Instant observations: Sixers suffer brutal loss in overtime to hospital Nuggets

The Sixers were gifted a date with the shorthanded Nuggets on a back-to-back and failed to capitalize, ultimately falling 125-124 after Tyrese Maxey’s overtime game-winner attempt fell harmlessly off the rim.

Here’s what I saw.

Horrendous loss

This was a tremendously frustrating game to watch for Sixers fans in light of who was keeping the game close for the Nuggets. But this was also just a classic combination of “first game back from a road trip” and “undermanned team shoots the lights out,” and as they weathered the storm early, the Sixers did well to respond as Denver kept hitting nonsense three after nonsense three. Trust your offensive process, stay together, and the victory will come eventually.

At least, that was how it felt for about 2.5 quarters, leading into a Sixers run that you assumed was going to be the closing kick to put this one away. Instead, they continued playing with their food, playing scatterbrained defense, and overpursuing the basketball for seemingly no reason. Quentin Grimes was one of their worst offenders, trying to get a steal on every possession to comical, slapstick-adjacent results. After walking right up to the line several times, he blew through it by fouling Hunter Tyson on a made three, giving the Nuggets a huge emotional lift as they went on a run early in the fourth. Obviously, Grimes was far from the only culprit in the wayward defense department. The letdowns in this game came in familiar departments, with the Sixers overhelping middle and playing leaky point-of-attack defense.

Some of what happened can only be chalked up to fluky shooting variance. Zeke Nnaji is shooting 23 percent from three for the season and is a dare shooter on every scouting report, and he went 4/5 from three against the Sixers. Bruce Brown shot 50 percent from three. There’s “overhelping” and there’s picking your battles, and the Sixers ended up on the wrong end of some big nights from Nuggets role players. Tip your cap to them, for sure.

On the other end of the floor, the Sixers made some brutal errors against a team that should have been underequipped to slow them down. After a huge stop sparked by VJ Edgecombe late in the fourth, Joel Embiid threw the ball away on a silly attempt to go hit ahead to Paul George, the ball ultimately bouncing away from Philadelphia. Those errors kept coming in overtime, with Embiid throwing another pass at Paul George’s feet at a moment where it felt they could have put it away with just one more made shot and a stop. It left the door open for the Nuggets to take this game with a scramble play.

A mixed night for the starting backcourt

Joel Embiid’s recent run of form might have managed to push other players and performances to the side, but Tyrese Maxey remains front and center in everything good the Sixers are doing.It was a lower-volume game for Maxey, but a hyper-effective one for most of the night, with Maxey attacking in spurts as the Nuggets hovered around Embiid in the middle of the floor.

Unfortunately for the Sixers, Maxey could not figure it out in crunch time, when Embiid was dragging ass and the offense slowed to a creep. On his end-of-game possession late in the fourth, Maxey nearly dribbled the ball out of bounds before harmlessly throwing it off the rim. In overtime, with the Sixers down one, Maxey broke the initial layer of the defense but missed his falling runner, missing out on another chance to win the game for Philly. Good as he has been, his end-game heroics have lagged behind his early offense and mid-game mastery.

It was a much weirder game for his counterpart in the backcourt. VJ Edgecombe spent the first 2.5 quarters of this game unable to do much of anything (aside from passing) on the offensive end of the floor. His drives to the basket were wild, his threes nowhere close to dropping, so he slipped a bit into playmaker mode, looking for his big target in the middle of the floor and shooters around the perimeter. It was a far cry from ass-kicking performances in New York, Dallas, and Memphis, but other guys were rolling, so you can excuse him for that.

Somebody woke Edgecombe up in the second half, and it may have been the officials. He grew increasingly frustrated with no-calls around the basket, letting the officials have it on one or two of them. As his anger built, so did his momentum from beyond the three-point line. One catch-and-shoot three turned into a pull-up jumper, and before you knew it, he went from scoreless at halftime to a 15-point second half, every single point coming via his jumper. With the game hanging in the balance and the Sixers running clogged toilet offense, Edgecombe had the stones (and the skill) to hit some monster threes in the guts of the game. Did you think he was going to hit crunch-time, pull-up threes with a hand in his face before the midpoint of his first season? If you say yes, I think you are a liar.

Just like in the Knicks game, what made his work on offense more impressive was the motor and impact he showcased on the other end of the floor. Jalen Pickett tried desparately to take him to the weight room in the post to get overtime buckets, and Edgecombe refused to budge, ripping one possession right out of his hands to send the Sixers running the other way. He had a hell of a second half, if nothing else.

The big guy looks good, but struggles in crunch time

The full-strength Nuggets are a team that can throw a lot of problems at Joel Embiid. Nikola Jokic demands his full attention on the defensive end, Valanciunas is another big body to battle off the bench, Aaron Gordon is an elite help defender, and their shooting will drag you out to the perimeter more than he’d like. But the group they faced on Monday night? Not equipped to do much with the big guy on an individual level.

Denver knew that as well as anyone. They aggressively doubled Embiid for most of this game, often matching him with smalls and then using DaRon Holmes as the auto-doubler off of whoever Philadelphia’s worst shooter/dunker spot target was. If the Nuggets stayed in a more traditional look with Holmes as the initial matchup against Embiid, the double was coming, just from a smaller player in the help spot. In the first couple of minutes, Embiid was a bit slow on the draw and had a turnover or two batting the ball toward teammates. But he eventually settled in and started quarterbacking the offense properly.

Embiid’s physical fluidity continues to look better and better, with the star center making quick (and repeated moves) in the post while defending from the rim to the three-point line on the other end of the floor. In rare moments where he didn’t draw a second defender, Embiid put some of Denver’s smaller players in the torture chamber — he hit a nasty half-spin move against Bruce Brown on the block, rolling right off of him and into a finish at the basket. The midrange jumper was stuck on automatic for most of the game, and it would be even more devastating if he could just get some more three-point jumpers to fall.

I view Embiid’s improved physical state as directly connected to his increased willingness to pass and play a ball movement offense. As Embiid’s health has improved, he has not had to think so much about the little details, like his pivots and steps through the lane, and can instead shift his focus on finding the open windows wherever they present themselves. Philadelphia has moved the ball around the perimeter with gusto over the last week and a half, sparked by Embiid’s determination to share the ball in the middle of the floor. So when a team hits him with constant pressure as the Nuggets did on Monday, there was little doubt how he’d approach the game. A good blend of passing and scoring.

All of that said, man, did he have some brutal moments late in this game. Playing more minutes than in any game this season, his decision-making and passing let him down late, giving the upstart Nuggets far more chances than they should have had to steal this game.

Tough night for McCain

For the love of god, I need Jared McCain to start making open shots. There was a contingent of Sixers fans ready to throw Nick Nurse off the roof of the Xfinity Mobile Arena when McCain wasn’t immediately thrust into a 25-30 minute role upon his return this season. If anything, the head coach has been quite patient with McCain, continually playing him despite a miserable run of form. And McCain did manage to hit a zone buster three at the end of a long possession in the first half, which always brings the hope that this might be the shot to get him in the right headspace.

It did not, and I am not sure we should keep hoping for a good Jared McCain this year. He is clearly overthinking and playing his way out of favorable spots that he would have killed to be in last season. McCain traveled on a botched pump fake that should have been an easy sidestep jumper, smoked a layup after beating his man off the dribble, and watched threes go over his head, not because of a lack of desire to play defense but an inability to change his height and wingspan.