David Thorpe on contenders
A free peek behind the paywall: why Dwyane Wade (!) could decide the East
For TrueHoop subscribers, David Thorpe has been examining the league’s many contenders to the 2021 crown. Today—as a little gift to you, it’s in its entirety below—he assess the 76ers, and why Ben Simmons should cue up some Dwyane Wade video.
Here are some of his other deep dives into this season’s many contenders:
The Suns:
From a distance, the story is easy: Chris Paul’s weird alchemy. Similar things happened on last year’s big surprise team in Oklahoma City. But that simple story is wrong. Without knowing what’s happening behind the scenes, the Suns’ story is not simply one of Paul’s play. All kinds of things are going well in Phoenix, including tons of things when he’s out of the game; this turnaround began in the bubble, when he wasn't even on the roster.
The Nuggets:
TrueHoop has chronicled Jokic’s journey starting back before he lost a ton of weight. Some suggested losing weight would sap his essence. I say weighing more worked like a training exercise. Not being able to run fast or jump high absolutely led Jokic to innovate crafty moves. He had to develop incredible touch on his paint shots, because he just couldn’t run past or jump over defenders. He created special tools for himself to survive in a sport that favors the incredibly athletic. Now that he has all those tools and can move, he has played better than anyone in the NBA so far this season.
The Bucks:
In golf, it is said that nervous, tight players tend to slice drives due to muscles not performing optimally. In basketball, it’s shooting form. This team has melted in the last two playoffs, and it has melted in a particular way: with a total loss of confidence. One bad shooting game led to two, and the crumbling began. The Bucks can’t—and shouldn’t—turn to Giannis to get their shooting eye back. He’s not Stephen Curry. Instead, he’s a guy who can occupy three defenders, which means somebody else must be ready to fire away. In addition to his incredible poise and defense, that’s where Jrue Holiday makes a giant difference for this team. Making 37.5 percent of his 3s, his best mark in six seasons, Holiday is primed to help his team shake off wobbling confidence.
The Lakers:
Older athletes have amazing moments, or days when they look 25. But those moments don’t happen often. Four amazing games out of five becomes three, then two. That’s how the chart above happens. It’s amazing a 36-year-old can sometimes blow minds, it’s unfair to expect it.
The Jazz:
The player who NEEDS more dribbles to create opportunities will have less value. Harden and Lillard take 70 percent of their shots after three or more dribbles, but are skilled enough to adjust. Ja Morant has already adjusted. He gets 37 percent of his made shots off two dribbles or fewer. His explosive attack moves will be even more valuable over time. Meanwhile, Mike Conley’s thriving.
The Nets:
The superpowers of James Harden, Kyrie Irving, and Durant are well known—but add in Joe Harris who is almost the league’s best shooter, and it doesn’t matter who the fifth player is on the court.
The Clippers:
Paul George is the player with the game and the skillset to connect the team, perhaps now more than ever—after admitting to some vulnerability last summer. Athletes are taught to be pillars of strength, not showing their human side has long been seen as a virtue. But inside the locker room, vulnerability can lead to strong connection. Doc Rivers, the Clippers’ coach last season, spoke of how a number of players went to visit George in person in his hotel room after he admitted his internal struggles. That’s not a coincidence. The Clippers can build off that.
Today, for subscribers, David Thorpe examines the 76ers, which we offer you here in its entirety:
Ben Simmons’ role model: Dwyane Wade
The art of dominating without a jumper
BY DAVID THORPE
Ben Simmons might be the best defender in the NBA. He’s 6-10, agile, and strong. He’s the Philadelphia 76ers’ quarterback on offense and defense, and their best passer. He bludgeons smaller defenders on the offensive glass and spearheads the Sixers’ terrifying running game. Other than Giannis Antetokounmpo, no man his size can do so many things on the basketball court. He’s an elite player on an elite team with the ball in his hands.
The best version of Ben Simmons could lead a title team. What’s it going to take to uncover that guy?
Dwyane Wade knows ...
Superstars, “glue guys” to connect the team when the stars run a little cold, a coach who molds cohesive approaches on both offense and defense, some good fortune along the way—the model to contend is actually quite simple. 76ers GM Daryl Morey knows it well. The former hotshot, genius Rockets GM probably would have toppled the Warriors’ dynasty in its prime if not for 27 straight misses in an epic Game 7, 2018 loss.
That Rockets team had an offense built around James Harden, space, and 3-pointers. The 76ers team is very different. Their best player is a hulking and agile center. Instead of tiny like the Rockets, this team is huge. And while both teams had lefty point guards, this one doesn’t care to shoot much.
In other ways, the two squads fit the same formula: superstars, glue guys, and a veteran coach with a championship pedigree.
The Sixers enter the playoffs as a likely top playoff seed.
