Simmons and firsts for lavine. Go get him. Beal just ain't gonna happen without mortgaging the future. 

Embiid probably tweaked his back flopping.   

0-4 without Embiid. Harris is pulling his weight.  He needs another player to help.

When Embiid plays, his MVP stock goes up.

When Embiid sits, his MVP stock goes up. 

When he sits, it shows why he is the mvp. 

not a very good game by our guys.  everyone needs to take a piece of the L pie, including doc and some of his horrid rotations.  maybe he is still tinkering with the roster, seeing who can play with who, when joel is out?  dwight just wasn't it last night though.  maybe next time embiid sits...  try bradley as a starter?  he looks to be trending up.  and yes i was frustrated at simmons, started to believe the "trade simmons" camp, and walked towards that cliff...  but i found this article which is a VERY good read:

After a back injury and a knee injury Ben Simmons started slowly, but he’s now beginning to sizzle - Liberty Ballers

it goes over the timeline of ben's injury and why we are seeing the ben we are today...  and not the ben of last year.  some have forgotten THIS ben simmons before his back and knee injuries:

he was trending WAY up to be the ben simmons we wanted (albeit one without the jumper).  imagine if we could get the 22 point and sometimes 30 point outbreak simmons back?

...and for anyone curious as to maybe ben's stats were because joel was off the court, here's his stats with joel and without joel:

not much different.  lastly, i found another video by the guy who comes off as a tool, but actually has good info, talking about ben in the playoffs..  and if he really IS a detriment to our team in the post season..  where it matters:

if some d**che canoe at home, probably making this video using a potato as a camera sees that stuff..  i think morey does too.  if you can grit your teeth through it, a lot of good points are made and he brings up simmons v harden, cp3, giannis, tatum, and the like in some areas...  also addresses ben's shooting or lack thereof.

so where am i?  i'm off the cliff, though i do see it in the far distance.  but that doesn't matter, i wanna know how close morey is to that cliff (he prob. has way more info on ben's injury than we do, and how it's affecting him).

So no Embiid, and your second "star” puts up 11 points. Pathetic. 

1 minute ago, nipples said:

So no Embiid, and your second "star” puts up 11 points. Pathetic. 

yeah, i was mad too.  maybe he's still working through some injuries from last year.  he was out due to knee swelling recently, if i recall.  i do want him to get back to that 22/9/8 avg. simmons.

10 hours ago, Khani1 said:

Can't wait for the Lakers game 🙄

They’ll have a shot if Embiid plays. It would be typical Sixers to lose to the Pistons then turn around and beat the Lakers two days later. 

5 minutes ago, JayEcho said:

yeah, i was mad too.  maybe he's still working through some injuries from last year.  he was out due to knee swelling recently, if i recall.  i do want him to get back to that 22/9/8 avg. simmons.

I doubt that ever happens. He’s never sustained that kind of level over the course of a season. He’ll have short stretches of games where he does it, then falls back to his typical career averages. He’s never averaged more than 16.9 PPG over the course of a season. 
 

The only way he becomes a 22 point average guy, is if he develops a shot. And I’ve seen no evidence that he will ever do that, or that he’s even willing to put in the work to do that. 

2 minutes ago, nipples said:

I doubt that ever happens. He’s never sustained that kind of level over the course of a season. He’ll have short stretches of games where he does it, then falls back to his typical career averages. He’s never averaged more than 16.9 PPG over the course of a season. 
 

The only way he becomes a 22 point average guy, is if he develops a shot. And I’ve seen no evidence that he will ever do that, or that he’s even willing to put in the work to do that. 

this is why i'm so curious about this doc rivers sixers team.  ben is VERY effective as a pick and roll guy and doc is using a LOT of them, which should help ben offensively and get those point averages up.  that is if he recovers from his injuries.  we've only known ben from brett brown and i believe doc is a much better coach.  some players develop better under different coaches...  sometimes why they flourish when traded.  i just hope our sixers rebound rather than have a hangover cause the lakers are coming up. 👍

The point averages are down.  By like 25%.  

 

this is the nba.  your "2nd star" needs to be a guy who can score. simmons isn't that guy. 

1 hour ago, nipples said:

So no Embiid, and your second "star” puts up 11 points. Pathetic. 

He actually looked pretty good the first 3 quarters when he wasn't in foul trouble. I tuned out the last quarter but I think he did jack looking at the stat line. 

Harris was excellent, Bradley played pretty well, Matisse played an excellent game defensively and the rest of the team was a dumpster fire. Maybe a bit harsh on Maxey who flashed again, I feel he needs a rest and has hit a bit of a wall. A lot of jumpers coming up short and it might be due to the monster minutes he logged as a starter. 

Howard seriously lacks concentration. Way too many fouls and the majority are just dumb and result in a turn over. He has been pretty bad other than maybe the Grizz game. I'm trying to remember which one he started and managed to log big minutes without committing 4 fouls in 4 minutes 

3 minutes ago, mr_hunt said:

this is the nba.  your "2nd star" needs to be a guy who can score. simmons isn't that guy. 

