Ben Simmons heard Jared Dudley refer to him as an “average” half court player and responded with 31 points on 11-13 shooting while going 9-11 from the foul line and adding nine assists and four rebounds. He turned the ball over just three times last night.

That’s nothing short of elite, Ben’s performance, and it spurred the Sixers to a comfortable 16-point game three triumph in Brooklyn.

This performance feels even more impressive than what the Sixers did in game two, which is crazy to think when you consider that they scored 145 points and tied an NBA record by scoring 51 in the third quarter alone. On Thursday night, with no Joel Embiid, playing on the road, and considering some of the stuff said in the media, Brett Brown’s team showed up in a big way. Outside of a rough stretch to end the third quarter, a Caris LeVert hot streak, and some tricky navigation of Boban’s foul situation, Philly controlled the game throughout.

Remember how Simmons, JJ Redick, and Tobias Harris combined for just 18 points in the game one loss? Last night they scored 86 point on 29-48 field goal shooting, stepping it up in Embiid’s absence to propel the Sixers to a 2-1 series lead.

Observations:

Ben Simmons

Elite defensively and elite offensively.

He guarded D’Angelo Russell on 41 possessions last night, and Russell shot 7-15 against him, but the Nets point guard needed 26 total shots to score 26 points. Players not named D’Angelo Russell shot 2-11 against Simmons and all Brooklyn players shot just 3-12 from three. Ben did an excellent job on the perimeter, and I wanted to highlight this play here, because even though Ben’s offense was so good, I think that sometimes we become distracted in regard to how good he is defensively:

Spencer Dinwiddie is hard to stick with. Ben moves his feet, denies the lane, fights through the screen, takes a forearm shrug, and forces a brick.

Offensively, you can go in 100 different directions, but I thought Ben was a great roll man last night. This is something Sixers fans have been complaining about for months now. Why doesn’t Brett Brown use Simmons more as a screener and roller?

They did that last night, and got stuff like this:

This was part of a ludicrous sequence of possessions where Ben was twice a screener and roller, resulting in two straight buckets at the rim, then a third play where he faked a dribble hand-off and got a straight run to the basket for a monster jam.

To cap off the performance, Ben went 4-6 from the line when Kenny Atkinson decided to go “hack-a-Simmons” and put him on the foul line. Ben, a 60% free throw shooter, finished 20 percentage points above his regular season average from the foul line last night.

Tobias Harris

A healthy 29 points and 16 rebounds on an 11-19 shooting night. Harris was 6-6 from three and just looked so much more assertive than he was in the first two games.

Look at how his efforts were spread out across the arc:

That’s the sign of a guy who is feeling it, the fact that he was willing and able to pull up from anywhere last night.

His usage in this game was 23.7%, second highest on the team behind Simmons. And he had a team high 98.8 defensive rating, guarding a variety of players and allowing just two made baskets against him all night long. He had Rodions Kurucs for 21 possessions and Joe Harris for 13 possessions and those guys combined to shoot 0-3 against him.

Harris also pulled down 15 of his 16 rebounds on the defensive glass and was credited with a team-high 6 box outs. He honestly did a really nice job in stabilizing things down low after some early sequences where Greg Monroe had trouble with Jarrett Allen.

Go through every basic and advanced stat on NBA.com and there’s a lot to like about Harris’ game three performance. He was phenomenal.

Jimmy Butler

16 points on 13 shots plus a perfect 7-7 at the foul line, he also added 7 assists.

It was another efficient night for Butler, even though I felt like he passed up some open shots. They did establish him early through the pick and roll, and I liked the 31 PNR with Butler as the ball handler and Simmons as the roll man. I would not mind seeing more of that in game four if Embiid is again unable to play.

Jimmy again took on most of the ball-handling duties with the second unit, as Brett Brown kept T.J. McConnell out of the rotation for the second-straight game.

On the second unit, this is what you saw:

  1. Butler (faux point guard)
  2. James Ennis
  3. Harris (also brought the ball up a bit)
  4. Mike Scott
  5. Boban

It’s easy to play a lot of pick and roll with Butler and Harris handling the ball in this unit. Boban as a massive human being is an easy dump down to beat the Brooklyn zone, and you have multiple guys here who can shoot the ball. They’ve had success with this lineup, which is the better alternative to using T.J. and Jonathon Simmons, like we saw in game one.

Greg Monroe

A lot of grumbling last night about Monroe, a guy who wasn’t even on this team a few weeks ago and then found himself starting in the playoffs.

