That’s a pretty pitiful road loss, the type of loss that helps determine whether you’re playing as a #1 seed or a #3 seed come playoff time.

After two days off, you take a short trip down Interstate 95 to play a 6-13 Wizards team, you start out fine, and then completely stop playing defense. The effort fades as you give up 40 second quarter points. You turn the ball over 21 times and concede 21 second-chance points to the NBA’s 23rd-ranked offensive rebounding team. Then you put together a 10-0 run only to watch the bottom fall out again.

The Sixers have now lost 10 straight games at Capital One Arena, that last win coming way back in 2013, which feels like a lifetime ago. This is the type of film you put straight in the garbage bin, so I’ll keep this recap very short, because nobody needs to spend too much time reliving that fiasco.

Coughing it up

Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons combined for 15 of the 21 turnovers, and some of them were just head-scratchingly bad, the types of turnovers they were making as rookies.

I made two clips for you, the first one with all eight of Embiid’s turnovers:

The turnover around 40 seconds pretty much sums up Joel’s night. He’s just casually strolling up the floor, easily pick-pocketed from behind, and then Brett Brown turns around and slaps the scorer’s table.

Embiid logged two offensive fouls, a three-second violation, one palming whistle, and then lost the ball on the other four occasions.

Here are Ben’s turnovers:

First things first, this number should actually be six, because they showed a replay of the basket interference and the ball had just come off the rim by the time he flushed it home.

Remove that play and you’ve got two instances of stepping out of bounds, one traveling, two lost balls, and a bad pass. His issues were more about trying to make some plays that just weren’t there, a couple of higher risk passes that didn’t find their mark.

On the season, Simmons’ per game turnover number is up to 3.9, from 3.5. Embiid’s number is actually down to a career-low 3.2, down from the 3.5 he posted last season. As a team, the Sixers are 28th in the league with 16.7 turnovers per game, which is worse than the 14.9 they posted in the 2018-2019 campaign.

Again, and I’ve harped on this for a while now, but turnover margins in the NBA are so small that the Sixers can make a huge jump even if only Ben and Joel find a way to cut down their individual numbers. For instance, if Embiid and Simmons each turned the ball over one fewer time per game, that 16.7 number becomes 14.7, which is 11th overall. And if they each turn the ball over 0.5 fewer times per game (aka they combine for one fewer turnover), then that number becomes 15.7, which is 18th, and certainly workable.

The problem is that you still see a lot of the same stuff you saw these guys doing as rookies, and that’s on Brett Brown, to an extent. He got a pair of guys who played one year of college basketball each, one of whom didn’t shoot the ball and didn’t have to shoot the ball, and the other who didn’t even start playing until he was a teenager. Professional coaches theoretically shouldn’t have to teach fundamentals, but in the one-and-done world we’re living in now, most top talent isn’t entering the NBA with four years of Jay Wright mentoring on the resume.

It’s on all three of them to fix the problem, because this team only goes as far as Simmons, Embiid, and Brown can take it. The real concern is how much of this is fundamentals and how much of this is the players not being able to focus mentally and get themselves in the right frame of mind for these types of games, which happens way too frequently. That’s just a nice way of saying they sometimes think they can come in and dog it, just sleepwalk their way to wins over lesser opponents.

Last night Washington scored 30 points off Sixer turnovers, so there’s the statistic that wraps up this section of the recap.

Other notes:

  • They wasted a great Tobias Harris game, a season-high 33 points as he tried to keep the Sixers in it.
  • Mike Scott had another 0% shooting night. He’s really struggling, now 1-16 from three dating back to the Sacramento game.
  • Embiid had a nice scoring and rebounding night when he wasn’t turning the ball over. 26 points on 7-12 shooting, 11-14 from the foul line, 1-2 from three. His offensive profile was alright, he just did not look mentally locked in at all.
  • Only 77 field goal attempts for the Sixers, which is tied for the second fewest this year. The lowest total was 72, in the Knicks game where they shot 40 free throws.
  • have a nice weekend