When presented with a roster as oddly constructed as the Philadelphia 76ers are, it is going to be tough to find a flow and a rhythm offensively. The Sixers are currently bucking the recent trend of everybody playing small and they are rolling out big lineups led by Joel Embiid and Al Horford.
After a 1-2 road trip that saw the Sixers get destroyed in the fourth quarter to start the trip in a loss to the Orlando Magic and then saw the offense big down late in a loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder, coach Brett Brown says the offense is most on his mind as the team returns home.
Brown stated at practice on Tuesday:
I think that the Oklahoma City game was the poorest defensive game that we played all year, but I think that my problems of conern at the moment are offensively related. It’s how do you take this team and grow it to where it’s functional and purposeful and I think that I said, and now that I’m living in it I mean it even more, I think it’s going to take every bit until Christmas to get some type of rhythm beat to what we do. Along that path, we will never forget, led by me, that we are a defensive based program and everything unravels if we don’t do that.
The Sixers are not today’s type of NBA team. They are rolling out two traditional bigs in Embiid and Horford, they have a 6-foot-10 point guard who refuses to shoot, and they have wing players in Tobias Harris and Josh Richardson who are not sharpshooters. This will not happen overnight, it might very well take until Christmas to figure it all out.
It has led to the team being ranked 18th in the league in offensive rating at 107.1 and ranked 19th in the league in 3-point shooting percentage at 34.1%.
Brown added:
It’s just confirmed that it’s an interesting team to put together with different skill sets and that’s my job. So, I leave the trip completely with that in the back of my mind.
The Sixers do return to the home floor on Wednesday as they host the New York Knicks from the Wells Fargo Center at 7:00 p.m. EST. [lawrence-related id=19548,19556,19539]