Brett Brown noted on January 7th that his Sixers team was committing fewer turnovers as a byproduct of more set plays being dialed up in the half court.

That was before Joel Embiid dislocated his finger, a time when Brown’s squad was struggling offensively and needed a boost to get themselves unstuck and rolling again after grinding to a stagnant halt near the season’s halfway point. Embiid only played two games in January but turned the ball over only five times total, a 2.5 per game average number that was much lower than the 3.2 and 3.0 numbers he posted in December and November, respectively. It would have extrapolated nicely, we assume, had he remained healthy.

Regardless of Embiid’s absence, and whether or not that’s the prime catalyst for the change, the Sixers are now a top-15 ball protection squad in the NBA, having climbed out of the bottom ten to land in a three-way tie for 11th place, turning the ball over just 14.6 times per game on the season.

That’s a better number than the 14.9 they posted per game last season, and much better than the 16.5 they finished with after the 52-win regular season. Brown’s team is actually on pace right now to commit the fewest turnovers since 2012-2013, when Doug Collins was coaching the squad.

Part of the reason for the improvement, play calling aside, is that Ben Simmons has gotten his individual turnover issues under control. This year he’s averaging a career-low 3.3 turnovers per game, and you can see how the per game average has steadily dropped over the course of the season:

  • October: 4.8 turnovers per game
  • November: 3.5 turnovers per game
  • December: 3.6 turnovers per game
  • January:  2.1 turnovers per game

8.2 assists vs. 2.1 turnovers is close to a 4 to 1 assist to turnover ratio for Simmons in January. That’s fantastic, and he’s doing that while taking on a more significant role in Embiid’s absence.

Speaking to that recent improvement, if you go through the best 12 turnover games the Sixers have played this season, 10 were played in January or December:

No surprise that they’re 8-4 in those games, even with that funky Dallas outlier in there. And if you want to be more hyper-specific, you’d have to go back 18 games now, to mid-December, to find the last time the Sixers turned the ball over more than 15 times. Those games used to happen rather frequently.

Oftentimes they’d simply win on the offensive glass and turn over the opponent enough times to offset total field goal attempts, which is why bloated turnover numbers didn’t truly matter as much as everybody thought they did. To that point, despite their issues, the Sixers are averaging 87.6 field goal attempts per game while limiting opponents to 85.4 of their own, which is the second-lowest number in the NBA. Typically, Brett’s teams excel in ancillary areas that negate the turnover problem, but now they’re still doing that while protecting the ball a little bit better at the same time.

We’ll see what happens when Embiid returns, and maybe his issues with ball protection cause the number to balloon a bit, but you’ve watched the same thing I have in recent weeks. There’s more pick and roll, more “horns,” more double staggers – a variety of different sets and calls that we didn’t see in the early part of the season, when the Sixers were left to their own devices and simply dumping the ball down to the post.

It’s a good thing to see.