Shutdown leaves Sixers with too many postseason questions
For the second consecutive spring, the first of which they would prefer to be forgotten, the 76ers are spreading the doctrine that they have been built for the postseason.
While that would open the question of why else a professional team might be constructed, in the Sixers’ case, it is a reasonable pitch. For they’ve waited through their rebuilding. They’ve load-managed their players at whatever risk to their regular-season record. They added experience at the trade deadline. They’ve had two years of postseason dress rehearsals.
The playoffs.
The Sixers have been built for them.
Built is one thing. Ready is another. The NBA-ordered work stoppage due to COVID-19 came at the most inconvenient moment for Brett Brown.
The Sixers have played 65 games, just 19 (just a coincidence) with their preferred starting lineup. As Brown said often since the trade-deadline arrivals of Glenn Robinson III and Alec Burks, there should have been an “eternity” to get it right. Instead, the Sixers will be made to, as the coach likes to say, “land the plane” before having gotten into the upright and locked position.
Unless Adam Silver can salvage the final 17 games of the regular season, the Sixers’ next game will be for postseason stakes. They’re not ready.
Like most NBA coaches, Brown prefers to shave his postseason rotation to about nine players. But, in the final game before the hiatus, he used 11, including 10 for 16 or more minutes. That didn’t include Ben Simmons, who has been recovering from a back issue.
In the context of the moment, that was not alarming. Even the best teams continue to seek their identities in early March, but the context has changed.
When he met with the press for the first time in 10 weeks Friday, Brown clearly still had questions. Where does Al Horford fit in? Has everyone used the time off to strengthen, not regress? And what about Simmons? Hasn’t there been a shift in the way he has been used, less as a point guard and more as a player rolling to the basket? Is that process to the point where it can be trusted?
Those are issues central to the Sixers’ core plan. Yet as the postseason nears, they haunt.
“With Ben, we get that we took a college ‘four’ man and gave him the ball and said, ‘You’re a point guard,’” Brown said. “Two times an All-Star. Gave him $170 million. I think he has a legitimate chance for the Defensive Player of the Year award. And he’s 23 years old.
“But we have learned that he can’t dribble the ball up 1,000 miles an hour and see five Boston Celtics or five Toronto Raptors and say, ‘Go to work, Ben, win a playoff game.’ So how do you take his Swiss Army Knife skill-set and tap into it each year better than I have?”
Tired of being expected to answer the ages-old question of why he never attempts three-point shots, Simmons seemed open to the shift in assignments, even if it is to his sharpest business interests to protect the point-guard job description. But he has not had sufficient time to make that adjustment before the playoffs. For that, there are repercussions.
Among the most surprising inseason developments has been the emergence of Shake Milton as a potential star-level scorer. But he has played in 52 career games. The Sixers needed those last 17
games to judge whether it was safe to pair him with Josh Richardson for meaningful postseason stretches were Simmons to be used more often up front. If not, they would have had to prepare for a deeper playing-rotation commitment to veteran Raul Neto.
What about Matisse Thybulle? Isn’t he leading all NBA rookies in steals? Would he be a useful postseason piece? Or is he too foul-prone early in his career to trust in June? The Sixers are out of time to find out.
The most troublesome question, the one upon which the entire built-forthe-playoffs pitch is based, is whether the Horford Experiment
will work. Though it has shown mild signs of growth, the combination of Horford and Joel Embiid in the frontcourt typically has been clumsy.
“It’s really easy to look at two teams: Al Horford as a center, Joel Embiid as a center,” Brown said. “What do we do well? What do we have to do better? And it bleeds over to what it looks like on offense.
“We’ve learned a lot about Al,” Brown added. “I’ve started him. I’ve brought him off the bench. Because we have had so many games without Joel, you saw a different side. He’s a legitimate center, a five-man, not a fourman.”
Four, five. Pick a number, any number. As for the questions, they are limitless. Have Robinson and Burks had time to fit in? Should
Mike Scott be bumped from the rotation because of a creaky regular season or be trusted for his strong postseason performance last year? Were those in-season weeks of Kork-mania real, or is potential offensive difference-maker Furkan Korkmaz still too inconsistent at the defensive end to work in the playoffs? Is Tobias Harris a three or a four?
Both Brown and Elton
Brand recently have assured that they have used the NBA timeout productively, studying film, meeting with their staffs in video chats, encouraging their players to regain top physical form.
“You feel a little smarter,” Brown said, “than you did before the pandemic.” Being smarter will help. Being 17 games more prepared would have been better.