greg4012 wrote:A few of my immediate thoughts on this game:
1. Major props to Bam and Herro. Both were subpar offensively last series and took on the moment last night. Keep it up!
2. That 2nd quarter was very hard to watch. Philly had everything going at 100%. It seemed our press was a blessing to them allowing for easy buckets. Combine that with them going balls to the wall with small ball and it was infuriating.
3. Spo and the defense adjusted somewhat in the second half, but continued to show some press action. At first I was bothered by that, until I saw how worn down Philly became over the 2nd half. It seems to me that they blew their load in the first half and didn't have the legs, endurance, and strength to continue to play a combination of small ball (taxing for guys that are used to deferring to Embiid to take the toll) and full court game. Props to Spo for sticking with it and not being as reactionary as us fans.
4. I'm confident we will be a little more refined in busting the zone looks moving forward. It shouldn't be hard to get an inlet pass to Bam in the middle of the zone and allow him to find one of our shooters or attack the paint.
5. Tobias Harris is completely dependent on a blatant stiff arm to create space to get his shot off. Refs better start calling that sh*t.
6. I'm definitely a biased fan and the foul count for the game was pretty even, but MAN it felt like the refs were falling for all of their BS foul baiting and also allowing them to play exceedingly physical against us, especially off the ball.
7. We need to continue to attack Paul Reed's bball IQ. Keep him unplayable because he's damn talented with that combo of length and athleticism.
8. We're due for our shooters to get hot soon.
You know what took us out of rhythm in the second quarter and away from our game that was working in the first quarter, "JIMMY" he was forcing it. Sometimes he has this great awareness about him where he gets everyone involved and lets the game go to him, there are other times he just wants to force it and be the guy. When Jimmy forces the ball to come to him at the start of each half court set, the other team focuses on Jimmy every time with laser like focus when we keep repeating it. We start turning the ball over trying to get Jimmy his matchup in the post that he likes and we waste 80% of the shot clock trying to get his matchup. Once Jimmy went out of the game again, that's when we started playing looser in the third quarter and that was it from there our other players started to share the ball. That was a Bad Jimmy game last night....He is so aggravating sometimes, but then well have a bad game as a team where everyone is missing and Jimmy puts up 35-40 points and gets us a win so we forgive him.