Noel Shines in Blowout Defeat to Clippers

By Sean Kennedy (@PhillyFastBreak)

Los Angeles 119, Philadelphia 98 – Box Score

Every so often, when matched against a true playoff contender, the Sixers rise to the occasion and push their opponent to the limit. Friday night was not one of those games. For whatever reason, the Clippers have been entirely immune to Philadelphia’s plucky underdog ways in recent years and this latest meeting was no exception. The last time the Sixers even finished a game within single digits of the Clippers was in the 2011-12 season.

Chris Paul is a future hall-of-famer and all, but pitted against the generous defensive efforts of Ish Smith and Isaiah Canaan, he looked like a create-a-player avatar playing on rookie mode. Paul finished with 25 points and 7 assists, racking up a +29 plus/minus in a modest 15 minutes of action. Both his shooting prowess and distribution skills were big reasons LA shot 12-29 from three, with the Clippers starters even better at 9-19.

The one period of the game where the Sixers were able to slow down the Clippers attack was when they opted to go with the ‘Hack-a-Shaq’ strategy with DeAndre Jordan late in the first half. Jordan went just 1-8 from the foul line during that stretch (he finished 5-17 on the game), leading to a 13-3 Philadelphia run to cut the Clippers lead to 8. However, in classic Sixers fashion, they came out of the locker room in terrible form, getting outscored 32-14 in the third quarter to put the game out of reach.

While the Sixers looked helpless on the defensive end (shockingly only recording 1 block as a team on the game), they did receive a big boost on the offensive end from their rising star, Nerlens Noel. Coach Glenn Rivers will look at the 20 rebounds grabbed by DeAndre Jordan as evidence that his center should be in the Defensive Player of the Year conversation. However, the way Noel was working him both on the block and the mid-range told an entirely different story. Nerlens looked extremely confident attacking Jordan with a variety of offensive moves, finishing with a career-high 30 points to go along with 14 rebounds. Yet again, Noel’s final stat line put him in historic company.

Take notice. pic.twitter.com/OcyViIhUZq

— Philadelphia 76ers (@Sixers) March 28, 2015

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

With each passing game, Noel continues to cement himself as a foundational piece of the Sixers’ future. There’s still the cynical section of Sixers’ fandom that thinks it’s only going to lead to increasing Nerlens’ trade value a la Michael Carter-Williams. But at this point, the organization selling off on Noel would as much of a head-scratcher as the Spencer Hawes tribute video the team showed Friday night (I mean, really?). The Sixers will head to Cleveland Sunday night, and will more than likely get soundly defeated once again by an opponent with true title aspirations. With the way Noel is coming on though, the days when the Sixers can have those aspirations of their own seem a tiny bit closer.