PHILADELPHIA – The assessments were mostly completed Friday night before they were rendered academic. It’s a feeling the 76ers have gotten plenty of practice with.
A home game against the Indiana Pacers might offer some valuable insights, no?
Two teams on paper that have playoff-caliber rosters, a chance to see the 76ers with their Big 3 intact for just the third time this season. Yeah it wouldn’t look fluid or cohesive, but there’d be glimmers.
Glances of actions, matchups, tendencies that the 76ers could flash now and develop later, that would give another quality NBA team problems. With health, with time, with continuity, they might provide a path forward.
And then Bennedict Mathurin’s forearm met Joel Embiid’s face, and the foundation of those ideas turned to quicksand.
And before the training team could so much as rummage through the bins of yesteryear for mask templates to protect the MVP’s sinus fracture, down went Jared McCain, one of the lone bright spots in a dark 7-16 opening, to the same meniscus tear that set off this latest cycle of Embiid waiting.
And so?
“It’s not that easy to deal with at times,” coach Nick Nurse said Friday, before the fracture was formally diagnosed and before McCain’s injury was detected. “But we’ve got to do a little better of next-man-up and fighting and pulling together a little bit.”
It’s Groundhog Day again for Nurse and the 76ers. Once they devise a few avenues toward coherent basketball, injuries spirit some of the pieces away for indefinite periods and the design process must begin anew.
The challenge is twofold.
Nurse has to manage the psychological one first, to prevent a locker room from getting down on itself, from sinking into the morass of despair outsiders can avail themselves of.
All season, that’s meant propping up Embiid’s emotions while dealing with the absence of his outsized personality and immense energy. McCain, who will undergo surgery and be out indefinitely, supplied a good-natured spark to help repair that deficit.
The second aspect is tactical. Nurse needs bodies to play 48 minutes of competent basketball nightly. And every little step of progress seems undercut by a giant fall backwards in the personnel department.
The Pacers game was an example. The 76ers started well, then got hit with a Pacers run.
They stabilized in the second quarter with Embiid, then we’re dazed by his exit. They found a wind in the third quarter and culled a deficit as large as 19 to five, then cut the deficit to five early in the fourth before the mistakes piled up in the face of a team that has its starts, among them a 32-point, 11-assist provider in Tyrese Haliburton.
Along the way, Nurse found offense playing with pace and going small, whether it was Ricky Council (14 points, nine rebounds, plus-10 in 21 minutes) or KJ Martin (13 points, plus-13 in 24 minutes) providing a spark and finding rhythm with Kelly Oubre on both ends of the court.
“It’s a fast-moving game, not anything we haven’t seen,” Nurse said. “We like to stay big if we can, but sometimes big is not the pace that’s going on. We bring in KJ, we bring in Ricky. They are athletic and have some speed. And I thought those two guys at both ends were effective. I thought they were two of the guys that were guarding the ball, the guys that were keeping guys in front and fighting down low and all that kind of stuff.”
The team has gotten more from Paul George, though it remains in the isolation game as he works to integrate with his new teammates via time in practice.
They know what Tyrese Maxey can be, so long as he’s not in a lineup where he must do everything.
Friday brought little from Guerschon Yabusele, Indiana’s four-spot duo of Obi Toppin and Pascal Siakam dominating for a combined 43 points, but his spacing around Embiid looked promising.
“We’ve been taking strides in the right direction,” Oubre said. “I think tonight was a little step back, but at the end of the day, we cannot let this define and determine us, because we are getting better. The last 10 games have been really good for us. So we just have to learn from this one.”
Many of those positives — all of the thoughts of, “hey this looks good; it’ll look really good with Embiid and George and …” — reset back to near zero with the injuries. The search reverts to the most rudimentary levels if the guy that the starting lineup is built around and the engine driving the second unit are out injured for a spell.
It’s a feeling that the 76ers know well by now. Whether that helps them plan their way out of it may only be determined if there’s enough healthy players to execute whatever those ideas are.
Contact Matthew De George at mdegeorge@delcotimes.com.
Source: Berkshire mont
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