Behind another 42 points from MVP candidate Joel Embiid, the Sixers won a 117-109 game against the Boston Celtics Wednesday night.
This is what I saw.
The good
• Joel Embiid will eat the Celtics for lunch this season if they don’t come to the center with some reinforcement at some point. He’s too big and too skillful for the guys at center, and Boston had an absolute whale trying to protect him with the improved space around the big guy this season.
Embiid added 22 points in just the first half, playing the same basketball discipline that has propelled his exit at the MVP level. He seemed to know exactly how Boston would react to each of his actions, using fakes, footwork, and certainly some size to make his way to places where they were forced to dirty him. His only turnover in the first 24 minutes was just a bad pass, rather than the kind of tunnel vision possession that often condemned him against Boston in the past.
His dominance continued in the second half, with Embiid choosing the Celtics from the bottom block. When they sent early doubles, he got the ball out of there quickly, which resulted in a great appearance for his weak side shooters. Boston tried to hang on to it with a single cover probably more than Brad Stevens really wanted, and Embiid absolutely tortured the old Cavs all night. Every time the Sixers seemed to run out of answers, Embiid seemed to come up with a new one.
When it was time to kill this game in the final quarter, Embiid not only stayed on the block and posted, with the Sixers allowing him to run the point effectively in the center of the floor so he could start the offense himself , as he did in his 45-point outing against Miami. The Celtics were so worried about what to do with Embiid in place that they only left other players at times on Wednesday, prompting an open eye for their teammates throughout the stretch.
We may be seeing a preview of what it will be like in the Eastern Conference qualifiers, if health allows. With a couple of notable exceptions, Embiid will have his way with the big men of many of the major conference candidates, including the Nets, who have just traded one of their best bigs as part of the trade for James Harden. There may be issues with this list, but Embiid is a nightmare for many of his future playoff enemies.
• I’ll be honest, I never thought we’d see Shake Milton with that confidence at the NBA level. He had a good combination of skills coming out of the SMU, but he was a kind of up and down player in a limited career earlier this year and even while getting big numbers in the G-League, few sometimes we saw him play with the free confidence that a guard has to get off the bench.
This is no longer a problem, and Milton has not shied away from any confrontation put in front of him. Even when he was tasked with beating Marcus Smart, one of the most tenacious defenders in the league, Milton showed no desire to back down and continued to leave his places out of the selection.
We begin to see some more advanced readings of Milton from this basic set he directs with Dwight Howard. Milton did not receive any rewards with assists to all of them, but he took several steps through traffic to find a shooter in the weak corner, sending the Celtics into fighting mode and beating Philly a couple of very nice aspects. . If you can combine these types of passes / plays with the score we have all seen you are capable of, it will have an absolute impact on this team.
And Milton’s defensive improvement would be the biggest story of his season if it weren’t for his scoring barriers, because he’s gone from being a massive negative to a less an average defender, often better than that. There were at least a few plays in which Milton’s assist on a corner kick disrupted the Celtics ’possession, a big signal earlier this year under a new coaching staff.
• I didn’t fall terribly in love with Matisse Thybulle on offense in this game, but I thought it was better than what her stats will end up saying. Kemba Walker was cooking in the first half, but it wasn’t for nothing that Thybulle did badly. In any case, there were possessions where Walker could neither get the ball nor go down because Thybulle was so effective at navigating traffic and denying him the place before he got there.
The numbers of robberies don’t always match the defensive output of a given night (and are often the exact opposite, a sign of a guy playing too much), but I thought Thybulle’s four robberies were a fair representation of a solid night.
• We’ll get to some of the issues I thought I had below, but I can’t blame Simmons for the approach he took with this game. For most of the night, he played the aggressor, rewarded with free-kick attempts and second-chance chances that he created himself.
More importantly, Simmons made some absolutely critical defensive plays along the stretch, and probably wouldn’t close it without him. After a poor possession by Embiid on the post, it was Simmons who tore the ground with just over two minutes to break the fast jump and get the ball out of bounds, allowing Philly to restore his defense.
A minute later, it was Simmons who came to steal by making a timely blow to Embiid’s man on the post, a sequence that allowed the Sixers to push their lead into the next possession. In the next possession, he tracked down Kemba Walker flying around a screen with the ball in his hands and still managed to force an absolutely wild shot that touched nothing but the shield and , finally, he would catch the defensive rebound that froze the game.
The box score won’t appeal to many people, but it won plays when it mattered, and it certainly deserves credit for that.
• After a hot start, Tobias Harris vanished from the game until the start of the fourth quarter, when the Sixers desperately needed someone to get on with Simmons in serious trouble. He took over as one of his veterinary leaders, scoring or assisting in three cubes quickly to push Philadelphia to the forefront with a group of bench players around him.
