Sixers Demolished by the Real Lob City

By Sean Kennedy (@PhillyFastBreak)

Los Angeles 130, Philadelphia 99 – Box Score

Ever since Ish Smith re-joined the Philadelphia 76ers roster, he and Nerlens Noel have been trying to create their own version of Lob City. Saturday night, the Sixers found themselves up against the genuine article, and Chris Paul and DeAndre Jordan were only too happy to prove that the original is always better than the copy.

With Blake Griffin out with a quad injury, the pair of Paul and Jordan became the primary focus of the Clippers offensive attack. Even on a night he didn’t shoot the ball particularly well, CP3 put on a master class in point guard 101, finishing with 15 points and 14 assists in just 26 minutes. Paul does little things like notice Ish Smith caught on Jordan on a switch, so he puts up a shot knowing Jordan will likely get any offensive rebound opportunity. Or, on a fast break where Jerami Grant knows Paul wants to go for a lob, Chris will fake going up for the lay-up and then throw the alley-oop over the back of his head.

Thanks to those and so many more great feeds from Paul, DeAndre Jordan ended the night with 22 points on 9-10 in 30 minutes of action. It would have been really interesting to see what Jordan looked like in Dallas without a future Hall-of-Fame point guard making life easy for him. Whoever got in his head at the last minute to renege on Mark Cuban did DJ a favor. Add all of that to guys like Austin Rivers, J.J. Redick, and Wes Johnson refusing to miss shots and you have yourself a 31-point blowout with the Clippers shooting a season-high 60.5% from the field.

Yet, for Sixers fans, there were a couple resilient flowers in the midst of a desert wasteland. First, Nik Stauskas suddenly remembered how to shoot a basketball, hitting 6 of 8 threes of 18 points. Along with the Phoenix game a few games back, he’s now had two solid performances in the middle of an otherwise abysmal stretch of basketball. Hopefully, Stauskas will start stringing a few of these types of outings together sometime soon.

Even more importantly for the big picture, Jahlil Okafor had one of his better offensive games as a professional, scoring a team-high 23 points on 10-14 shooting. Big Jah had the jump shot working to out to about 15 feet and looked much more comfortable working the pick-and-roll with Ish Smith in there. Considering those are essentially considered the “weak points” of his game offensively, the future looks bright for Okafor in scoring the basketball. He was still awful defensively, even letting Cole Aldrich do damage, but let’s at least focus on one side of the court at a time.

Philadelphia has now concluded its annual Disney on Ice road trip and will be back at home against the Timberwolves Monday night (good news for fans trying to get back to a normal sleeping schedule). Despite this awful loss, the West Coast trip has to be considered a good one for the Sixers after tripling their win total on the season. With their next six games all taking place at the Center, we’ll see if they can build on it at all.