PHILADELPHIA–At the moment, the Philadelphia 76ers are one of the top defensive teams in the league as they are fourth in defensive rating at 111.0. Even after Thursday’s 133-114 loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder where they had perimeter defensive issues, they are still in the top five.
However, when things go bad for Philadelphia on defense, it seems to take an extreme downturn.
In Thursday’s loss to the Thunder, the Sixers had a ton of trouble stopping dribble penetration. Tyrese Maxey was assigned to OKC star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander to begin the game and he just couldn’t find a way to slow him down. This is due to the fact that he doesn’t have the size nor is he the greatest defender to begin with despite giving 100% effort on that end.
When teams get into the paint, they are able to break down Philadelphia’s defense and are able to get easy points.
“We’re still top five in the league, but I don’t think we’ve reached our potential,” said Joel Embiid. “I think we still have a lot of breakdowns. We give up a lot of easy points. We don’t guard the ball the way we’re supposed to so we just got to take pride in, all of us, of doing a better job of stopping the ball first.”
It wasn’t just SGA on Thursday either. It was also Josh Giddey, Jalen Williams, and Tre Mann who were able to have success for the Thunder.
“I think it was a little bit of everything, honestly,” added James Harden. “Dribble penetration, keeping the ball in front of us. They made some shots early which kind of messed us up a little bit, but we never really got a grip on the game until we kind of figured out what we were doing and got a hold of it. They were just scoring. They were just scoring and that’s a team that can get hot. They put up 150, I think, against Boston.”
In this case, there isn’t much the Sixers can do except head back to the drawing board and continue to grow on the defensive end. Maxey is going to find himself matched up with talented guards like that going forward and it’s something he’s going to have to improve upon for the future.
“You try not to let yourself have any slippage,” Maxey finished. “You just got to look at the film, see what we did wrong, and try to fix it. That’s really it.”
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