Whether or not this 76ers team has a real chance to get Morey his first title comes down to the riddle of Ben Simmons.
35 feet of wingspan
Morey’s Rockets set many records for NBA offenses. With apologies to P.J. Tucker, they focused less on defense. Doc Rivers, the new Sixers coach, inherited a roster with big defensive potential, and made it real. Led by Simmons, a sure-fire, first-team All-Defense selection this year, this team reminds me of the Lakers’ best defenses from the Andrew Bynum-Pau Gasol-Lamar Odom era.
An NBA player once told me about matching up with and said: “we can never forget about that 21 feet of bigs inside.” Those three men, who stood over a combined 21 feet actually, built a wall around the rim.
The Sixers have the East’s best defense thanks to similar wingspan measurements. Like height, reported wingspans are often inaccurate. (Mike Scott has been reported with a 6-11 wingspan, but says on Twitter it’s 7-3.) Whatever the precise numbers, the 76ers are all arms. Sometimes they have nearly 35 feet of combined wingspans on the court. If it feels to opponents like there are hands everywhere, it might be because they can field five players who each average almost seven-feet of reach.
The 76ers’ starting five measures a combined 34 feet and six inches of wingspan—because Seth Curry drags the average way down with his 6-4 measurement. But look who’s about to check in: Matisse Thybulle (6-11 wingspan), Shake Milton (7-0), and Dwight Howard (7-5).
Morey has delivered Rivers a roster with excellent defensive options. What Rivers has built thus far, though, looks ideal to me, a spicy blend of making every shot difficult, with enough gambling for steals to keep opponents uneasy and kick off one of the league’s best fast breaks. Thybulle has emerged as one of the league’s best defensive players (99th percentile, according to DunksandThrees), but this is an approach built around Simmons.
Old school coaches may whither at the gambling nature of a team like Philly. Every jumped passing lane comes at the expense of a better-contested shot.
But the data support Rivers’ aims. The Sixers might not be super elite at preventing 3s, creating misses from deep, or preventing shots near the rim. But they are good at all of it—and they just about lead the league in steals, blocks, and deflections per game.
Think about this from an opponent’s point of view. Nothing is easy, from anywhere. Everything is contested. And you can never stop stressing the havoc of a live ball turnover in a stew of quickness, speed, hustle, and length. No team gets their hands on dribbles, passes, or shots more than the Sixers’ defenders—and it drives their offense.
A blistering break
Coaches and commentators love to talk about using good defense to create confidence on offense. The Sixers turn steals and rebounds into a lot more than good feelings. Simmons leads one of the top three teams in fastbreak points and points off turnovers. All that athleticism and length on defense becomes an assault at the rim, from long-armed athletes. It’s an almighty challenge to get back to protect the paint—focus too much there, though, and the 76ers would love to shoot a transition 3. All those tall and fast athletes make teams pay for missed shots and bad passes; the Sixers’ fastbreak has become a second skin for this team that first identifies as a defensive juggernaut.
It’s Simmons who is the lifeblood of their transition game—that’s where he’s nearly perfect.
Simmons’ half-court role model
When the defense is set, Simmons sometimes looks like a high-school running back plowing through ten-year-olds. Gifted as a scorer and passer with either hand, he finds open guys when his path is too clogged, he’s primed to be an offensive nightmare. The problem isn’t that he lacks the ability to do more. It’s that he doesn’t.
This is what I’d like him to watch.
In 2006, I sat with some players’ family members in Miami when the Heat hosted the Mavericks for Game 5 of the tied NBA Finals. Mavericks fans and owner Marc Cuban will forever complain about how often Dwyane Wade went to the free-throw line. Wade scored a ton, that’s for sure:
17 fourth-quarter points
43 total points
21 free throws (out of 25 attempts)
almost every basket with the game on the line
He did it all with a skillset a lot like Simmons’.
This game was a wakeup call to me, and how I advise players. I called a young pro I was helping: “Did you see how hard Wade had to work to get the ball, get to his spots, and score all game against a defense focused on guarding him?” That was the takeaway I had from what turned out to be the turning point of the series. Being a top scorer takes relentless energy.
Ben Simmons averages 10 shots and 14 points a game. No one denies he has the talent to create more for himself. Most “experts” think he needs to do more for the 76ers to win the East. This is the defining tension of Simmons' career. The 76ers can’t win a title with a timid Simmons.
A top seed with room to improve
The 76ers have the players to have a top-five offense—but instead only have the 13th best.
