It’s fair to say that a young team featuring two rookies and a limited Joel Embiid might need more than three games to figure it out.

But you can’t excuse the mediocre defensive effort we saw on Saturday night. You can’t spin 61% from the stripe. You certainly can’t shrug it off when your number one overall draft pick clanks a free-throw off the side of the backboard.

If Markelle Fultz isn’t healthy, he should sit until he is. I hope that’s the only reason he’s bricking foul shots and refusing to take his open looks, because I wouldn’t want to know what the alternative explanation is.

There are no positives to take away from a 34 point road loss. I guess Ben Simmons had another double-double and finished with some nice numbers. Jerryd Bayless shot the ball well.

That’s about it. The Sixers were never really in it. They were down 17 points after the first quarter and had three players with three personal fouls going into halftime. The turnovers (20), bad fouls, and goofy traveling calls were persistent again.

Big Jah

With Joel Embiid inactive, Jahlil Okafor got some minutes behind starter Amir Johnson.

Jah came into the game and was assertive right away, hitting a spin move jump hook after grabbing an offensive rebound.

On the other end, he immediately committed his first foul, then his second, and then his third in just under three minutes. He was bogged down by foul trouble which caused Brett Brown to go to Dario Saric at the five.

To Okafor’s credit, he got the fouls under control in the second half and added a couple of blocks while looking more impactful on the glass. You just see the drop off in rim protection and defensive awareness when Embiid and Richaun Holmes aren’t on the floor, but with Johnson underwhelming so far, I’d like to see Jah get a good run in these next few games so we can figure out right now whether he has a future here or not.

Okafor finished with a respectable 10 and 9 in 22 minutes, but his game still feels a bit lopsided to me.

What the Fultz

Fultz had six points on 1-5 shooting and went 4-8 from the free throw line.

Is it time to start worrying? If not now, when?

These are rhetorical questions for you, the fan. I really don’t know. I’m not gonna give you a hot take right now. Actually, the hot take might not be giving any take at all. The reservation of judgment feels so contrarian in 2017.

Again, with the shoulder, if he’s not healthy, just sit him and get that taken care of because he continues to hurt himself mechanically and mentally in overcompensation.

In the words of an MSNBC Twitter personality, we must not normalize this:

One bright spot you could point to was the fact that Fultz at least did get to the line. Only Simmons shot as many free throws as Fultz did on Saturday night.

The rookie had a good spin and finish early in the game. He had two of his five shots blocked, but on this sequence I felt like he let it go just a bit earlier:

https://youtu.be/D9DRNPSj-ck?t=2m7s

Nice stuff there, with Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot running through the baseline screen and clearing out to give Fultz an attacking lane. He got that shot over a seven-footer. Nice to see him starting to figure out when he needs to release that shot near the rim.

The Sixers also got the ball in his hands a little more by splitting up the rotation so that he wasn’t in with T.J. McConnell. That’s why Bayless checked back into the game before Fultz made it off the bench. So they’re at least trying.

Fultz:

Gettin’ Cold

Another bad game for Robert Covington, who again got into early foul trouble. He couldn’t hit anything from the floor and had the fewest points (5) among all Sixer starters. I think he air balled a turnaround jumper seven feet from the basket.

Defensively, you’d expect Simmons and Fultz to maybe struggle, but Covington bit multiple times on that DeMar DeRozan pump fake and left his feet well away from the rim. That’s not the typically disciplined stuff you see from Cov, who was disappointing on that end of the floor on Saturday night. DeRozan finished with 30.

Going to the bench

Trivia question – who took the second-most shots last night?

Answer – Justin Anderson.

He went 4-12 from the field and 2-7 from three to finish with 12 points in a season-high 17 minutes. Nik Stauskas got his first minutes of the season (8) and finished 0-1. Luwawu-Cabarrot had four points in 11 minutes and is shooting .267 through three games.

In the “show me something” category, none of these three are currently lighting the world on fire. Anderson certainly isn’t afraid to shoot, but .333 on 14 attempts isn’t gonna cut it.

Simmons pulling up

Look, it’s easy to do an entire story with nothing but knee-jerk negadelphia reaction, but I’ll try to dig a bright spot out of this slop bucket.

Simmons hit a nice pull-up jumper in the first quarter:

https://youtu.be/1YEBhI23L8Q?t=48s

It wasn’t the world’s best pick and roll, but Johnson gets enough of DeRozan to force the switch and Simmons knocks down a 14-footer over Jonas Valanciunas. He hit another pull-up shot from a slightly shorter distance on the other side of the key.

Simmons is already putting up double-double numbers, but he can easily go for 20 and 10 every night if he continues to build on that shot.