PHILADELPHIA — The margin for error for the Philadelphia 76ers at the moment is very slim. Without the services of Joel Embiid, Tyrese Maxey, De’Anthony Melton, Nic Batum, and Robert Covington on Friday, their execution had to be sharp.
In a 103-95 loss to the New Orleans Pelicans, their execution was anything but.
The Sixers fell behind by as many as 23 in the first quarter, alone. The Pelicans shot 70% from the floor compared to 24% and 1-for-11 from deep for the Sixers. The defensive and offensive execution was poor which upset coach Nick Nurse.
“There’s a couple of things you’re doing when you’re getting your defensive game plan together,” Nurse started. “So there’s certain schemes that you’re doing as a team, and then there’s certain things you’re doing to key personnel, right? And pretty much the entire second half, we did the right thing. Obviously, there’s some breakdowns here and there and there was a couple loose ball rebounds. That stuff’s always gonna happen right in the game, but for the most part, we had the schemes executed and our schemes on the key personnel executed in the second half and that just enabled us to play in transition a lot more, right?”
Nurse is correct. The Sixers were much better after halftime and cut the lead down to six in the fourth quarter. They gave themselves a chance to steal one, but if they had just played a better first half, they probably win this game.
“We got a lot more up the floor baskets,” Nurse continued of Philadelphia’s second half. “We started putting our head down and driving it and getting into layups and things like that. So when we’re coming down and they’re laying it in the whole first half, we’re coming back against a big, long, strong, athletic, half court defensive team, and just wasn’t a whole lot good there.”
Six of Philadelphia’s first seven possessions resulted in a 3-point attempt on Friday. They weren’t good 3s either and that bothered Nurse as the Sixers got down by a big margin.
“Now I think that we started we came into the game with what I would consider a soft approach, because we took like, six or seven 3s out of our first eight possessions, right?” Nurse continued. “Now a couple of them are wide open. The one we made went up the court, Kyle (Lowry) swung to Kelly (Oubre Jr.) wide-open in the corner, bang, but there was a bunch of dribble up ones that were at least moderately to heavily contested, right? And that’s not good enough, right? Like, you gotta play tougher than that. You got to put your nose in there and drive it in the paint and try to get to the foul line or draw some defense and kick it out to somebody that’s open, etc.”
Combine the poor offensive start with the poor effort on defense and it results in what ended up being a deficit as large as 35. The Sixers just can’t put themselves in a hole such as that one.
“So I thought both things,” Nurse finished. “We had a soft mentality on offense. We tried to jump shoot our way to a lead early and you can’t count on that, and then we didn’t execute the defensive schemes. Not a very good combination. It kind of led to what’s that say? I can’t even read that 30-something to 15. That’s a big number. I can’t read it but it’s 30 upwards close to 40, right?”
The Sixers take on the New York Knicks on Sunday.
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