Early on I thought he was going to be a liability, when Jarrett Allen got a couple of boards and easy looks at the rim. But I honestly thought Monroe did a nice job in the first quarter of hitting the offensive glass and pulling down some rebounds, it just didn’t seem like he had the legs for those put back efforts, which is why he shot 4-13 from the floor.

At the end of the third quarter, when Boban got into foul trouble, Monroe came back out against a small Nets lineup and Brooklyn immediately went on a 14-3 run that cut an 18 point lead to 7. Brett Brown adjusted and went small with Mike Scott, Boban came back and ultimately fouled out, then Scott came back in to finish small.

Here’s what Brett said about the usage of his bigs:

When we realized Joel wasn’t going to play, you feel comfortable, you’re confident in your defensive scheme with bigs being back. So Boban and Greg being back we were confident in that. To have Greg be available is quite handy. You always knew that Jonah (Bolden was available), if the game became a little bit smaller, or if those two legitimate bigs weren’t as effective as they would be, in the event Boban fouls out, then you go to plan C with Mike Scott, and just go apples for apples where you’ve got a bunch of 6’9″ and 6’8″ guys doing a lot of switching and trying to cover for JJ where we’re not putting him on an island in unfavorable matchups.

Fair enough, and listen –

I know people were calling for an earlier small ball look, or to use Ben at the five (a lot of people want to see this, and they aren’t wrong) but the Sixers have a ton of size on this Nets team, and you saw how effective Boban was when he was in the game. If you go small with Mike Scott too early, he’s not a good defender in space, and if the Nets then throw some LeVert/Dinwiddie/Russell lineup at you, those are three guys who can really attack in space and beat you off the dribble. You’re then trying to respond to the other team instead of forcing them to adapt to your personnel. Instead, the Sixers were willing to play drop defense with their bigs, concede some floaters, and when LeVert cooled off, the Sixers pushed the lead back out to double digits.

Monroe and Boban had 10 offensive rebounds while the Sixers put up 20 second chance points, so you have to think about staying on the front foot offensively before pulling the plug and going small ball right away. That option is always going to be there when you need it.

JJ Redick

26 points, 5-9 from deep, and just a clinic in movement and design.

There were some plays last night where Redick was just putting his defender through the meat grinder, running him on the baseline, into screens, through staggers, and all sorts of stuff.

We talked about this a lot, about beating the “top lock” and springing JJ for open looks, and on plays like this one, Dinwiddie has to navigate a bunch of bodies before trying to skirt by Boban to stick with Redick:

That’s just a baseline floppy type of play. The Sixers don’t run a lot of floppy, but when you start a guy closer to the basket, you can move him around and put him through more stuff defensively, make him cover more ground.

They put Dinwiddie through the gauntlet on a sideline out of bounds play later in the game, on the sequence where Jared Dudley was whistled for the foul:

That stuff is there all night long. Drag those guards in and around Boban and they’ll get sick of it pretty quickly.

Ben also set some great screens last night.

Other notes:

  • Dudley had a really bad game last night, but he did get Simmons to air ball a shot on the first possession in which he guarded him. While going in for the rebound, Dudley took a Boban elbow to the head. Tough night all around for the veteran.
  • Rodions Kurucs, who also took umbrage with Ben’s comments in the media, fell asleep on the big dunk right before halftime. He finished with three points on 1-5 shooting.
  • James Ennis didn’t have a great game. 0-3 from three with a team-high 4 turnovers, some that were just total situational killers.
  • Playing zone against Boban has been mostly useless. It’s so easy to dump the ball to him at the foul line, and even when Brooklyn invites him to shoot, he’s hitting from outside the paint at better than 60% in this series, which is insane. That has to be really frustrating for Kenny Atkinson.
  • I think I’m in the camp of “Zhaire Smith can give the Sixers something in this series.”
  • The Sixers scored 16 fast break points in this game, up from 12 in game two and 4 in game one. They’ve really improved in this are as the series has progressed.
  • They had a series-high 16 turnovers last night, but Brooklyn also had 16. Philly scored 20 points off those turnovers while Brooklyn scored 21, so it was basically a wash. The Sixers shot only two fewer field goals than the Nets (93 vs. 95).
  • An 0-4 three-point night from Joe Harris, who has been totally AWOL in this series.
  • The Sixers overall shot 86% from the line, up from 81% in game two and 69% in game one.

Happy Friday.