The Philadelphia 76ers lost last night to the Toronto Raptors, with the Raptors pulling away in the third quarter before an unnecessarily exciting ending where the Sixers basically trolled the Raps into having to actually close out instead of coasting to the finish line. Robert Covington had 26 and 12, Sergio Rodriguez came back from illness with 16 and 5, and Gerald Henderson hit most of his shots for the first time in a moon cycle, but Philly were paper-cut to death by Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan, who combined for 51, and they fell 123-114.
There were many reasons why the Sixers lost -- poor bench play, some lazy defensive rotations, way too many offensive boards given up -- but this will be a single-issue game for most fans: Jahlil Okafor and Joel Embiid starting and playing most of their minutes together in the frontcourt. There was no real impetus behind the lineup adjustment besides theoretical curiosity; asked about the move pre-game, Brett Brown essentially answered "COZ I FEEL LIKE IT":
Did it work? Sorta, at least at first -- Jahlil was cooking in the post, and Embiid was doing his thing from the perimeter, having a nice series of possessions where he'd pump-fake from beyond the arc and make things happen on the move towards the basket. But on defense, the cracks were exposed by Lowry and DeRozan and the team couldn't quite caulk 'em up, and on offense, Joel got going as a playmaker (a career-high five dimes) but never really as a scorer (just nine points on 3-6 shooting, the first single-digit scoring outing of his career). I wouldn't blame all or even most of the team's problems on the Joehlil lineup, but clearly it left the dudes a little rattled at times:
In fact, I think it's safe to say that if this lineup switchup had happened a year ago, we would've had two words for it: stealth tanking. Sixers win a couple games in a row on the road, and look like they might be getting healthy sooner rather than later? Sabotage the team from the inside with an illogical frontcourt pairing that you can explain away as "developmental experimentation." I'm not sure what percentage of true that is in this instance, if any, but at the very least it does come from a place of wins still not mattering — where the Sixers aren't sure enough about their initial hypothesis to keep their experiment controlled. For now, all the pieces are still highly variable.
Ultimately, the pairing wasn't tragic — the Sixers about broke even with the two on the court together — and Brett Brown says he might even try it again:
If it didn't work, dammit, keep on trying 'til it does: Sounds like Process-trusing to me. We'll have a national game against a much easier opponent — the 10-18 Lakers, currently on an eight-game slide — to try it out against next this Friday, so maybe by the end of the week, we'll be arguing which one's Duncan and which one's Robinson in our new Twin Towers lineup. (Answer: Joel is both, of course, and Jahlil is Nazr Mohammed.)