Raise your hand if you had Shake Milton starting a national television game against the LA Lakers on a Saturday night in late January.
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Yeah, me neither, but it worked out just fine. Shake held up well, and the trio of Ben Simmons, Tobias Harris, and Al Horford carried the load, scoring 73 combined points to make up for the absence of Joel Embiid and Josh Richardson.
It was prototypical Sixers home game against a good opponent, which means that they were up for this one. The energy level was high, the defense was solid, and they out-shot Los Angeles 78-76 on the strength of 12 steals and a +6 total rebounding margin, which negated 21 turnovers. LA couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn from deep, finishing 6-30 from three point range but cutting the lead to five points late in the fourth while on the final game of an opposite-coast road trip.
It was a 7-0 Al Horford run that sealed the deal, a beautiful pick and pop three-pointer with Ben Simmons handling the ball and collapsing the paint like only he can. The Sixers needed their highly-paid stars to play like stars on Saturday night, and that’s exactly what they got.
Fantastic game for the 23 year old, who finished with 28 points on 12-15 shooting, 10 rebounds, eight assists, and four steals. He did most of that without a tooth, which was knocked out at some point in the first half. As such, he didn’t after the game, because a dentist was fixing him up.
More importantly, he was active in the fourth quarter, contributing this over the game’s final 12 minutes:
He stayed involved and did not disappear, getting to the rim, grabbing boards, and playing his typically elite defense. Brett Brown used him in a variety of ways, as he explains here:
You saw that Horford/Simmons brush and roll, Brown’s favorite play, the one that Furkan Korkmaz is running these days in lieu of the departed JJ Redick.
In this set, Horford is really comfortable slipping the screen, and with Simmons’ elite ability to get downhill off just one step, one turn of the corner, he was creating a ton of space on the pop, which you can see here:
“Those are the positions I kind of like to be in,” Horford said after the game. “Ben is great at what he does, drew two (defenders), flipped it back, and that was a big shot for us.”
(sorry about the audio in the clip, I don’t know what the hell happened. I cut the thing at 12:15 a.m.)
Looked iffy for a bit there, with:
But Harris particularly did a nice job on Howard, keeping him off the glass to the tune of five rebounds. He also only finished with one field goal attempt, so LA wasn’t able to do too much against what I thought was one of their better mismatches on that end.
“Honestly a center like Dwight, or a guy like Gasol, you try to keep them off the glass and limit some of the things that they want to do,” said Harris postgame. “So whenever you see a guy who obviously weighs more or they’re taller, it’s a chance for them to go down on the block and make a 1v1 play or what not. So just defend, keep ’em off the glass, try to do some things they don’t normally do in their system.”
Philly did a decent job all night long of trying to avoid putting themselves into compromising defensive positions. They fought through some screens, looked solid in off-ball defense, and didn’t give LA anything too easy despite missing their star rim protector in Embiid.
Brown decided to take Simmons out a little earlier in the first quarter than he typically does, bringing Raul Neto and Furkan Korkmaz off the bench. Ben came back in around the three minute mark of the first quarter in a small ball five role surrounded by Neto, Korkmaz, Zhaire Smith, and Mike Scott.
Smith had to leave the game early with a left ankle sprain, a real bummer for him after finally getting a chance to play with the A team, but you see in these scenarios without Embiid that Simmons can do a little more in the paint when playing faux-center in a smaller lineup.