By Sean Kennedy (@PhillyFastBreak)
When a team finishes 18-64 on the season, there are bound to be very poor individual performances. So I was somewhat surprised that while reading a Nylon Calculus article yesterday, the Sixers actually had the two worst unlikely performances in the entire NBA last year. You would figure that with the baseline already having moved so low, bad games from members of the Sixers wouldn’t move the needle much. Still, as anyone who watched the majority of their games last season could tell you, when things got bad, they got really bad for the Sixers. So maybe I shouldn’t have been too surprised. Anyway, it seemed like as good a reason as any to run down the 5 worst individual performances from the Sixers’ 2014-15 season.
Fortunately for our purposes, Basketball-Reference has a stat called Game Score, which is a John Hollinger metric roughly serving as a one-stop shop of a statistic for how well a player performed in a single game (you can check out the formula for Game Score in their glossary). Sorting by Game Score, we can easily identify which 5 efforts stood out the most amongst the sea of bricks, turnovers, and general disarray (not this General Disarray) that was this past Sixers season. Here we go:
5. Jason Richardson (3/6/15 vs. Utah) – 0-10 FG, 0-4 3PT, 3 RBS, 2 AST, 4 PF, 0 PTS
J-Rich was one of the more inspiring stories of the season for the Sixers. Literally out of the league for years due to a few different lower body injuries, many thought Richardson would take his money and quietly drift off into NBA retirement. To his credit though, he diligently rehabbed and always believed he would make his way back onto the court, which he finally did with the Sixers in February.
It’s easy to pinpoint why this poor of a game happened for the former Michigan State Spartan, as two nights earlier, he had his best game of the season. On March 4th, Richardson played a season-high 36 minutes, scoring a season-high 29 points in the Sixers’ overtime loss to the Thunder that was maybe the most purely exciting game of the season for the team. Unfortunately, those old legs of J-Rich’s just couldn’t bounce back quickly from playing such heavy minutes, and the results were evident when he put up that clunker against the Jazz.
4. Luc Mbah a Moute (4/1/15 at Washington) – 0-8 FG, 0-4 3PT, 1 RB, 1 TOV, 2 PF, 0 PTS
Mbah a Moute served as a steadying veteran presence on a young Sixers squad and actually had the best shooting season of his career in 2014-15. Still, he didn’t have it on this night in Washington, somehow getting up 8 shots in just 17 minutes of action and missing all of them. Combining that poor shooting with just one combined rebound, assist, steal, and block while on the court makes this line one of the least effective of the year for Philadelphia.
3. Michael Carter-Williams (12/27/14 at Utah) – 2-20 FG, 1-7 3PT, 3-4 FT, 4 RBS, 6 AST, 6 TOV, 3 PF, 8 PTS
If you ever need to talk yourself into the MCW trade being alright, a good place to start is Carter-Williams’ stretch from late December-early January. Alongside this 2-20 abomination, the former Sixers point guard had 2-13, 2-9, 1-13, and 1-7 shooting performances. There were times when he looked visibly shaken on the court and hesitant to even put up wide-open shots.
He certainly wasn’t hesitant against the Jazz, although maybe he should have been given the abysmal results . This line was one of just 7 in NBA history of 2 or less shots made in 20 or more attempts (3 of those 7 coming from Sixers players, aren’t we fans lucky?). That night in Salt Lake City might have been when Sam Hinkie really started working the phones and shopping MCW around. Having had the misfortune to watch it, I can’t say I would have blamed him.
2. Nerlens Noel (12/12/14 at Brooklyn) – 0-8 FG, 6 RBS, 1 STL, 1 BLK, 5 TOV, 4 PF, 0 PTS
Remember how the first couple months of the season, we wondered if Noel could even serve as a starter in the league given how poor he was on the offensive end. It speaks to how well he played during the second half of the season that performances like this one seem like ages ago and not just 8 months gone. Somewhere along the way, the stone hands that caused seemingly endless amounts of turnovers got better, the jump shot improved, and Noel gained confidence to start drawing fouls and getting to the free throw line. Given his upward trajectory, this game might go down as the worst one of Noel’s entire career.
1. Hollis Thompson (2/9/15 vs. Golden State) – 0-9 FG, 0-4 3PT, 6 REB, 2 AST, 4 TOV, 6 PF, 0 PTS
After a slow start to the season following a serious illness, Thompson actually rebounded nicely and hit over 40% of his threes for the second consecutive year. However, it was in no thanks to his effort against the soon-to-be World Champions, as Hollis put up one of the worst two-way performances you’ll come across.
On the defensive end, he struggled to hang with the Splash Brothers coming off all those screens, fouling out in just 28 minutes off the bench. Meanwhile, he couldn’t buy a shot offensively and threw in 4 turnovers to boot. His offensive rating for the game was 10 (average is 100 and no other Sixer had worse than 70 on the game). The Sixers only ended up losing by 5; any sort of normal night from Thompson and they could have pulled off the upset. During a Sixers season littered with poor performances, this one was the worst.
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