The Philadelphia 76ers are still bad, but they’ve been less bad as of late.
The Philadelphia 76ers lost again on Wednesday night. It was their 34th loss of the year. The news wasn’t all bad, though, because the team to whom they lost, the New York Knicks, is one of the two teams in the league worse than them in the standings. The 76ers are supposed to be bad; this is the way that 76ers president and general manager Sam Hinkie wanted it. While a 4-6 record over the last 10 games might fuel rumors of coach firings in cities like Chicago, that record is surprisingly respectable for this Philadelphia team.
The most interesting part of the 76ers’ experiment is their near total reliance on inexperienced players with little or no NBA service time. This has allowed second-round draft picks like K.J. McDaniels and Jerami Grant to see much more playing time than they would be granted on most teams in the playoff hunt (or any team in the Western Conference that doesn’t play in Minnesota). Only two players are listed on the 76ers roster who have more than six years of NBA experience: one is Jason Richardson, who has been out with injury for the duration of the season; the other is Andrei Kirilenko, who is definitely never going to show up and play in Philadelphia.
For their game against the Knicks on Wednesday, the 76ers were also without center Nerlens Noel and forward Luc Mbah a Moute. The absence of Mbah a Moute meant that 76ers entered the contest with three-year pro Malcolm Thomas as their most experienced active player.
This has been a season-long situation for the 76ers, and that leaves a lot of unknown for this young team. Certainly, they are far from a good squad at this point. The knowledge of who the 76ers are, a “tanking” franchise that trades away any competent and experienced players in exchange for second-round draft picks and contracts that they can shed. Meanwhile, they also employ a “rookie” whom they took with the No. 3 overall pick in this year’s draft. This rookie in question, Joel Embiid, was injured and likely to miss the season before they drafted him. His only gains since then have been on a scale.
So, back to that 4-6 stretch. The 76ers currently hold a better position than the New York Knicks and the Minnesota Timberwolves, but only by the slightest of margins. They are looking up in the standings at literally every other team in the league. How have the 76ers managed to perform at a higher level of late?
The 76ers are the worst scoring team in the league. Dead last. They also have a plus-minus differential of -12.6. The next worst team is, not surprisingly, the Minnesota Timberwolves, who come in at -9.9. If you isolate the 76ers’ plus-minus for the past 10 games, it’s still -9.3. That moves them out of worst over that stretch, but not by much. There must be other factors, because there are several teams that only won twice over that same 10-game stretch. When isolating for wins, the 76ers had a better stretch than 10 other teams.
When you look at the actual results of the individual games, you get a clear picture of how they managed to boast an awful plus-minus despite the four wins. In the six games that the 76ers lost, they were defeated by an average of 19 points, including a 35-point torching at the hands of the Wizards. The numbers are still extremely concerning, but those other losses included defeats by the Atlanta Hawks and the Toronto Raptors, two of the top teams in the Eastern Conference.
In their wins, the 76ers were playing it much tighter. Their average margin of victory over those four wins was 5.26, including a 15-point win over New Orleans; the other three wins came by three, two and one point each. When the 76ers are getting beat, it is a beating indeed. When they win, it has been a much closer affair.
While players like McDaniels, Robert Covington, Henry Sims and Grant have been making the most of their opportunities in the lineup, it has been the play of the latest rumored available trade chip, Michael Carter-Williams, that has made a significant impact. Tony Wroten put up 27 points at the beginning of the calendar year and has gone downhill from there. Despite two other 20-point games, he barely cracked double-digits in the January games before suffering a knee injury that ruled him out indefinitely. He has now missed four consecutive games and in his absence Carter-Williams has been taking control of the team. MCW did not play in Wroten’s big game against the Clippers, which might explain some of it, but since that game, he has been phenomenal. He’s led all players in assists twice and all scorers in two games as well, including a game against the Toronto Raptors in which he outscored Kyle Lowry.
Like all things good in Philadelphia, there’s reason to remain skeptical. While Carter-Williams has averaged a team-high 16.6 points, 6.8 assists and 1.8 steals over the last 10 games, he also leads with 3.6 turnovers during the same stretch. He is also shooting just 38.6 percent from the field. It turns out that isn’t really that bad for the Sixers, as Covington, Wroten, McDaniels, Hollis Thompson and Larry Drew all have worse field-goal percentages over that stretch. What doesn’t save Carter-Williams is that just two of those players played in more than six of those games and average more than 20 minutes. The point: Michael Carter-Williams is producing based on volume, not on efficiency or superior shooting ability. In the win over the Knicks, Carter-Williams went off for 27 points, but he took 26 shots to get there, along with 7-8 from the free-throw line.
Just like the 76ers as a whole, there is potential in Michael Carter-Williams, but if you go too deep into any numbers pertaining to the 76ers, you’ll find yourself in some type of Black Mirror scenario.
The other factor that the 76ers need to consider is that all this winning could be a detriment to their chances at “winning” where it counts – the NBA Draft Lottery. According to this Washington Post article, the Philadelphia 76ers still maintained a 20.2 percent chance at being awarded the No. 1 overall pick at next year’s draft, and that was before they went out and lost the Knicks on Wednesday. While there is no guarantee that the 76ers will lock up that top pick next year, (there’s seemingly always a scenario where the Cavs could pull it off), they still have the greatest likelihood of securing that pick. Whatever the result, it has been nice to see the young players in Philadelphia string together a few good games. Now if they could just get Embiid on a diet…
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