With Embiid carrying the load for Philly, Harris only has to make explosions like these together during dead periods. That would be enough to win the day.
The bad
• Poor defense or just better Boston attack? On Wednesday night there was probably a bit of it. The Celtics, as they always seem to do against Philadelphia, made incredibly hard shots from all over the field. Marcus Smart seems to really savor these games against a division rival, especially when he can throw a rainbow float over Embiid’s outstretched arm to torture Sixers fans.
Still, he didn’t think Philly would play especially well on defense, and it looked like they were one step behind his opponent most of the night, forced to play reactive defense instead of imposing his will on the game. . The Celtics ’hot shot ended up forcing the Sixers to make some match adjustments, I think they would have preferred to avoid them, and I’d like to see it again before thinking about which side deserves more credit / guilt.
• Before Wednesday night’s game, Doc Rivers noted that he would like Ben Simmons to get more of the ball on the post, perhaps even posting on both sides of the basket with Simmons and Embiid. It’s not a strategy I particularly want to review with, but it’s also a strategy if it’s with that.
Here’s the problem: Simmons makes almost no attempt to score on the post when he gets the ball. The Celtics threw miniature guards against Simmons on the low block, and barely explored the opportunity to score before throwing the ball and resetting the offense. If we’re at the point where he’s not interested in attacking Kemba Walker and Jeff Teague on the block, it basically makes no sense to give him the ball down there.
To Simmons ’credit, he intended to reach the free throw line and seek contact on Wednesday, coming to the line quite frequently against a team that has often rendered him useless. Unfortunately, everything fell apart in the second half and his physical focus earned him his fifth foul before the third quarter ended. He has struggled to find the middle ground between playing aggressive and reckless, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he has not developed the foul drawing skills to benefit from playing this way.
I can’t criticize the guy for trying to make use of his framework the way everyone has asked him to for years, but it’s really amazing that the options are basically “down or nothing” four years after his career. Jaylen Brown spent a night up and down shooting the ball in front of Simmons, but comparing his growth in recent years is not flattering to Simmons on offense.
• Even if Matisse Thybulle’s offensive skills finally arrive, he still has a long way to go strictly as a decision maker. It’s all scattered with energy all the time. There was a sequence in the second quarter in which he was a one-on-three on a quick break and decided to retire for a three-on-one dispute instead of braking, and in a matter of moments he went straight into the path that Ben Simmons was trying to drive. towards, taking possession.
With Seth Curry almost back in training, there will soon be some serious competition for minutes at the back of the rotation. Howard-Maxey-Milton’s three-man group is nailed and Doc Rivers has been constantly talking about Furkan Korkmaz, who returned Wednesday night from injury. He combines this with Isaiah Joe, who gives them good minutes off the bench, and Thybulle should hear the footsteps behind him.
• Speaking of Maxey, I don’t love him as the fifth man in the starting lineup the Sixers had on the outside against Boston. Rivers who want to keep Shake Milton in the same role as his offensive spark off the bench is understandable, but if you wanted to follow that route, I think it’s almost better to put a pure shooter next to Embiid / Harris / Green / Simmons .
There were a lot of message possessions with Maxey on the strong side feeding Embiid into place, and while he was fine as the guy who got the ball to him (this has been a problem on some occasions this season), it wasn’t especially useful when the ball went back on its way. For now, the three-man trigger isn’t fast enough and the Celtics did an effective job of annoying him on the way to the basket.
• Dwight Howard continues to impact as an offensive rebound (and subsequent foul drawer), but his defensive instincts have been surprisingly bad over the past few weeks. Boston absolutely cut the Sixers when Howard participated Friday night, and while some of that can be attributed to a poor perimeter deficiency that compromises their positioning, Howard dealt with the consequences as badly as possible.
The ugly
• There have already been quite a few games played this season where it just felt bad to be done in an empty gym. The contrast between a normal Sixers-Celtics game and this Sixers-Celtics game made me feel like I was going crazy. Rivalry games don’t feel the same without a lot of juice from the people in the stands.
• It’s increasingly become the norm in the NBA, but I refuse to accept guys, not even trying a shot at the end of a quarter to protect field goal percentages. Boston’s Semi Ojeleye grabbed the ball with almost two seconds left in the first quarter and there was room to dribble, and turned sideways with the ball and ran the clock instead of trying to do something positive to to your team. It’s ridiculous that we’ve gotten to this point.
Follow Kyle on Twitter: @KyleNeubeck
Like us on Facebook: PhillyVoice Sports
Subscribe to “The New Slant” podcast by Kyle’s Sixers at apple, Google, i Spotify