Embiid provides an answer for Simmons-less Sixers
PHILADELPHIA » For his 18th starting lineup of the season Monday, Brett Brown faced the usual challenges.
Who would play point guard in the absence of Ben Simmons, whose back situation was downgraded from “soreness” to “injury”?
Who would fill in the rest of the backcourt rotation?
Was it time to give Al Horford’s ailing ego a salve by returning him to the starting unit?
Was it OK yet to go heavy early with two players acquired at the All-Star break?
Then, there was the one question Brown didn’t need to ask: Where to turn? For what would be a 129-112 victory over the Atlanta Hawks, he would simply turn to Joel Embiid.
Even if it was his way of proving that the Sixers really don’t need Simmons as long as he is at his best, Embiid scored a ca
reer-high 49 points while taking 14 rebounds and twice that many on-court bows.
Without that, and given that they did allow Atlanta to run up a 40-spot in the third quarter, the Sixers would have stumbled out of the event with punishing questions. Instead, they would run their home record to 27-2.
“He knows it more than I can say it,” Brown said. “We talked about it a little bit, with the sort of news about Ben, and him not being there, it was clear to him that he’s got to come out and he’s got to play like he did tonight.
“Nobody is asking him to get 50 every night. But his mentality is the thing that impressed me. We saw the same thing against Brooklyn. The bottom line is this: When he comes out with that energy, that mentality, he makes a statistician work. And we will win a lot of games.”
There wasn’t much known about Simmons Monday, only that he was somewhere other than the Wells Fargo Center, that he was continuing to heal and that his management team was at some level involved. For the Sixers, that could not have been encouraging. So, Brown would adapt. He would start Shake Milton at the point, reinsert Al Horford to the starting lineup after a three-game bench experiment, see Tobias Harris score 25, and hope for the best from Embiid.
It all worked.
“Joel was dominant,” Brown said. “Dominant.”
That was clear. Less clear, though, yet just as perplexing, was the one question that could haunt the franchise through the rest of the season and into the playoffs: How has so little else been decided 58 games into a season and seven years into a rebuilding process? How did it get to the point where Brown has to mix, match and juggle so many potential units so late in a season?
Injuries haven’t helped. The Sixers have had too many. But when it got to the point Monday where Brown needed to resort to the two-word plan that no coach ever really wants to trust, it was worth a discussion.
“I wouldn’t say it is one person,” Brown said about his plans to replace Simmons at the point. “I think it will be done” … (wait for it) … “by committee.”
Unstable operations resort to by-committee personnel usage in February. The Sixers, who are 9-20 on the road, should be past that by now. But at every turn Monday, the team that turns over its roster so often that the players barely know each other by other than their uniform numbers, found solutions.
“I mean, it’s basketball,” reasoned Josh Richardson. “It’s the NBA. There’s a lot of games. And coming into it, you’ve got to know that’s how it is going to be. So you just try to make the best out of it.”
The Sixers have been relatively new to each other all season and are on a pace to win 51 games. But when Brown ran down his list of potential Simmons lead-guard understudies and it included Furkan Korkmaz, it was a reminder that something went wrong in construction. And, just asking, what was with the willingness to allow T.J. McConnell to breeze so easily into free agency? But that’s what the Sixers have been doing for the better part of three seasons, giving Brown one team, then another, then another, then another.
Because of injuries, he never had the time last season to allow his newer unit to mesh, and that showed in the playoffs. If Simmons is to be missing for any extended time, that could again be an issue.
“That’s why you have a ‘team,’” Brown said. “Now coach it. And this is the opportunity we have without an NBA All-Star, without a starting point guard. And we will manufacture ball-carriers with the group that has been left back.”
They can use the trainer to carry the ball as long as Embiid does what he did to the Hawks.
“When you look at, ‘What is our advantage, gold, silver, bronze?” Brown said. “Well, gold, it’s Joel for sure.”
Embiid fought off double teams, made 14 of 15 foul shots, and even handled the ball in a late fourcorners set.
Will the Sixers miss Simmons, should his back be slow to stop throbbing? Of course.
But they showed Monday that they will not panic.
“It’s next-man-up, as always,” Richardson said. “And Ben is a great player. We’ll miss his presence. But at the end of the day, we have to pick up the slack and keep going.”
Even without Simmons, they can yet make the season turn to gold.