It may be time to hit the panic button in Philadelphia. The 76ers season has been hanging by a thread all year. Entering Wednesday night, although they were without Ben Simmons for the foreseeable future, there was still some reason for optimism. The Sixers going into this game had the third easiest strength of schedule, what seemed to be a more motivated Joel Embiid coming off a career high 49 point game against the Hawks, and a record of 36-22. Things took a turn, however, when early in the first quarter of a double digit loss to the Cavs (yes, you read that right) Joel Embiid went to the locker room after being wrapped up by Ante Zizic.
At halftime, Embiid was ruled out of the game with a shoulder sprain. I’m no doctor, but from what I have gathered, a shoulder sprain can range anywhere from 1 to 8 weeks, so Embiid should be back come playoff time unless he suffers a setback. Simmons, on the other hand, has nerve impingement In his back, which could be a 2-3 week long injury if it can heal with rest and physical therapy, but could end his season if it develops into a herniated disk, which would require surgery. Needless to say, this team is officially backed into a corner.
There are a lot of takeaways from Wednesday night but aside from the injury, the biggest story is, yet again, the Sixers abysmal struggles on the road. I would be lying if I said I had done any actual research on it but I can not imagine that there has ever been a team to have the best home record in the league with a road record worse than 9-21. There just can’t be.
Their struggles on the road, in my opinion, are mostly effort based. I hate to sound like the mainstream media talking heads that pretend the only reason teams ever lose games is because the other team “wanted it more” or “had more heart” but in the Sixers case, it’s mostly true. Statistically, while every starter on the team does have a dip in statistics on the road, it isn’t by much. The only starter that has much of a change at all is Embiid, with a 7% dip in field goal percentage. But the problem really lies on the defensive end of the floor.
When the Sixers are at home, no team in the league has a better defensive net rating. On the road, 11 teams have a better defensive net rating. Statistics don’t always tell the whole story, but in this case statistics are very reflective of their play. If you watch the games they give up way more wide open looks on the road than they do at home. They give up easy offensive rebounds. They make lazy passes. They become stagnant on offense because they cannot string together enough stops defensively to gain any momentum. That is the main problem with how this team was built. When you hang your hat on the defensive end, you have to bring it on that end every single night, constantly create offense with defense, string together enough stops when you’re in a shooting slump so that other teams can’t go on runs, and take pride in the fact that nobody can score on you, and a lot of these guys just don’t seem to have that mindset. The plan, according to Brett Brown, was to play bully ball offense and smash mouth defense. So far, we are only seeming to get those things at the Wells Fargo Center. Hopefully Joel and Ben have a speedy recovery, because if this Cavs game tells us anything, things will go south very quickly if they don’t.
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