Instant observations: Tyrese Maxey, Sixers collapse in third quarter vs. Suns

Tyrese Maxey was off the pace from the opening tip, and the Sixers completely melted down on defense in the third quarter of a 116-110 loss to the Phoenix Suns on Tuesday night. Despite a strong night for rookie VJ Edgecombe, the Sixers were never truly in the game for the final quarter and a half.

Here’s what I saw.

Good grief, Tyrese

This was a game where it felt very obvious via the eye test that both teams had played the night before. There were a lot of plays where the mind wanted to do one thing, and the body responded differently, leading to missed connections on passes and some painfully short jumpers. You were going to go through periods of severe offensive struggle, and you needed a star to carry you.

Unfortunately for the Sixers, Tyrese Maxey was the face of the struggle. Newly minted as an All-Star starter, tapped for a signature sneaker by New Balance, everything has been coming up Maxey over the last couple of days. But with Joel Embiid and Paul George both on the shelf, Maxey wilted, turning in yet another uninspiring offensive performance during a run of too many of those.

Without excusing a dreadful outing, I do think you have to ask if he has simply been overworked up to this point. Against Phoenix and over the last couple of weeks, he has missed quite a few shots that feel like gimmes for the regular version of Maxey. You’re going to miss uncontested runners in the lane and open catch-and-shoot threes over the course of a long season, but not this many in a short span with Maxey’s skill set. So you start to wonder about how many minutes he has played and how that would weigh on his shoulders. Perhaps Nick Nurse has seen and felt that, because the Sixers changed their sub patterns on Tuesday, pulling Maxey out of the lineup for multiple unexpected breaks in the late stages of quarters. Still, Maxey carried a heavy workload, playing close to 20 of 24 available first-half minutes, and dragging his legs through the third quarter with Edgecombe sitting for almost five minutes of the third.

Maxey did manage to pull a quick scoring burst out of thin air midway through the fourth, breathing some life into a game that seemed completely out of reach. But even in that stretch, which featured a three, a drawn foul on Devin Booker, and a speed layup at the rim, he played helter-skelter basketball, too keyed in on trying to right his wrongs when good basketball plays were there to be made. Maxey took an outrageous, no-chance layup in transition that he was only bailed out on because Edgecombe made a miraculous play to snag the offensive rebound and score immediately after. A play like that is much more frustrating than him simply missing shots.

The truth is that you simply can’t afford to have a night like this from Maxey down the other two veteran stars. It is not his fault that the older gentlemen weren’t available to play, but it is his responsibility as the face of the franchise to find ways to win regardless of the circumstances. He was dreadful against Phoenix, and they were drawing dead as a result.

What the hell was that third quarter?

Forgive me for opening a new section with a meme, but this was all I could think of watching the Sixers defend in the third quarter:

I have no earthly idea what the Sixers’ defensive plan was in the second half, nor did it seem like they made decisions based on who was on the floor for Phoenix. Overhelping middle away from Devin Booker on the wing? Sure, give their best offensive player a look at a wide-open three. Booker driving into traffic with Grayson Allen on the strongside wing? That calls for a needless gamble to help on Booker, letting Allen fire an immediate catch-and-shoot three with no one close to him.

There were stretches where the Sixers simply played too aggressively and overpursued, which can be irritating to watch but are ultimately part of the scheme and plan. Nick Nurse wants to force turnovers, run, and then do it again. But the lack of a coherent approach in the disaster quarter that turned the game is something else entirely.

A nice night for two Sixers

Paul George was a (semi) surprise scratch from Tuesday night’s lineup, missing the game despite most people expecting he had been staggered with Embiid over the two halves of the back-to-back. So the natural question was simple — who was going to offer the secondary scoring? Kelly Oubre evidently decided he was going to offer primary scoring, helping to carry this group for about 2.5 quarters before the floor gave out underneath them.

Oubre had a very simple job for most of the night, hoisting threes from all over the floor as the Suns showed Maxey and Edgecombe multiple bodies in the middle of the floor. But I also appreciated that he tried to set a physical tone on defense for the second night in a row, immediately ripping the Suns for a steal and score on the first possession of the game. He was one of just a few Sixers players who showed real fight in this game, independent of the shotmaking display.

The bigger star was VJ Edgecombe, who played some excellent inside-the-arc basketball.

Midrange jumpers have been both a friend and an enemy to Edgecombe this year, whose efficiency on pull-up twos has been pretty rough for most of this season. But he has put some eye-popping stretches together to bail the Sixers out of tough offense, and summoned one of those in Tuesday’s first quarter, hitting three tough twos to sustain the Sixers early, each shot more difficult than the last. Edgecombe has been vocal about Scott Drew effectively banning these shots at Baylor, and he has found some real joy dabbling in the dark arts as a rookie. These are shots he will need to unlock defenses if his upside case comes together:

There were also, it should be noted, stretches of pretty sloppy work at the point-of-attack for Edgecombe. He was trusted in some end-of-quarter sequences that usually fall in the hands of Tyrese Maxey, booting his handle against pressure. The play-to-play consistency isn’t there yet, particularly when he is without the screen-and-score services of Joel Embiid to draw attention away from him. But the turnovers are, in my view, a necessary short-term drawback as he figures out how to manipulate opponents and become a high-level shot creator. If anything, I thought he even got too unselfish at times on Tuesday. Edgecombe seemed to second-guess himself on a few scoring opportunities, where I’d rather he get up a few extra attempts rather than fire the ball to Dominick Barlow for an ugly corner three attempt.

“Young legs” don’t always win out when rookies are pushed to the limit on back-to-backs. Edgecombe went through an early-season period where he appeared visibly worn down, for example, and Nick Nurse talked before the game about how Edgecombe had already played more games this season than he’d probably ever played in an amateur season. But rocking a fresh haircut and dropping the headband he’d worn for weeks, