The Sixer Sense
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Ranking the Philadelphia 76ers’ 5 best defenders

By Rusty Gorelick

The Miami Heat's Goran Dragic, right, has his shot blocked by the Philadelphia 76ers' Joel Embiid late in the fourth quarter in Game 4 of the first-round NBA Playoff series at the AmericaneAirlines Arena in Miami on Saturday, April 21, 2018. The Sixers won, 106-102, for a 3-1 series lead. (Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald/TNS via Getty Images)
The Miami Heat's Goran Dragic, right, has his shot blocked by the Philadelphia 76ers' Joel Embiid late in the fourth quarter in Game 4 of the first-round NBA Playoff series at the AmericaneAirlines Arena in Miami on Saturday, April 21, 2018. The Sixers won, 106-102, for a 3-1 series lead. (Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald/TNS via Getty Images) /
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(Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald/TNS via Getty Images)
(Charles Trainor Jr./Miami Herald/TNS via Getty Images) /

Brett Brown made defense a priority when he joined the Philadelphia 76ers in 2013, and he developed some of the NBA’s best defenders in his tenure as coach.

The Philadelphia 76ers posted the NBA’s fourth-best defensive rating in the 2017-18 season, just one year after they won 28 games and had the 17th-best defense in the league. Philly only trailed the Utah Jazz, Boston Celtics, and San Antonio Spurs in that category.

The Sixers retained all of their best defensive players and added a few more athletic players who could contribute at that end of the floor, so their already impressive 2017-18 defensive rating of 105.77 could skyrocket in 2018-19.

Robert Covington and Joel Embiid anchor Coach Brown’s defense, and they do a great job of it. The former finished in fourth-place in 2018 Defensive Player of the Year voting and made First-Team All-Defense, while the latter made Second-Team All-Defense.

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In addition to those two stellar defenders, Ben Simmons showed plenty of promise on that end of the court in his rookie year after experts questioned his work ethic as a defender in college. T.J. McConnell has always pestered opposing guards effectively while Markelle Fultz and Zhaire Smith showed lockdown potential in college.

Older role players also played solid D last season: J.J. Redick was pleasantly average and Amir Johnson had his moments when he received playing time.

The team traded two raw, athletic defenders earlier this summer in Justin Anderson and Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot, but since the Sixers want to make a deep playoff run, they rightly decided that the two wings were not good enough to take up roster spots. Instead, Smith and Fultz will get minutes off the bench and will play against guards and wings, and they will do a better job than Anderson and TLC could.

Philly finally has a team full of competent defenders and quite a few who sit in the company of the league’s biggest names. They have enough defensive depth that the team will hardly miss a beat on that end when the starters sit during games in the upcoming season. It might be hard to rank them, but here are the Philadelphia 76ers’ five best defenders on the current roster.