It’s sure not early anymore for Sixers team facing bleak big picture originally appeared on NBC Sports Philadelphia
The Sixers know they played Friday night against the Pelicans like a team taking its shaky first step or two in a long season.
They also know that the season’s halfway point is creeping up, they’re 15-21 and losses like this make the big picture even bleaker.
“It’s not panic mode, but there’s sort of a desperation that we need to start to play with,” Paul George said. “And look at every game like it matters. From this point forward, every game matters. I think we do have to approach it in that manner, because it’s not going to get any easier.
“We lost tonight. Not going to discredit how they played tonight, but it’s a team we should’ve beat. And we’ve got (the Knicks) coming in, we’ve got (the Thunder) coming in. … We’ve got to put teams like this away early. That’s a team you’ve got to beat if you want to compete to be one of the teams standing in the end. These are the games that we put teams away.”
The Sixers indeed failed to defeat an 8-31 Pelicans team that announced Zion Williamson was suspended Friday for violating team policies. Brandon Ingram, Trey Murphy III and Herb Jones were out injured, too.
In that context, the shorthanded state of the Sixers doesn’t mean much. Joel Embiid missed a third straight game with a left foot sprain — he’s still “day-to-day,” Sixers head coach Nick Nurse said pregame — but George and Tyrese Maxey both suited up.
Maxey led the team with 30 points and 12 assists, but his outside shooting was poor — two air balls in the second quarter, no three-point makes until the final two minutes. George had a shorter first half than planned because of foul trouble and managed a mere two points before intermission.
His 23 second-half points weren’t sufficient because defensive blunders kept sinking the Sixers’ comeback effort. The Pelicans regularly put the Sixers’ defense on its heels, capitalized on miscommunications and found themselves with unguarded shots.
According to Cleaning the Glass, the Sixers rank 29th in the NBA in opponents’ points added through transition play. Their half-court defense ranks seventh after a strong December, but the Sixers’ overall defensive showing vs. New Orleans in the second half was reminiscent of the team that started 3-14.
“Probably just communicating, game plan readiness and just the effort. … Just continue to get back to ourselves, because we’ve been solid on those things,” Kelly Oubre Jr. said. “But tonight they had a little bit more pop and a little bit more assertiveness than we did.”
To open the Sixers’ three-game homestand, the Suns notched a win thanks to 67 second-half points. The Pelicans posted 70 Friday.
“I think this week we had two games where I don’t think we played certainly as well as we needed to or certainly as well as we were in December,” Nurse said. “Again, we’re a little thin. … I’m a little worried (the starters) are logging a lot of minutes and a lot of assignments. I tried to get them some breaks here and there. It just seemed to me like we didn’t have quite the pop energy-wise that we needed for the full game.”
As George noted, the Sixers’ recent defensive problems are not typical for cohesive teams with stable cores.
“It’s just talking more,” George said. “I think talking is always a subject that comes up on teams, especially early on. Obviously, if we’ve been together for a long time, we kind of just know where guys are going to be. You know rotations, you know coverages.
“But I think, with this being our first year together, the communication aspect of it is fairly new to this group. Talking, making sure we know what’s going on … who’s switching, who’s supposed to be in this spot. So I think we’ve just got to continue to grow in that aspect.”
At some point, if the Sixers are going to pull off a dramatic season turnaround, all the injuries and chemistry-building ups and downs with summer signings have to stop being the main stories.
“I feel like we’re still in very early stages on a lot of stuff,” Nurse said the day before his team’s loss to New Orleans. “But in saying that, it has forced us into continuing to go over it.
“And it gets a little monotonous for these guys, but that’s where you’ve got to come in and say, ‘We don’t have the luxury to treat it monotonously. We don’t. We’ve got to treat it with the urgency that it needs.’ That just takes a little harder coaching on my part sometimes. No problem.”
