The Sixers managed to do the unthinkable and get outplayed by the Washington Wizards for the entirety of four quarters, losing 119-114 in a game that was not competitive until the final 90 seconds, despite Washington having a slew of absences to match Philly’s. Philadelphia’s tanking mission continues uninterrupted, with a big weekend of matchups ahead against Miami and Toronto.
Here’s what I saw.
— The game ended.
— Every version of a recap in this space lately has been a variant of this sequence:
- Justin Edwards had another good game
- Boy, Ricky Council IV sure was doing some stuff out there
- Man, this team sucks!
3/3 yet again on Wednesday evening. Edwards is the best story the organization has going right now, and he continues to build on his success with each game.
The best thing you can say about the rookie is that he is impacting the game more as a ball handler without it ever feeling like he’s overdribbling or freezing others out of the offense. He’s incorporating some new stuff, like hitting defenders with pitter-pat crossovers to get from a crowded middle of the floor to the other side of the rim for a layup. But mostly, he’s taking what the defense gives him and adjusting if the three-point shot isn’t falling for him. He went 1/4 from three on Wednesday night and 8/8 from inside the arc until a wild sequence in the final minute that saw him miss several putbacks at the rim, which is a difficult trick to pull off.
Tremendous run he’s on offensively right now.
— I support Guerschon Yabusele padding the numbers a little bit as this season winds down. He has played hard, been a good soldier, and kept a positive demeanor as the season has gone to hell. If Grimes can get near-unlimited opportunity ahead of RFA, Yabusele deserves some time to shine and set his market.
— The game started.
— Ricky Council IV is playing the worst basketball of his life at a time when the Sixers need it most. I feel bad for him that he hasn’t made more of the opportunity, and fear it spells doom for his time with the Sixers, and perhaps in the league.
— When the Sixers were still playing for something other than a percentage chance to keep their pick, Nick Nurse frequently made the claim that their defensive woes were more about their offensive struggles than effort and structure. I generally didn’t buy that because their baseline of effort was so poor that it was hard to attribute defensive failures to anything other than that. These days? You can certainly point to their brutal offense as a primary reason they can’t get stops.
Philadelphia’s offense had basically one option for the first 4-5 minutes of the game, and it was “feed Guerschon Yabusele” while the vet was manning the five. He had a decent amount of success, posting up Alex Sarr for an easy two and nailing some threes from above the break. But that success didn’t last long, and when Yabusele was brought to the bench for an early sub, the Wizards started getting stops and pushing the pace, scoring easy transition buckets in odd-man situations.
It doesn’t help that the Sixers are so deep into the season and so deep into their rostered players that they have to bring in new options from the G-League just to field a real team every night. Chuma Okeke had a good stint here on his second 1o-day contract, and the Sixers were forced to replace him with Phillip Wheeler on Wednesday, adding that little extra bit of uncertainty on a team that already has talent and execution issues. The new guys who join the rotation every other week or so are battling and doing their best to fit into the plan, but there’s only so much a fringe player can do on a hapless team.
As has been the case all season, though, the opponent came in and bombed away on them from three. I have had issues with their overly aggressive scheme for a while now, but I don’t even know that the Sixers did much wrong in their coverage against Washington. Sometimes, you’re just a bad team that inspires no fear in the opponent, and a hot start turns into a good night turns into a win. Just how the game goes.
— For eight consecutive seasons, I have been predicting that Will Smith would ring the bell at a Sixers game. The logic was always based on a simple foundation: he’s a part-owner of the team, and when you’re looking for big names to get involved for playoff runs or big occasions, who better than the Fresh Prince?
So while my prediction finally came true on Wednesday night, ending a legendary losing streak that Susan Lucci would be proud of, it is deeply funny that this was the game that finally brought Big Willie out of his Sixers slumber. A battle of two banged up teams tanking their butts off, at the tail end of Philadelphia’s most disappointing professional sports season in at least 25 years, blessed by a pregame bell-ringing routine by an A-list celebrity.
Weird times.
— Speaking of weird times, the Sixers crossed the 50-loss threshold on Wednesday against the Wizards, which is an idea that is still hard to believe even though I have been covering this season from start to finish. I took the under on Philly wins this year once the weird preseason unfolded for Joel Embiid, but I thought this would be a good playoff team at minimum. A step forward from Maxey, a middling Paul George year, good play on the wings, a little bit of luck, and you’re at least in a spot to be the team that the top half of the conference doesn’t want to see in a round one series.
The craziest part of it all is that this happened in spite of a few big hits on fringe signings and draft picks. Guerschon Yabusele has far outperformed any reasonable expectations for his NBA return season. Justin Edwards is a big hit for an undrafted player coming off of a bad year at Kentucky. Jared McCain was far and away the best rookie to start the year. The Quentin Grimes trade looks like an absolute heist. And they are still nowhere close to the playoff hunt, sitting along with a bunch of stinky doo doo teams at the bottom of the league.
It turns out that if you build a team around stars, you need the stars to drive winning.
