Sixers’ early offensive success isn’t sustainable

Six games into the season, the Philadelphia 76ers — despite one of their All-Stars looking limited by a knee injury, and the other sitting out every game thus far for personal reasons — have the highest offensive rating in the NBA. Though the Sixers haven’t played especially fast on offense (they rank 30th out of 30 teams in pace), they’ve been able to score efficiently in the halfcourt, something that has been a challenge for the past few seasons.

Optimistic fans will see this offensive success as a sign that the Sixers offensive philosophy of surrounding All-Star Joel Embiid with capable shooters and letting him go to work can work. Vindictive fans will see it as an indictment of Ben Simmons’s offensive capabilities, arguing that the removal of a total non-shooter from the starting lineup has reinvigorated an offense that looked lethargic and cramped at times with Simmons on the floor.

The truth, though, is more sobering: the most likely scenario is that the Sixers have simply been beneficiaries of incredibly hot shooting to start the year. As the season goes on, fans should expect statistical regression and for the offense to come back down to Earth. In other words, this hot start really is too good to be true.

Sixers early offensive success isn’t sustainable

The main reason to expect some regression to the mean from this Sixers offense is something general manager Daryl Morey certainly won’t be happy about: overreliance on mid-range jump shots. It’s hard to work these shots out of the team’s offense entirely when the midrange is the go-to spot for leading scorers Joel Embiid and Tobias Harris, but still, they are demonstrably less efficient than shots at the rim or 3-pointers.

Their scoring is more heavily reliant on midrange jump shots than nearly any other team in the NBA — they’re significantly above the league average in shots taken from both the 5-9 and the 10-14 foot range, while ranking last in the league in shots attempted at the rim per game. They’ve been incredibly hot this year from the mid-range, ranking top-five in the NBA in shooting percentage from 5-9 and 10-14 feet, which has masked their inefficient shot diet.

The Sixers are shooting a scorching 56.0 percent from inside the arc, better than every other team in the NBA except the Denver Nuggets. They’re also on fire from 3, knocking down 38.5 percent of their tries so far — better than everyone besides the Knicks and Hornets. Even their free throw percentage is unusually high: they’re shooting a collective 86.5 percent, the best percentage in the NBA.

It’s plausible that the Sixers could be elite at one, or maybe two, of these metrics. But there are plenty of early-season stats that just feel unsustainable — Seth Curry shooting 63 percent from 3-point range, for example, or Tyrese Maxey shooting 93 percent from the free-throw line — and seem to be superficially buoying the team’s flawed offensive approach.

That’s not to say that the Sixers are a bad offensive team. There are plenty of positives to take from the first few games on that end: an increased three-point rate, Joel Embiid’s progress as a playmaker, Seth Curry’s newfound confidence. They could very well finish the season as a top 10 offense in the NBA. But number one, with their current personnel and shot distribution, is an unsustainable product of early-season shooting luck.

Going forward, the Sixers shouldn’t rest on their laurels and assume that what they’re doing is working. They should look to get more looks at the rim, work their way to the line more frequently (despite Joel Embiid trailing only Giannis Antetokounmpo in free throw attempts per game, their FTR is just 18th in the NBA), and shift their focus away from traditionally inefficient midrange looks that just so happen to be falling in the early going.