Did the Sixers answer your preseason concerns and questions this season?
The 2020 NBA season, along with the rest of the sports world, is still indefinitely put on hold at the moment due to the outbreak of the coronavirus. It’s uncertain when or if the NBA will return this year as commissioner Adam Silver announced Saturday he’s still unsure of a time frame.
“The safety, health, and well-being of our players, coaches, fans, and everyone involved in our game is paramount,” said Silver. “Based on the reports, we are not in a position to make any decision and it’s unclear when we will be.”
However, there is silver lining (get it?), as the commissioner did mention that the NBA intends to resume the 2020 season, when given clearance. Still, without a specific timetable on when they’ll be able to start, Silver predicts that the season will go “significantly later than June.”
So with that, we must take his words with a grain of salt and hope for the best, but expect the worst. It’s a shame too cause several days ago would have marked the start of the playoffs, and if the season were to be over, we’ll never know how this Sixers team would have fared.
The day the NBA was postponed, the Sixers record was 39-26 and they were sixth in the Eastern Conference. Obviously going into the season, this team had championship aspirations and a sixth place finish in the Eastern Conference was not the expectation. But remember, there were 17 games remaining on the schedule and Joel Embiid just returned from injury for that last game before the league was suspended. (Ben Simmons was still out with a nerve impingement in his lower back, but was reported the other day that he’s available to play if the NBA season resumes.)
Would the Sixers have finished better than sixth? Would the Sixers have kept losing on the road? Would they have been able to secure a playoff seed that had home-court advantage?
For now, we don’t know.
But with so much uncertainty revolving around this season, I thought it would be cool to take a look at some of the preseason concerns and questions and see if they were answered in order to try and bring some certainty back into this world. Because the season still had around 20 percent of it remaining, some of these answers could have changed later on, but for now, we’ll answer these as if the year is over.
Let’s get to it.
Did Ben Simmons improve?
When the casual NBA fan looks at this question, they will instantly go “nO, hE sTiLl DoEsN’t ShOoT tHrEeS.” But to us Sixers fans, I think this a no-brainer for yes. Although Ben still didn’t add a respectable three-point shot to his game this year, he improved his overall game as a player, especially on the defensive side.
Adding another All-star nod to his resume, Simmons led the league in steals per game and total steals even though he was out for three weeks before the season ended. He held his opponents he covered to just 41.3 percent from the field while leading the Sixers to the sixth best defensive rating in the league. He’s third in the NBA in deflections, and tied for the league lead in defensive loose balls recovered per game.
And when Joel went down with his dislocated finger, we saw Ben take over this team reminiscent of two years ago during their 16-game win streak to end the 2017 season. Simmons led the Sixers to a 7-3 record during Embiid’s absence, putting up per game averages of 20.7 pts, 9.4 rebs, 7.6 asts, and 2.1 stls, all of this while leading the league in minutes played during that span. He showed he can put this team on his back, and kick it in to high gear when need be.
Also, he hit two threes this year, which more than doubles his career output so you really can’t say he didn’t improve in that area too. Overall, Ben took a big step this year, and can hopefully be a defensive player of the year candidate for years to come.
How did the additions of Al Horford and Josh Richardson turn out?
So, what can we make of these two off-season acquisitions. We’ll start with Al Horford considering he was the main free agent the Sixers signed last summer (excluding the resigning of Tobias Harris). I’m not gonna sugar coat it, the deal is awful. 4 years, $109 million looked bad from the start for a 33-year-old Horford, but if Big Al was anything like he was in Boston or Atlanta, I’d be able to justify it.
However, this was not the case as Horford averaged only 12 points per game while shooting a career worse 44.2 percent from the field. His Player Efficiency Rating, which is a combination of all the stats a player accumulates down to one number, which demonstrates that player’s effect on the game and individual productivity, was 15.67. That would be his worst rating since his rookie year, and would rank him 130th in the NBA in that category, below players like Michael Carter-Williams and Dwight Powell.
The fact of the matter is Horford just doesn’t fit with this team. He clogged up the paint on offense and would constantly get blown by his man on defense. The team actually looked better when he got switched to the bench. He’s still set to make $81 million over the next three years until he’s 37. Unless the Sixers find a trade partner for him, I have Elton Brand’s first big free agency “splash” going down as a flop.
As for Josh Richardson, it’s tough to judge his impact on the floor as he had trouble staying on it. Richardson only played in 48 of the possible 65 games for the Sixers, but when he played he put up a modest 13.8 points per game and had a career best plus/minus of + 2.4.
However, Richardson was a player that improved every year with his scoring output, and this year actually saw his points per game average go down from 16.6 to 13.8. I get it, he was playing with Simmons, Embiid, and Harris, all players that need the ball in their hands to operate. But Richardson actually averaged his highest usage percentage of his career at 20.5 percent, meaning he was pretty involved in this team’s offense. He also shot the ball an average of 12 times per game, his second highest shot attempts of his career.
Now, Richardson still has a great contract for this team, and he showed some spurts of what he could do in a Sixers uniform. But I honestly don’t think the Sixers recovered from the loss of J.J. Redick and Jimmy Butler.
Last year’s starting five will probably be the best this team will ever assemble throughout this process and we saw what the first attempt to replace it looked like. The Sixers went from the fifth highest scoring team in the league to the 21st, as Redick’s ability to space the floor and Butler’s ability to create his own shot were never matched by Richardson and Horford.
This team’s not dead in the water though, because when you have Simmons and Embiid you’ll always have a solid foundation to build around. I just think come next season, this starting five should look a lot different, with either Horford or Richardson being gone.
Is Brett Brown the right coach?
Before this year started, I always thought Brett Brown would be gone if the team didn’t make it to the conference championship game. After two straight years of losing in the Eastern Conference semifinals, the minimum expectation was for this team to compete for the Finals.
But a lackluster road record, combined with injuries to its stars, saw the Sixers fall all the way to sixth in the East with 17 games remaining in the season.
Now, if this season continued going on as it appeared to be, I thought Brown was gonna get the boot. Even though they had the best home record in the league, a 10-24 road record overshadowed it. The lack of accountability, along with a possible no home-court advantage throughout the playoffs, looked like the recipe for an early exit.
However, if there ever were a reason for Brown to stay here after such a pedestrian season, this would be the only exception. As underwhelming as this season was, you can’t justifiably fire Brown after this year because you’ll never know what could have happened. If the Sixers made the playoffs as a sixth seed and got bounced in the first or second round, he’s 100 percent fired. But the Sixers also could have made it to the Eastern Conference Finals or even won the title.
We’ll truly never know unless this season resumes, and even after that, I still don’t know if you can accurately make the call if he should stay or go after such an erupt and unprecedented end to this year. In the end, I think Brown stays, but next year, if the Sixers start out slow, I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets canned early on.