Joel Embiid deserves MVP consideration. Only Nikola Jokic has done more on offense. A career low in 3-point attempts and career highs in scoring, free throw attempts, and field-goal percentage mark the new and improved Embiid, though they don’t tell the full story. This man is remarkable in every way (except for passing out of double teams—more on that later). He’s a combination of Shaquille O’Neal and Hakeem Olajuwon with a sprinkle of Dirk Nowitzki. Embiid has Shaq’s disposition to dominate the paint, the nifty “fake and pivot” game of Olajuwon, and young Dirk’s ability to make long 2s.
Combine all that and you get 11 free throws a game, which leads the league. No one else is even at 10 a game.
Doc Rivers also deserves credit for putting Tobias Harris in position to have a career year a decade into his career. After Embiid, Harris is the 76ers’ best half-court weapon.
Embiid’s game, Harris’s ability to score inside and out, and the Sixers’ 3-point shooting combine to give Philly a good offensive team. That’s just it: good. Not great. Slightly above average from 3, slightly below average in turnovers, top 10 in offensive rebounds, plus all those free throws and fastbreaks and you get an offense that can be one dimensional in the halfcourt. Slow Embiid and the transition game—and the offense fizzles.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
LeBron James and Giannis Antetokounmpo come to mind when Simmons attacks. Simmons is nearly seven feet tall, brutally fast, and can drive and finish around the rim with either hand. Yet he drives 10 times a game. This generates 3.7 shots and, on average, one made free throw a game. All told, Simmons earns about five points per game from drives.
The Pacers’ backup point guard, T.J. McConnell, is 6-1 and not a bouncy guy. He scores five points a game from drives.
Justise Winslow has been ravaged by injuries and is no lock to keep an NBA job moving forward. He scores five points per game from drives.
Luka Doncic doesn’t have anything like Simmons’ size or athleticism, and is scoring 12.4 points from drives per game.
Hubie Brown knows
Just before Wade made that incredible, likely title-saving bank shot at the end of Game 5 on ABC, Hubie Brown said, “as we all know Dwyane Wade sometimes will just put his head down and rely on his quickness and his ability to finish.” Inarguable. The great scorers who can handle the ball like Wade and Simmons can create the space for a good shot for someone. But it requires energy, and, frankly, the kind of determined disposition Embiid has. The answer isn’t for Simmons to drive and shoot, necessarily. It’s to drive and read. Simmons, a gifted passer, should shine in that role.
So far, Simmons hasn’t shown the interest in carrying the team that way. He dabbles in it the way my mom dabbles with swimming when the water’s cold. A better model would be a highly trained skydiver. (But even better: in this case one mistake won’t kill him.) Dive in. There are no guarantees, but training and talent suggest he’s overwhelmingly equipped.
Giannis only has around 12 drives per game, but it’s because team build walls of defenders to prevent his attacks. Simmons faces no such walls. He plays with Joel Embiid, who has the strongest gravity on the floor. I would like Simmons to watch Wade, I’d also like him to watch Giannis, and notice how much easier Simmons has it.
Simmons’ great advantage is that opponents will always keep defenders close to Embiid, who can make those Dirk-like shots. They will double Embiid as well. Embiid is not yet someone who can be trusted to make the easy, correct pass as a second defender approaches. With defenses focused on Embiid and then Harris, Simmons has ample opportunities to be far more assertive as a shooter, driver, and a cutter (which he is good at). A few months ago against the Jazz, Simmons was a monster, scoring 42 points on 26 shots while Embiid was out. But it was a “one-off.” He hasn't scored more than 28 points in any other game all season. He has not scored more than 18 points since late March.
I’ve often referred to a line from “The Matrix” where Neo’s mentor explains to Trinity that “there is a difference between knowing the path and walking it.” In the 2006 Finals it was clear that Wade knew counting mostly on Shaq to win it all was a mistake. No, he needed to take matters into his hands. Few players can do that in the postseason series after series. They are the game's best players for a reason. It seems likely that Embiid will be a monster whenever teams don’t flood the paint, and when they do, Harris and their shooters will be heard from.
It’s a proven formula to make an offense solid. Simmons is the one with the tools to make it elite—or close. If he channels Wade, lowering his head and attacking possession after possession, the Sixers can win every series they play.
More than likely he won’t, which means the Sixers, who went through the whole painful Process just to draft mega-talents like Simmons and Embiid, will be left wondering if Simmons is the right fit. There were sourced reports claiming that Morey tried to get his old pal from Houston, James Harden, surely in exchange for Simmons. He knows Embiid is a franchise center in need of a franchise playmaker, and he won’t suffer two tragic postseasons before acting on some way to make that happen.
Wade was secure in his role in Miami, but played every game as if it would be his last time in a Heat uniform. Simmons actually is playing for his future in Philadelphia. His defense and overall talent are not in question. His heart and mindset to fight to be the best player might be. A Sixers team led by only Embiid is toast. But with Simmons playing like D-Wade they’ll be toasting a conference championship, or more.
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