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Alright.

Let’s talk about Brett Brown and everything else that went wrong last night.

I’ll frame the article with this disclaimer:

One of the things that bugs me about Philadelphia sports fandom is that we tend to narrow our focus when looking to assign blame. For whatever reason, we insist on pinpointing one specific thing or one specific person when seeking accountability or trying to explain what went wrong over the course of a 60 or 48 minute game. We do it in football, when we say “the offense deserves the blame!” or “the defense deserves the blame!” or “the refs deserve the blame!” While identifiable mistakes might tip the scales towards one or more of those phases of the game, you know as well as I do that there is typically blame to go around when you suffer a bad loss in any sport. It’s very rarely ever on just one person or boiled down to one play.

To that point, there was a lot that went wrong in Chicago last night.

I watched the final five minutes of the game three times this morning and wrote down these bullet point problems:

1. Robin Lopez was getting offensive rebounds against Mike Scott, who was playing center in the Sixers’ small ball look.
2. The field goal drought went from 7:10 on the clock to the 3:29 mark. The only points they scored in that time frame were two Ben Simmons free throws.
3. JJ Redick bad pass turnover looking for Scott
4. some easy pick and roll switches put Zach LaVine in mismatches against Scott (the bigger, macro-level issue here is that the Sixers still really struggle against good guards)
5. Redick misses wide-open three after Harris offensive rebound
6. There was a defensive sequence where Redick got switched onto Lauri Markkanen, Tobias Harris got lost, and Otto Porter was wide-open for a game-tying three-pointer.
7. Ben Simmons offensive foul while trying to set a screen (kind of a weird call)
8. Butler offensive foul (I don’t know if this was an over the back, I thought he actually made a good play on the ball)
9. Simmons lost the ball while driving 1v3 for some reason after a brilliant steal on the defensive end
10. Scott’s foul on Lopez, which I’m not sure was a foul. He did get some forearm on him before the shot was taken.
11. Blown switch on LaVine’s game-winning basket
12. I didn’t like the final play call (the first one). Not sure if Ben was supposed to go to Harris there, but Butler was the target, he was closest to the rim, and his momentum was taking him away from the basket. On the second one, they didn’t run anybody at the rim at all and tried to get Jimmy on a heave.

Thoughts on those bullets after the jump:

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Brett Brown sounded like Doug Pederson on Monday.

That’s not a bad thing, right?

We’re talking about different sports though, and while basketball situations certainly are not perfectly congruent to football situations, the macro-level ideas are typically the same. In channeling Pederson, Brett Brown said he wanted to be aggressive Saturday night when asking Ben Simmons to intentionally miss his second free-throw attempt while down by two points with 10 seconds remaining on the clock.

It seemed like a head-scratcher at the time, since the most common practice in that situation would be to attempt to make the second free throw, cut the lead to one, and then foul Golden State as soon as possible. You would then have 6-8 seconds to come down the court and get off a shot, being unable to advance the ball without a timeout.

What’s the higher percentage play?

Is it missing the free throw and going for the rebound and put back? Or is it traveling the length of the floor to try to spring a decent look?

I asked Brett on Monday about the data supporting his decision, and whether the analytics steered him in any specific direction the other night:

“I’m glad you brought that up and I thought you would. This is what you should all hear – I will coach aggressively. I will coach aggressively. Is it reckless or is it just a calculated risk at times? It’s gonna be a calculated risk. When I look on the floor and I have a 57% free throw shooter, with no timeouts, we don’t have Joel Embiid, it’s a stage of the game that I think we can steal something. They didn’t have DeMarcus (Cousins) on the floor. We subbed and brought Jonah Bolden on the floor. So at that point, it’s like an onside kick, you start the second half with an onside kick and maybe that works or maybe that doesn’t and you’re either a hero or a goat.

My point is, when we study it, and I have a gut feel on something, you judge the situation and you’re playing the NBA champs at home – with all those types of things, and they wouldn’t have expected it – then I’m gonna do it. We’ll live with the consequences. Normally if you’ve got a timeout, or JJ Redick at the line, you know, you’re not going to do it. So under those circumstances I did it. I’ll do it again. In relation to what the numbers say, it’s too vague, it’s mist to the question you’re asking because there’s too many events surrounding what I just said. Without getting into all those iterations again, that’s why I did it.”

There’s your explanation, which is fair to me. I think the consideration of Ben Simmons as a below-average foul shooter certainly plays into the decision to miss intentionally instead of relying on him to make two in a row.

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In a battle of teams missing their best players, the 76ers’ “supporting cast” got the job done.

I put “supporting cast” in quotation marks because that group is comprised of All-Star Ben Simmons, four-time All-Star Jimmy Butler, and a future All-Star in Tobias Harris.

Nice win in Oklahoma City, and only deserving of a half-asterisk, in my mind. Sure, Paul George wasn’t available, but the Sixers played on the road without Joel Embiid and Boban Marjanovic and found a way to beat the Thunder for the first time since November of 2008. Furthermore, it was their first road win against OKC since they were actually the Seattle Supersonics. Philly had never won a game in Oklahoma City, ever.

You can thank Harris for that, because he was phenomenal on the night, his best performance in a Sixers uniform. Tobias finished with 32 points on 11-19 shooting while dropping in 5 of 7 three point attempts and going 5-5 from the foul line. He added 5 rebounds and 3 assists, plus a steal and a block while turning the ball over just once and committing only two personal fouls.

His biggest contribution was a borderline insane 4th quarter sequence where he made four consecutive clutch plays, and that’s where I’d like to pick it up, with 5:06 on the clock and OKC having clawed back to tie the game at 93. I want to start here because as we near the playoffs, the most important topic is going to be the end of the fourth quarter and how Brett Brown and his players execute in tight half-court offense situations.

Four Harris sequences more or less won the Sixers the game:

1. a spot up corner three (Sixers 96/OKC 93)
2. a brilliant rotation and block on Steven Adams, resulting in offensive basket interference (Sixers 96/OKC 93)
3. a difficult bully ball floater over Dennis Schroder (Sixers 98/OKC 93)
4. a pull-up three pointer (Sixers 101/OKC 93)

It was incredibly fun to watch in real time, an 8-0 Tobias Harris run that took us from 5:06 on the clock to 2:56 and gave the Sixers an eight point lead.

Take your pick of clips from those four plays. I’ll go with this one:

Hell of a feed from Ben right there.

But it got sloppy after that, really sloppy, and we’ll talk about it after the jump:

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