Merry Christmas.

Let’s talk about the final play of regulation.

If you were like me, you were probably thinking that the ball would end up in the hands of Jimmy Butler or Joel Embiid, but JJ Redick took and missed the shot instead. If he hits from 18 feet, we’re talking about a wonderful road win. Instead he missed, the Sixers went on to lose in overtime, and the reactions were borderline apoplectic, at least on social media.

I don’t have too much of a problem with that play call. Sure, you can go isolation with Butler, who has hit a couple of tough three pointers at the buzzer this season. You can run the two-man game with Embiid and Redick.

Brett Brown decided against using a timeout and instead wanted Redick on the baseline, running that “inverted pick and roll” with Ben Simmons.

Watch it once while focusing on Redick and Simmons, then watch it again and check out Embiid’s body language:

I put “inverted pick and roll” in quotations because that’s only maybe 50% of what the play is. Sometimes it looks like a brush cut and sometimes it looks like a dribble hand-off. It’s a little bit of all three of those things at once.

Whatever the case, it’s a set they’ve used before with success. All you’re really doing it spreading out the floor and putting the onus on two defenders to navigate the brush, or else Simmons is going to drive the lane. JJ ended up with the ball and got a mid-range look that really is a higher percentage shot than those iso three-pointers Butler made earlier in the year.

The only problem I have with using Ben in that situation is that he’s obviously not a threat to shoot, so if you cut off the lane, you know he’s going to dump it off to Redick instead. And in this situation, he really didn’t get any contact on Gordon Hayward, nor did JJ do a good enough job of running Hayward into Marcus Morris. It was rushed and poorly executed:

Hayward can’t just round Simmons there, you need to get some body on him or drive him into his own man.

In hindsight, the skill sets of Butler and Embiid allow for more improvisation or flexibility when you’re in a crunch time scenario like that. Butler can drive OR shoot. Embiid can get to the foul line. You only needed one-point there, and Redick was not having an amazing shooting night, yet that’s where they went.

The other thing is this:

They didn’t need to take a timeout. Taking a timeout allows Brad Stevens to sub in Marcus Smart and Terry Rozier and take Hayward and Kyrie Irving off the floor. It also allows the crowd to sort of whip themselves into a frenzy. Letting your team go down the floor, seeing the matchup, and calling the play you want is fine in that instance. I didn’t think that was a huge deal at the end of the day.

This all leads us to Brett Brown, who unsurprisingly took a lot of flak last night, not just for that final play but because of the overtime collapse.

Let’s start by taking a step back and defining Brett Brown.

Brett likes motion, movement, rhythm, tempo, and sharing of the basketball. His base offense takes bits of things he learned under Gregg Popovich in San Antonio and also incorporates some Mike D’Antoni concepts as well. It’s space and pace, right? They spread the floor, sling the ball around, and get out in transition.

All of that is fine for 45 minutes, but it runs antithetical to late game NBA basketball, which is about slowing things down and executing half-court offense. Sometimes you just have to put the ball in your best player’s hands and let him do his thing.

I know I’ve used this analogy before, but it’s kind of like a spread offense football team doing well for three quarters. They throw bubble screens and hit you with read options and really kill you in space. Then, all of a sudden, the situation changes, the defense tightens up, and you need to line up in I-formation and just give the ball to your 240 pound fullback and let him bulldoze somebody for a difficult first down.

The Sixers aren’t great with that, that concept of changing pace and slowing it down and closing out a game. I don’t know if the base offense and some of their more common sets interface well with late-game basketball. They certainly aren’t running the floor and getting transition three-pointers with 45 seconds left on the clock, and a lot of times that renders Ben Simmons as more or less useless in the half court.

I don’t think all of this makes Brett Brown a “bad coach” per se, but philosophically the late-game approach has to shift. He needs to micro-manage more than he does. It’s nice to trust your team in a hands-off way, but a younger squad can’t just feel their way through these games, they need guidance from the sidelines.

This quote from Embiid last night I think sums it up a bit:

No player should ever be saying that they don’t feel like they’re in the right situation. I know Joel is putting the onus on himself to do more, but this sounds like he’s still not fully on board with whatever the Sixers are doing right now. He also needs to not turn the ball over six times, but it’s hard to criticize a guy who put up 34 points and 16 rebounds on 59% shooting while going 12 for 12 from the foul line.

One more little Embiid nugget from David Murphy’s Inquirer story:

Any ambiguity that may have seemed present in those sentiments was quickly dispelled when Embiid was asked why he thought the ball did not find him down the stretch.

“Don’t know,” the big man responded. “Got to ask coach.”

Hmm.. I dunno. Joel sometimes has these emotional knee-jerk types of reactions. He just did this a few weeks ago and it was squashed. We’ll see if anything comes from this round of griping.

For what it’s worth, I do think the “perimeter” stuff is a bit overblown, because Joel more often than not finds himself in the post after the Sixers go through their motions in the base offense. He gets post looks off elbow sets and they find various ways to get him in the block. A good sidebar story would be to look through the film and analyze every double team he’s received over the past three or four games.

Anyway, in the overtime period they hit one of eight field goal attempts, which obviously is not going to get the job done.

They were:

  1. Redick open 3 (miss)
  2. Butler tough turnaround mid range jumper (make)
  3. Simmons tough layup from behind backboard (miss)
  4. Wilson Chandler 23-footer after offensive rebound (miss)
  5. Butler relatively open three-pointer (miss)
  6. Redick contested three-pointer with shot clock expiring (miss)
  7. Simmons transition layup against Al Horford (miss)
  8. Butler three pointer with a hand in his face (miss)

The Sixers didn’t even hit the rim on those last two possessions, with 45 and 30 seconds on the clock respectively while down by 4 and 6 points. They really just did not execute well in overtime and they missed some open shots, rushed their sets, and looked really uncomfortable in the half court.

This one stood out to me:

Butler and Embiid pick and roll? Great. Love it.

They’re just a little sloppy going through it. Butler picks up his dribble early. Embiid has Chandler wide open in the corner, but picks out Simmons who is also open under the basket. Ben ends up catching the ball behind the backboard and has a tough finish there.

On the next trip down the floor, they did this:

That’s not a bad look at all.

Yeah, Chandler might have been able to get Embiid down low there, but you can live with an open Butler three.

They just didn’t get it done when it mattered last night. If Kyrie misses at the end of regulation or JJ hits his shot, again, we’re sitting here talking about a great win. The Sixers really had some promising patches of play last night and I thought they played some ferocious defense down the stretch. They went on some nice runs to erase Boston leads, and they even built leads late in the game. They just couldn’t finish the job by executing in the half court.

Other notes:

  • The Simmons jumper wasn’t a big deal. He shot it because he had to. He’s not taking that shot during a normal possession.
  • You see the clear difference in depth in these games. The Sixers got 13 points from their bench while Boston got 26.
  • Mike Muscala couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn yesterday. His 1-8 three point total really killed them.
  • 3-7 for Ben from the foul line doesn’t get the job done.
  • Chandler had a nice game. 15 points on 5-11 shooting while going 3-6 from three? You’ll take that any day of the week.
  • The defensive rebounding in the third and fourth quarter was very good.
  • Boston didn’t shoot that well. Credit the Sixers for some of that, but you’re not gonna get a ton of 42% shooting nights from them at the Garden.
  • The national broadcasts are underwhelming.