Tyrese Maxey scored 39 points in a 110-108 comeback win for the Sixers over the Clippers, shaking off a sluggish start to outlast James Harden in Philadelphia. Quentin Grimes and VJ Edgecombe chipped in with secondary scoring alongside Maxey, though errors by the young backcourt kept the Clippers alive in crunch time.
Here’s what I saw.
Tyrese Maxey, chipping away
When Maxey is shooting the cover off the ball, the Sixers have had a viable, even elite offense this season. But when he’s just a pretty good guard, producing moments of flashy offense in between misses on threes and floaters, they don’t have a whole lot going for them. The offense is simple enough that they aren’t going to simply manufacture points out of off-ball movement, and with Kelly Oubre on the shelf, they’re also down a purposeful off-ball cutter who can prey on defenses that are caught ball-watching.
At halftime, Maxey had 12 points on 12 shots, bothered once again by a switch-heavy defense and pesky (read: sometimes illegal) contributions from Kris Dunn and the wise elder statesman Chris Paul. He struggled to hit threes against the Clippers, even on open catch-and-shoot attempts, and he struggled to bail himself out with his runner/floater package. But Maxey’s case isn’t being helped by lineups that currently include multiple non-shooters on the floor at a time, with due respect to the contributions Drummond and Barlow are making otherwise. Philadelphia has mixed in different ballscreen actions this season, including double-drag looks and Spain pick-and-roll, but they struggled to consistently generate clean looks for him in the first 2.5 quarters or so of this game.
Against the run of play, Maxey started clawing himself out of the hole after halftime, mostly by sparking the Sixers in transition. As Philadelphia finally started getting stops, he put repeated pressure on the Clippers in early offense, drawing a handful of fouls to put the Sixers in the bonus for eight minutes of the third quarter. He was pretty excellent as a scorer in transition, whittling away at L.A.’s lead by attacking before they could get set, and the momentum slowly started building, one free throw at a time.
As the third quarter turned into the fourth, the Clippers’ dam broke. Preying on their tired legs, Maxey’s speed hit another gear in the closing quarter, as No. 0 went into running back mode, slicing through gaps with bad intentions before tossing in some truly absurd buckets around the rim. Xfinity Mobile Arena was borderline dead for at least the first 2.5 quarters of this game, the home crowd understandably unimpressed by the start to this one, but Maxey’s individual barrage sucked them back into it in crunch time.
Part of being a team-leading star is exactly what we saw from Maxey on Monday night — stumped by a veteran-laden team early, he found a different way to attack them, seeking a rhythm through trips to the charity stripe the way his mentor (and Monday’s opponent) James Harden showed him. And as he found the confidence and his shooting boots, Maxey ultimately put the visitors away with a fourth-quarter flurry, even if he flubbed an important press situation at the end.
Two-way excellence for Quentin Grimes
In his role as their bench offense captain, we haven’t spent much time thinking about what Grimes can do on the defensive end. He has long held a reputation as a “three-and-D” player and is one of the few guys with that label who actually brings both, but Grimes has skewed much more heavily toward offense during his brief stint in Philadelphia.
On Monday night, the Sixers needed a solution to slow down James Harden. Harden had 17 first-quarter points against the Sixers, absolutely ripping them to shreds in isolation and high pick-and-roll sets. For a spell in the first half, the Sixers turned to box-and-one defense, which was effective enough until the Clippers began to get rolling from beyond the arc, making it hard to shade coverage away from the non-Harden Clips. So it was up to someone to try to offer resistance at the point of attack, and Grimes ultimately drew the top assignment.
I thought he did a hell of a job making Harden work when the two shared the floor in the final 2.5 quarters or so. Harden is a master of grift ball with stepback range out to 30 feet, and Grimes did an outstanding job of playing Harden tight without reaching in, leading to some downright heinous attempts from the future Hall of Famer in the second half. There was no way back into this game without a Harden slowdown, so Grimes deserves tremendous credit for giving them a chance on that end.
This was also an excellent decision-making night for Grimes offensively, with his shots and touches fairly limited for the first three quarters but his impact still there to be felt. Nick Nurse inserted him into the starting lineup for the second half in place of Dominick Barlow, and the three-guard look that has defined their season to date felt like the right way to go even before it started showing up on the scoreboard. Grimes was part of one of their best sequences of the night early in the fourth, taking a hit-ahead pass from VJ Edgecombe in transition and quickly firing it to Andre Drummond for a breakaway dunk.
When they needed him in the fourth quarter, Grimes offered some of his best work all night, blocking Harden on a midrange jumper, hitting a huge pull-up three, and scoring out of a well-designed ATO from Nick Nurse. Maybe not his best Sixers game, but I would argue his most consequential.
Paul George returns, at least physically
Paul George looked well on his way to a sparkling debut in the opening minutes of this game. He canned his first shot of the night, a catch-and-shoot three in transition, and then drew three free throws on a reach-in foul shortly afterward.
Could it be? Was this the guy they were hoping for when Daryl Morey threw a four-year max at him last summer? Well, no. George would hit just one more shot in the first half, a drag-step layup deep in the paint, otherwise vacuuming up touches with nothing to show for it.
I can’t blame George individually for this, but trying to get him going led to a slow, predictable Sixers offense. Contrary to public consensus, the Sixers haven’t played at a breakneck pace this season, and in fact, they entered the night 24th in pace despite the absence of the so-called “slow vets” in Embiid and George. But George’s return only seemed to make them even slower than usual, using a lot of the vanilla, side-to-side offense that was at the center of last season’s trainwreck.
If George really has been playing five-on-five with these guys for the last month in practice, I sure hope they’ve looked better than this behind closed doors. Even if we concede that George’s return required a return to basics on some level, this was a rough performance against a team on their third game in four nights and playing the second half of a road back-to-back.
Other notes
— Another game, another big shot from VJ Edgecombe in crunch time. After a silly reach-in foul on James Harden that looked like it could be a potential pivot point of the game, Edgecombe made up for it with a monster three on a broken play.
The crunch-time free throws are another story. After a missed pair in Boston in the opener, Edgecombe missed two freebies in a big spot again on Monday.
— I wonder what the two-minute report will say about the final minute of this game.
— Andre Drummond’s game was about as ugly as it gets, but he was an absolute handful on the glass at either end, which is all you can hope for. He put in a shift.
— Jared McCain looks like he has no place in this rotation right now. His first-half minutes came alongside Edgecombe, Grimes, and a version of George trying to work his way back into rhythm, so opportunities weren’t going to be plentiful, but it looks tough for him right now.
Is more time in the G-League going to accomplish anything for McCain? I’m not sure, but I wouldn’t be opposed to repeated Delaware trips until he at least builds a conditioning base for a full game. Nurse is relegating him to mop-up duty at the end of second quarters, so he’s not going to build his legs and lungs up that way.
— Barlow’s shoe came off two different times in the first half. Lace those bad boys up a little tighter, my friend.
— Maxey has been good at most things but pretty horrific trying to navigate two-for-one situations this season. It seems like it should be much easier than he/they are making it look in those spots. Look for a decent early shot, and if it’s not there, you go into bleeding the clock mode. The Sixers somehow keep accomplishing the worst of all worlds, taking bad shots while also not gaining shot and clock advantage.
