Instant observations: Sixers open road trip with tough loss to Chicago Bulls

Crunch-time issues led to another Sixers loss in Chicago, with Philadelphia falling 109-102 to the Bulls despite 31 points from Joel Embiid and 27 points from Tyrese Maxey.

Here’s what I saw.

Finding the balance with Embiid

As Tyrese Maxey has climbed to his rightful spot in the captain’s chair for Philly, Joel Embiid has been viewed through an even harsher lens than usual. Sixers lose with him? He ruined the flow. Sixers lose without him? His contract and availability are killing the team. Whether he plays well is sometimes immaterial to the debate surrounding him as a player. But he is, as it turns out, still capable of playing basketball pretty well.

Friday’s first half felt like the right balance of Embiid hunting his own offense while playing his part to get the rest of the team going. The Sixers got off to a 13-2 start with Embiid setting bone-crushing screens at the point of attack, mixing in face-up jumpers and the occasional duck-in along the way. When Zach Collins came in to spell old friend Nic Vucevic, Embiid was very deliberate about attacking the smaller/thinner big man, generating some deep paint touches for flip shots around the rim. His handle was the main thing that let him down — Embiid had a couple of driving opportunities that went awry as he tried to collect his handle and turn the ball over for a layup, coughing it up to Chicago instead.

Finding the right balance of Embiid and Maxey this season has been trickier than it ought to be, even though they play so effortlessly off of one another in two-man actions. Embiid had some excellent quick decision-making for hockey assists to Maxey in this one, driving into space before hitting a kick-out that eventually found its way to their most dangerous shooter. When the ball can simply find Maxey in an open pocket without No. 0 having to run through a maze of screens and handoffs to get there, it allows Maxey to provide significant offensive value without overtaxing him. How these two play off of and understand one another is key to hitting their highest ceiling in the playoffs if they hope to compete this year.

That said, Maxey’s best scoring flourishes largely came on his own without Embiid to run with and off of, with the younger guard deferring a bit when the two shared the floor. There is a real conversation to be had about how to structure the offense around the full-strength version of this team, but the Sixers had some good offensive process moments that led to poor results in crunch time, missed threes from VJ Edgecombe and Tyrese Maxey as two examples. That will lead to a lot of people focusing on the fact that Embiid featured on the possessions, which feels like misplaced blame, even if there are larger structural questions. Don’t just run static post-ups in the guts of the game, would be the corner I’m standing on.

I continue to be more concerned about the defensive stuff. In recent games, it has felt like Embiid is getting more comfortable and more helpful on the defensive end as he gets more reps and gains a better understanding of his current physical limitations. Still, he lacks the recovery speed to make plays with the same regularity that he used to, and while his positioning and effort have slowly improved over time, Embiid is more susceptible than ever to being beaten in space by smaller perimeter players, as Coby White showed in crunch time.

Stabilizing the defense

The Sixers have stabilized as a firm playoff team largely on the strength of their defense. Their early-season shooting was eventually going to cool off, and they were able to minimize the impact of their regression by locking in on the other end. For the last month, they’ve been among the best defensive teams in basketball.

You wouldn’t have known that watching Friday night’s first half. Nick Nurse was red hot in the huddle (quite literally, according to Prime’s Cassidy Hubbarth), watching his team make basic execution errors he must have thought they had grown out of. The Sixers struggled to pass off switches, failing to communicate or otherwise identify that they needed to pass off a driver, leading to a lot of uncontested drives down Main Street for the Bulls. Quentin Grimes appeared to be a target of Nurse’s ire, yanked out of the game after a particularly brutal second-quarter stretch in favor of Justin Edwards, who is not exactly Scottie Pippen himself.

(Perhaps Nurse should have stuck with Grimes on the pine, because choosing Grimes over Dominick Barlow in crunch time looks like an indefensible decision in hindsight. While Barlow’s inability to shoot did cause some floor spacing issues, the Sixers handily lost Grimes’ minutes all night long.)

Having blown a massive lead to the Bulls in the same building earlier this season, you would have thought the Sixers would come prepared for their brand of basketball. Chicago wants to play up-tempo whenever possible, in the halfcourt and in transition, but the Sixers took a while to recognize it on Friday. Early turnovers didn’t help the cause, nor did some long missed threes that led to a few two or three on ones for the Bulls in transition.

There haven’t been many “out of control” moments for VJ Edgecombe this season, at least not compared to the average rookie, but he had a few genuine headless chicken moments against the Bulls, battling first-half foul trouble and compounding defensive issues with wild drives to the basket. While he was hard done by a non-call on one of those journeys to the hoop, I thought Nurse did the right thing sitting him down in favor of more minutes for Jared McCain, who brought some stability to the floor on both ends. But it ultimately felt like they never found the right combination of players on the floor, losing one battle right as they started winning another.

Other notes

— I simply love watching Dominick Barlow and Jabari Walker attacking the offensive glass. They are tough, no-nonsense battlers around the rim, constantly digging extra possessions out of the mud for the Sixers. The two-way duo combined for five offensive rebounds in the first half alone, helping the Sixers make up for a rough start shooting the ball.

— Thought Adem Bona was better than his box score line indicates during a brief second-half shift.

— For most of this game, Paul George was not particularly good, at least not on offense. The looks were clean enough, but he was fighting himself for most of the first 2.5 quarters. At least he continued to chip in elsewhere, grabbing double-digit rebounds while playing (mostly) sturdy defense, because he put together some ball-stopping possessions on the other end that would make Kelly Oubre blush.

Then again, George sticking it out long enough to leave his mark is exactly what many of us asked for last season, when he treated their sinking ship as a problem for others to deal with. So it felt like a deserved breakthrough when George got a pair of wing threes to drop late in the third, pulling the Sixers into a lead to open the fourth through little more than perseverance. A brief flash in the pan, or the start of a larger heater? When George quickly rose into another three on a play where he barely touched the ball early in the fourth, it appeared we had our answer.

Ultimately, they just needed more out of him.