Long Ball Larry
Footballguy
Sixers fans agree, but would add “Tobias Harris” before “Sixers”. I guess it’s sort of pointless and irrelevant at this point, but I almost assign the most blame to him for this playoff failure considering that he makes almost the same as Embiid and has basically zero impact on the game. Not that I expected anything different, but when you stack up the inputs and the outputs of the team, he is so negative.
2nd is Maxey who has been unable to make enough happen as the second “star”. He had some improvement this year, but he won the award primarily based on his increased usage. He still has a ways to go in terms of creating shots for others. When teams can lock in on him, he is too predictable on his drives and the Knicks have largely been able to follow him and stop his layups. Needs more variety to stress the defense out more.
3rd is Nurse who, like those before him, who somehow can’t figure out a credible theory of the second unit in the playoffs. I know his personnel is limited and part of the problem is that maxey can’t really lead it, but I really wish he could have figured something out. He knew that Joel was going to wear down and should have had some other contingency plan.
4th is Joel, who I give all the credit in the world to for playing through these injuries, but I wish he knew some way to manage his body a little better during the games. His flow gets thrown off by these injuries compounding the physical limitations, which leads to things going even worse.
I could make other points about Daryl, Kelly Oubre and others, but they would be kind of marginal.
The crazy thing is that I think most Sixers’ fans saw this as maybe a bit of a step back year before the season and losing in the first round would have made sense. But then things started going so much better in the first half of the season and expectations really got elevated. But it looks like they will squander another “easy” path to the conference finals.