Tobi is honestly the second star on this team right now and he isn't good enough to get you over the hump. We have two guys that are essentially third options in Ben and Tobi

6 minutes ago, The_Omega said:

The point averages are down.  By like 25%.

if this is about simmons, then this is why i'm hoping it's him fighting back from injury(ies) and not him actually regressing.  the article i linked above says simmons has only played 18 games since the back injury...  and he was just out earlier with knee swelling.  again, i hope he can overcome that and doc can get him back to the 22/9/8 avg. guy we were seeing before the allstar break last year.  👍

4 minutes ago, Mat said:

Tobi is honestly the second star on this team right now and he isn't good enough to get you over the hump. We have two guys that are essentially third options in Ben and Tobi

agreed...they're both 3rd options and neither can carry the scoring load. it's never more apparent than when embiid doesn't play. they get blown out by 10+ points to lousy teams when he sits. 

Without fact checking this, I feel all Ben's big scoring games have come against cellar dwellers. The Knicks/Cavs of the world when they were bad.

When he comes up against better competition with better coaching, they're able to negate his strengths and force him out of the paint. Those bad teams will let him play his game and he looks like an All-Star. So he looks like he has really great point totals over X amount of weeks when in reality he has played against a bunch of crap teams and scored against them and still struggles against playoff calibre opposition.

To follow up on my last post, I'm trying to think of the last playoff game Simmons really took over. Maybe the Heat when Jo was injured and he had that massive game after laying an egg the previous one? I think it might have been a triple double and then he came up against the Celtics next who layed out the blueprint on how to stop him

 

15 minutes ago, Mat said:

Without fact checking this, I feel all Ben's big scoring games have come against cellar dwellers. So the Knicks/Cavs of the world when they were bad.

When he comes up against better competition with better coaching, they're able to negate his strengths and force him out of the paint. Those bad teams will let him play his game and he looks like an All-Star. 

so, it looks like the allstar game last year was 2/16/20..  here's a screengrab of the (12ish) teams we played heading into it where ben was averaging the 22/9/8 stat i keep pointing out:

 

it's a mixture.. sure the knicks were there.  but so were the lakers, clippers, bucks, celtics..  and to average 22/9/8, he had to be around that total for most of those games.  i don't think he could've fallen off a cliff against the harder teams in the 15 games where those averages were taken and not also have the average take a dive.  

https://www.phillyvoice.com/sixers-pistons-instant-observations-ben-simmons-shake-milton-tobias-harris-jeremi-grant/

24 minutes ago, mr_hunt said:

agreed...they're both 3rd options and neither can carry the scoring load. it's never more apparent than when embiid doesn't play. they get blown out by 10+ points to lousy teams when he sits. 

for better or for worse (last night was for the worse), this sixers team does not have a lot of experience with embiid sitting out.  joel has played in 14/18 games for us this season.  i still think doc may be trying to find a cohesive unit that can play together if embiid has to sit.  which is why some of his rotations last night were awful.  then you add to that whatever is going on with ben.  us giving up 17 3's to them and us giving them 32 at the charity stripe...  along with milton and other guys having an off night, and yeah..  we what we got.

Alaa said multiple times that Grant had been working with an ex Sixers shooting coach to transform his shot. I'm not sure if it's the same guy that TJ was working with to add the serviceable 3 point shot but the guy has put in the work and has become a really good player.

We have been complaining that the 6'ers broke Fultz shooting action and that Ben hadn't improved when in reality one had his uncle rework and break his mechanic and the other is using his brother to tell him how good he is and he doesn't need a jumper. Grant is proof that they had the right development guys there and it's the work ethic and entitlement of the early draft picks which hasn't seen them live up to their potential. 

It also would have been nice to see how a team would look right now of guys they let walk or traded away. Grant, Wood, TJ, RoCo, Dario, Holmes and Shamet are a few. 

3 minutes ago, Mat said:

Alaa said multiple times that Grant had been working with an ex Sixers shooting coach to transform his shot. I'm not sure if it's the same guy that TJ was working with to add the serviceable 3 point shot but the guy has put in the work and has become a really good player.

We have been complaining that the 6'ers broke Fultz shooting action and that Ben hadn't improved when in reality one had his uncle rework and break his mechanic and the other is using his brother to tell him how good he is and he doesn't need a jumper. Grant is proof that they had the right development guys there and it's the work ethic and entitlement of the early draft picks which hasn't seen them live up to their potential. 

It also would have been nice to see how a team would look right now of guys they let walk or traded away. Grant, Wood, TJ, RoCo, Dario, Holmes and Shamet are a few. 

Just takes effort and a commitment to want to be great. 

Look at Jaylen Brown. Pretty much an energy guy after his rookie year and now a definite All Star.

 

Shamet hasn't really improved and barely getting minutes when the Nets only play 7 guys. 

5 minutes ago, DaEagles4Life said:

Shamet hasn't really improved and barely getting minutes when the Nets only play 7 guys. 

I saw he was out of the rotation. He had a couple of really good playoff games for the Nets I think last year or the year before. I think it's going to be a tough team to get minutes because you have Kyrie and Harden clogging up the minute at the guard positions and Joe Harris who is a better version of Shamet. I figured he would get minutes ahead of TLC but he isn't as good on the defensive end of the court. I think he is someone they move around the deadline for scraps so they can sign a frontcourt option to the vet minimum.