How is Philly leaving PG open?
It's a long season and maybe Philly jells some. But it looks to me like they only have one Edgecombe and nobody else is particularly interested in getting stops. Lebron lost his quickness, Embiid can't move at all, and Maxey is too small to guard PG or Tatum. My question for Nurse is to ask why he has JB starting possessions on MRob, not picking up one of those wings. But I'm not complaining.
I called this before the season started. JB is a terrible defender off the ball. Embiid and Lebron cant defend anything that moves outside of 5 feet. Simons has never defended a day in his life. You have Maxxey and Edgecome who are passable defensively and that's about it.
I also called the spacing issues. Embiiid, Maxxey, Brown, Edgecombe, Lebron are all guys who want to get in to the paint and midrange to core. You cannot have all of those guys in the paint or else you have zero sroom for any of them to operate - so the only option is to force at least a couple of those guys to stand out on the perimeter chucking up threes. Joel Embiid has not received the Chris Bosh / Kevin Love treatment as I knew he would - welcome to the Lebron James effect.
This game also exposed the big Jaylen Brown problem to the world. JB is far too emotional. Sometimes that serves as motivation, but then you get nights like tonight...you can see all JB had tunnel vision. All he could think about is trying to lock down Tatum, and that personal vendetta of his came at the expensive of the team. Meanwhile Tatum just kept out of the drama, focussed on the game, and did his job., That is the difference between Tatum and Brown in a nutshell.
This sixers squad has a lot of talent, but that talent is poorly matched. Early on they are going to win games by simply "out-talenting" opponents. But once opponents start studying tape and start attacking their weaknesses I think the poor team design will start to get exposed, and I could see that issue become bigger come playoff time when teams have days/weeks to create schemes and make adjustments. Against this Philly team all you need to do is clog the paint and force them to take jumpers. They will have one or two fluke good shooting games in the series, but outside of that they will struggle immensely.
After this stinker of an effort hopefully Jaylen Brown will learn to stop acting like a child and keep his mouth shut. The 36-year old man he got traded for and the star he's been throwing shade at for the past couple of months just gave him one hell of a beatdown.
Topic: Celtics (8-2) at 76ers (9-2) Game #11 11/10/26 (Read 3200 times)