Well that was screwed up and totally unexpected, but in a great way.

The Sixers rested James Harden and Joel Embiid on Monday night, essentially punting the second half of a back-to-back before the road trip. Expecting a second loss and forfeiting the home split, they instead won the game… OUTRIGHT, as Mike Missanelli would say. They went out and turned a schedule loss into one of the best wins of the season, complete with a Tyrese Maxey uber performance and a Shake Milton+Furkan Korkmaz rebirth. It was a Turkish revival after Kork had been banished to storage closet B, like Howie Roseman during the Chip Kelly years.

That was fun though, for real. They addressed a lot of things that killed them on Sunday night, such as a ridiculous rebounding margin, allowing only four on the offensive glass Monday night. They got the field goal volume under control, finishing +6 for the evening, and they shared the ball in their stars’ absence, throwing 27 assists while shooting 40.5% from three behind the ‘ole dribble-weave. I did the sports radio joke in the second half:

Of course the answer is a resounding no, but you see the rest of the team play differently when they have the opportunity.

“We work on it a lot,” said Doc Rivers of playing without Joel Embiid. “We know, going into the year I’ll say this, with Joel you know he’s gonna miss some games. And I thought last year we weren’t prepared for it until the second half of the year. This year we work on it every day. What are we gonna do? How are we gonna score? Space the floor. And we work on it every day. They play that dribble-weave stuff every day in practice. And so they’re comfortable when they come in the game to do that. And moving forward, we’ve been doing it with James as well. Think about that same kind of motion with James doing it. It can be pretty good, but you’ve got to give up yourself to do it, and I thought our guys did that today.”

Yeah they did, and they gained a game on Miami while pulling into a second-place tie with the Milwaukee Bucks ahead of a tough West Coast road trip.

Maxey Maxey Maxey

28 points for Tyrese Maxey, who was just electric down the stretch. He’s not gonna win most improved player, because his minutes have doubled this year, and that award usually goes to third or fourth year guys who do more without the large playing time increase, but holy cow has his game transformed. He’s hitting catch and shoot threes, driving to the rack, and cutting back on the floater he liked as a rookie.

The “Maxey, Maxey” cheers were so loud in the fourth quarter last night that you could hear it very easily on television as well.

“Hearing it is different,” Maxey said after the game. “It’s different. But I can’t take any of this credit. I’m just looking at the stats right here and guys like Shake and Furk and Paul Millsap. Paul Millsap starts tonight. I don’t think he played in the last ten games. Furk hasn’t played much. But for those guys to stay ready and come in and play 31, 27 minutes, it’s just testimony to our group.”

That’s a humble response to that question, to credit teammates instead.

Beyond the offensive stuff, it was this huge block that pretty much sealed the deal:

Maxey on that sequence:

“We turned the ball over, first of all. It was hard to get in. It was a hard spot. In my mind I was thinking, ‘either he’s gonna have to dunk on me today or I will get this block.’ It was one or the other. And just one of those plays where you have to put your body on the line. And coach Doc always messes with me, saying I’m six-foot and I need to stop trying to block shots. I got in there today and he said, ‘that was a great block, but I don’t want to see you ever block another shot again.’ It was great, though.”

Popping the Kork

18 points on 7-12 shooting while hitting 4-7 from three. Furkan Korkmaz is BACK baby. We think…

Kork had only played 49 minutes in March before this game. He had been exiled to whatever island Napoleon was sent to back in the day. I think it was called “Elba.” But here comes Furk like a bat out of hell (RIP Meatloaf), firing early and often after getting a chance to play again.

“As a player, if you don’t have that mentality (of staying engaged and positive), you’re not going to be in this stage in the NBA or in other leagues because you’ve got to be competitive,” said Korkmaz. “That was our mindset. Sometimes we play a lot of minutes, then we don’t play, we play different roles. That’s what it was huge for us to get it going, see the ball going in. Also, in the future, we’ve got to still remind ourselves, too, that we are good players and we need to show this to the people. That was one of these days today.”

Honest to God, the Sixers could use something from Korkmaz off the bench. Would really go a long way towards giving them a semblance of a rotation in the playoffs. Or maybe they get something from…

Shake

20 point Shake Milton night. He’s in the same boat as Kork, just kind of there, having fallen by the wayside. Prior to Monday night, he’d logged one double-digit scoring effort in the 2022 calendar year, a step back after his strong start to the season.

“It’s tough,” Milton explained. “You want to be the best teammate you can be, but you’re also a human being at the end of the day, too. You want to play, you want to be out there helping the team win, so definitely getting an opportunity to play this many minutes again, your eyes kind of light up. You definitely look forward to trying to take advantage of that opportunity.”

We’ve said a hundred times before, but Doc went into the playoffs last year without much of a bench plan. He was rolling 10 guys and trying to find the hot hand on a nightly basis, but if he can do some more experimentation here down the stretch and come up with a legitimate eight-man grouping, then you’ll feel a lot better about those non-Embiid minutes come April.

Other notes:

  • In a contest between DeAndre Jordan and Paul Millsap, the answer is neither. This should have been the Paul Reed and/or Charles Bassey game, but alas, it was not to be. There was one stretch where Jordan got lobbed two times in a row by Bam Adebayo, and it was ugly.
  • Every time Georges Niang drives and/or attacks a close out I’m thinking it’s gonna be an offensive foul or blocked shot. He looks so awkward doing it but somehow ends up at the rim and gets off some decent shots. It’s like watching a train barreling downhill and slowly off the tracks.
  • Tobias Harris 6-12 for 14 points. He is the same player with Embiid/Harden as he is without Embiid/Harden. He’s just not capable of “taking over a game.”
  • I’ll end with an Erik Spoelstra quote. He was asked what happened to Tyler Herro’s defense: “Watch this game, I mean Maxey played great. He was getting to his right hand all night long, regardless of what we were doing and whatever the scheme was or whoever was on him he was getting to his right and getting to where he wanted to go. We are much better than that. I don’t want to take anything away from them or how they played, they played a great basketball game and they sealed it at the end. It was a possession game and it got to about two minutes and Maxey banged home some big shots and they created that separation but Tyler has been one of our better individual defenders during the course of the year. I am going to chalk this up hopefully as an anomaly but hopefully it catches our attention as well.”