Turnover! Turnover! Turnover!

Share

To everything there is a season, and for the 2015-16 Philadelphia 76ers, this season primarily seems to be to give the ball to the other team. They lost 112-85 to the Indiana Pacers last night while coughing the ball up a stunning 31 times — most in the NBA for a single game since 2000.

Let's get the good out of the way first, since that won't take particularly long:

  • Nik Stauskas finally got off the schneid by hitting his first three shots in this one. (He would miss his next five, so he may technically be back on the schneid again.)
  • Jahlil Okafor had two consecutive jaw-dropper buckets in the post against Jordan Hill, part of a fairly decent 14 points on 6-11 shooting night. (He was also -30 for the game.)
  • T.J. McConnell proved himself a not totally-unwilling (or incapable scorer), hitting just about every mid-to-long-range jumper he was given, ending up with 16 points on 7-9 shooting. (He had five turnovers, though, to go with only three assists.)

So that's the good, and it ain't all that good. The bad is much more unequivocal — the Sixers simply could not run offense in this game. Forget putting ball in basket, putting ball en route to basket was a bridge too far for Philly in this one. As Brett Brown himself said after the game, for better or worse, you can't blame this on one or two Sixers: This is a teamwide incoherence, one contributed to by every player. (Somewhat literally: All 11 players to get minutes in this one turned the ball over at least once, with Christian Wood and Isaiah Canaan the lone Ballers not to notch multiple giveaways.)

I would say the root of the problem lies in the inability for this team to properly post up Okafor. Big Jah is the team's only reliable option in the half-court, but other teams know this, and they're figuring out ways to make it too difficult to be effective for Philly. They're fronting him, or gumming up the spacing around him, or forcing him out to the perimeter. By the time the Sixers finally get him the ball — or conclude there's no feasible way to do so — the shot clock is already ticking to naught, and the Sixers end up becoming sloppy and predictable. The turnovers are just an uninspired pass or drive away at that point.

Part of that's on Okafor, for not being big and strong enough yet to hold his own against defenders fighting for positioning, and for not being seasoned enough yet to know how to make defenders pay for fronting him, or how to sucker a help defender into coming over just so you can kick out to an open shooter. But part of its on the team for not giving him a point guard who can both throw a reliable entry pass and raise from three himself if his man is sagging too far off him, and for playing him alongside Nerlens Noel and Jerami Grant in the frontcourt, who provide about as much spacing as a stream of sixteenth notes. We're not exactly putting our offensive hub in the best position to succeed.

Still, it shouldn't be this bad. And it won't be forever — Robert Covington will get back his shooting legs at some point (as will Sauce, maybe hopefully), Nerlens will do Nerlens things on offense again after three games of contributing nothing but traffic, and Kendall Marshall and Tony Wroten will return to provide shooting and penetration, respectively, from the point guard position. But games like this, you just wonder how much more this team can endure before the light at the end of the tunnel starts to seem like an optical illusion to them.

0-12. Next up is the Hornets in Charlotte on Friday — another plausible win for the Fightin Franklins, assuming such a concept is still even in play. Here's hoping for a lot of Spencer Hawes in that one.

Contact Us