76ers put odd brand on display
Team’s makeup quirky, effective
PHILADELPHIA — The final verdict on Elton Brand’s aptitude as a personnel man has yet to be written, but his news conference timing is impeccable. An hour before the Philadelphia 76ers tipped off what many figured would be the latest example of the limitations of one of the most curious collections of talent in recent NBA history, their general manager made himself available for his first question-and-answer session since the regular-season opener.
For 10 minutes Wednesday, Brand smiled and deflected and redirected his way through an evangelical defense of the legitimacy of the roster he had assembled, refusing to so much as acknowledge the validity of the premises underlying the skepticism he confronted.
Joel Embiid? A dominant force. Tobias Harris? Exactly the player the Sixers had envisioned when they signed him to a max contract extension. Josh Richardson? A go-to scorer. Ben Simmons? He would eventually expand his offensive game. Not that the Sixers needed him to do so. All they needed was growth. And chemistry. And all they needed to realize both was time.
“As GM . . . any way I can make the team better, I will,” Brand said, “but, again, I am encouraged about where we are, and I look forward to having this team grow and compete against upper-level teams like tonight.”
Three hours later, as the Sixers’ victory song hit a crescendo on the sound system with 45 seconds remaining, and nearly everyone inside a sold-out Wells Fargo Center was clapping and stomping, you wondered if Brand might let it be known that he was available to entertain follow-up questions.
Nobody who has followed this team on a daily basis since the start of the season will be fooled into thinking that the Sixers’ 121-109
dispatching of the first-place Milwaukee Bucks will serve as the final word on any lingering doubts. But, man, was it a heck of a Christmas for anybody in that locker room who began it with some questions to answer.
While Giannis Antetokounmpo entered the afternoon as the consensus NBA favorite, Embiid looked like the best player at both ends of the court, scoring 31 points on 11-of-21 shooting while teaming with Al Horford to harass Antetokounmpo into an 8-for-27 shooting performance. Richardson scored 16 first-half points, hitting four of his seven attempts from 3-point range while playing a pivotal role in leading the Sixers to a 21point halftime lead. Simmons tallied 14 assists and three steals while scoring 15 points and running an offense that finished with just seven turnovers, all without making a shot outside of the restricted area.
“This was a big game for us,” said Harris, who shot 5-of-7 from 3-point range and finished with 22 points. “Even early in the season, this was the game everybody had marked on their calendar.”
It’s not that the questions about this team aren’t grounded in reason. They are as legitimate as the good feelings the Sixers instill with victories such as this. None of the other contenders in the East have been as wildly variable as the Sixers this season. All of the rest — with the possible exception of the Toronto Raptors — feature the sort of downhill scorer who can win a playoff series on his own.
Maybe the next few months will show that the Sixers have one in Embiid, who has looked the part in his past two outings against those contenders.
At the same time, the Sixers are 5-2 against those contenders, 6-2 if you include Indiana. Neither Milwaukee nor Miami, neither Toronto nor Boston or the Pacers, can boast anything close to that mark in the East. Against a team that entered the afternoon boasting an NBA-best 27-4 record, which had earned them the nearconsensus designation as Eastern Conference favorites, the Sixers dominated at both ends of the court, the way they did in their first game against the Boston Celtics and their first against the Mami Heat.
From the beginning, Brand and coach Brett Brown have acknowledged that while things might look funky for stretches of the 82game regular-season slog, theirs is a roster that is constructed first and foremost to compete once the flowers bloom and the leaves start to bud. Whatever vulnerabilities the first 33 games have revealed, the only thing that will end up mattering to the history books is whether those vulnerabilities will outweigh their strengths enough to keep them from winning four out of seven games against the Bucks, Celtics, Raptors, or Heat.
Perhaps more than any of those teams, the Sixers are tailored to match up against the formerly 27-4 Bucks. There isn’t another team in the NBA that can force Antetokounmpo to play 48 minutes with an elite defensive center standing at the business end of his ferocious wing-to-low-block drives. On multiple occasions on Christmas, the Bucks star looked to be uncomfortable with that proposition, losing the ball before takeoff as Horford and Embiid stood in his path.
Brown said after the game that Horford’s ability to match up against Antetokounmpo was not lost on the Sixers when they contemplated signing him this offseason. And while Horford’s presence was most valuable when Embiid was on the bench, it also showed itself when they played as a duo.
“I just think, matchup wise, we fit well with them because of our size,” Harris said.