This season’s expectations for James Harden and the Sixers were always too grand | Marcus Hayes
Teams that remake themselves at the NBA trade deadline seldom reap immediate rewards. Harden and the Sixers are unlikely to be any different.
On that heady day the Sixers introduced James Harden as the Missing Piece in mid-February, celebrity team president Darryl Morey fed the beast of expectation.
“We are well-positioned to go on a run — and a run that, hopefully, excites the city of Philadelphia,” he said. Adding Harden “put us into a different tier of competing,” he said.
But Morey isn’t regarded as one of the brightest minds in basketball for nothing. He knew that success in Philadelphia would be measured only by exceeding the finishes of Joel Embiid’s previous four years, which would mean reaching the Eastern Conference finals. For the Sixers to maximize the addition of Harden, health, chemistry, and coaching would need to coalesce. So, Morey added this:
“All the hard work happens from here. We haven’t accomplished anything yet.”
Two months later, it looks more and more like they won’t accomplish much of anything again. Which, frankly, should not be surprising.
Adding Harden never should have raised expectations for 2022. Assuming Harden remains with the team, this was a deal that set the Sixers up for the next four seasons, not the next four months.
Teams that remake themselves at the NBA trade deadline seldom reap immediate rewards. There isn’t enough time. By the time the season ends Sunday night, Harden will have played in 22 games with the Sixers. He will have taken part in four full practice sessions. The Sixers still haven’t replaced the shooting of Seth Curry — Matisse Thybulle, Shake Milton, and Furkan Korkmaz all had their chances — and, as lumbering as Andre Drummond looked before he was dealt, he makes DeAndre Jordan look like Nikola Jokic.
The team is flawed in its construction, its strategies, and its execution.
Doc Rivers will probably take the fall if (when?) the Sixers fail, and Lord knows he has made mistakes in his two seasons as coach, but, really, this is no one’s fault.
It’s just too little and too late. It generally has been.
History
When, since 2000, has a team added a player with 25% of the season remaining and reaped immediate rewards?
The Sixers added Dikembe Mutombo to their 2001 team that reached the NBA Finals, but Deke was a rim-protecting rebounder who averaged less than 10 shots per game. In other words, he was a plug-and-play upgrade over Theo Ratliff, whose role he assumed. When Harden arrived in Philly, everything changed.
Also: The Sixers’ head coach was Larry Brown, perhaps the best coach of the generation.
The most productive result we found since 2000 was 2004, when the Pistons added Rasheed Wallace at the deadline. But that roster included Chauncey Billups, Richard Hamilton, and Ben Wallace, who were also coached by the legend Brown. They won it all, but Wallace essentially was a role player.
The Harden deal more closely resembles the addition of Tobias Harris to the 2019 Sixers, and that ended sadly, too.
Events usually unfold along these lines.
In 2004, Milwaukee traded Ray Allen and three other assets to Seattle for Gary Payton and Desmond Mason. Seattle missed the playoffs. Milwaukee earned the seventh seed in the East, but the Nets beat them in six games in the first round. Carmelo Anthony joined the Knicks at the 2011 deadline, but they lost in the first round.
The trade the Harden deal most resembles happened in 2008, when the Lakers spent a king’s ransom for Memphis Grizzlies center Pau Gasol. They reached the Finals and won the next two titles. Then again, Gasol was coached by Phil Jackson and played alongside Kobe Bryant, who’d already won the NBA Finals three times and had been to five.
Joel Embiid is a wondrous basketball player, but he ain’t prime Kobe.
Hopeless?
A loss in Toronto on Wednesday magnified the Sixers’ shortcomings.
They subtracted their best perimeter defender, Ben Simmons, to acquire Harden, who is an inferior defender. Of course, Simmons wasn’t playing for the Sixers anyway. Further, it didn’t help matters that the unvaccinated Thybulle wasn’t eligible to make the trip to Canada, but that’s a rant for another day.
At any rate, Pascal Siakam cooked the Sixers for the second time in three weeks. The Sixers play atrocious team defense against players like Siakam, and, as such, he has averaged 31.5 points, 11.5 rebounds, and 8.5 assists in the two Raptors wins. Those wins that almost guarantee the Raptors the No. 5 seed would pit them against the 76ers in the first round of the playoffs, which begin next week.
» READ MORE: Matisse Thybulle’s absence — and unvaccinated status — came as no surprise to the Sixers | Keith Pompey
They can’t solve a simple 2-3 zone defense. Neither Embiid nor Harden, who dominate possessions, is comfortable trusting the concepts that beat zones. The ball stops, decisions are poor and slow, and Harden and Embiid are flummoxed unless the zone strategy is identical on each possession. This being the NBA, the strategies seldom repeat.
The team’s pace stats — how many possessions they average — has plummeted to 26th, down from 12th last season. Twelfth might not sound great, but considering the offense centered on the Joel Embiid Half-court Exposition, ranking 12th was astounding, and it largely was a result of Simmons’ freakish abilities to go end-to-end. With flyers like Thybulle and Maxey on the court, Harden needs to push the pace, but this seems to be his limitation.
None of these problems is hopeless, given time. The remedies lie in practice repetitions.
Blame Doc if you like, but this time of year, practice repetitions do not exist.