The Philadelphia 76ers Subtle Small Ball Success

Some Small Ball Success For Sixers?

And so, the Philadelphia 76ers sit on four draft picks, and four big men (if you consider Jahlil Okafor, Nerlens Noel, and newcomers Joel Embiid and Dario Saric) converging into a fork in the road.  Does the team go small?  If they do, is this a complete change to the team culture?

Well not exactly.  The team current head coach Brett Brown is a disciple of the “pace space pass” dogma, and has infused that thought process onto his players from the get-go.  Part of the 2014-2015 season was centered on the Sixers experimenting with a small ball version of their own.  You see, the team had struggled through a 4-28 run early last season.  But they eventually did find a groove, going on a short 8-13 sprint.  How did they do that?  Brett Brown had the Sixers playing small ball by minimizing the minutes that big men Nerlens Noel and Henry Sims played together. When they shared the court, there was only so much room to operate in the paint and on the baseline; the defense took a few steps in, the lane became clogged and the Sixers struggled to find quality scoring opportunities because of it. After January 5, 2015, Brown preferred to surround one big man with a point guard and three capable shooters (at least by the Sixers’ standards).  That led to an improvement in the team’s fortunes.  That same concept of going small has resurfaced in 2016 as well.

So too, we’ve heard again and again that the team just cannot harmonize when both Jahlil Okafor and Nerlens Noel play on the court at the same time.  Once more, the team suffers because there are too many bodies at the post and not enough of a threat from the perimeter.   Last year, the deadliest roster was the lineup of Michael Carter-Williams, K.J. McDaniels, Robert Covington, Luc Mbah a Moute, and Noel had logged the most minutes out of any Sixers’ lineup; and while doing so they’d also outscored opponents by 14.9 points per 100 possessions over the 19 games they had played together. This is particularly impressive when considering that the Sixers as a team have been outscored by 10 points per 100 possessions for the entire season.

The biggest reason for this is the group’s performance on the defensive end. They limited opponents to an eFG% of 41.6%; that was the lowest of any lineup in the NBA that has logged more than 80 minutes. This isn’t because of a small sample size, either. This group has played 152 minutes together, one of the fifty most frequently played lineups in the league.  Three of those five are no longer with the team, as the team traded MCW and McDaniels, and did not re-sign Mbah a Moute.  But that lesson remains embedded on coach Brown.

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