistic that took him home to the point where they were so bad.
I’m not a big fan of Mike Scott, but the combinations have been a bit annoying as Rivers works around the absence of his four backups. Lineups with Dwight Howard, Matisse Thybulle and Simmons, for example, are a nightmare, even if you can talk about their defensive strength.
• Embiid focused a little too much on trying to win the foul-drawing contest in the second half, and Pistons rookie Isaiah Stewart did a good job playing a disciplined defense once Plumlee committed a foul outside the box. game, which provoked some ugly attempts by Mr. Embiid in crunchy weather. It’s hard to argue with a guy who usually catches defenders with his hand in the cookie jar, but he can’t let that be his only mode of attack at big times.
• If the Sixers are looking at an improvement looking ahead to the playoffs / second half of the season, a fifth starter replacing Danny Green or moving him to a bench role is the most obvious move to make. He knows what to do and most of all, he stays within that role, but his body seems to be trying to catch up with his mind right now. Even when it comes to a fake bomb on a bridge or an attempt to launch after a clever cut, Green is only seen out of rhythm.
You could sell me with the idea that he’ll be fine, and he’s a guy particularly likely to fall the second night from one behind the other, as he’s been part of his deep playoff career. But this season there have already been ugly nights.
• Doc Rivers told reporters before the game that the Embiid / Harris / Simmons group of three men were hesitant to play, and Tobias Harris was playing like a boy who probably could have spent a free night. He has tightened his decision-making this season and continued to compete on defense on Saturday, but had three or four goals against the Pistons, losses that have been left out of his game in the early stages of this year.
There’s no reason to cringe at it, but just as hard.
• While we are on the subject of head-scratching plays, Matisse Thybulle was a one-man crew in the worst possible way on Saturday. There was a possession of the first half in which he had several opportunities to move the ball to an open teammate who might have a chance to do something with it, and instead continued to dribble the air off the ball before finally trying a wild stop that hit nothing but glass. Know your role, young man.
The ugly
• Dwight Howard was called up for a foul on a play where a piece of his shorts had been ripped off. Picking up a technical foul after complaining about this seems pretty blatant to me, so I have to send a complaint to the officials.
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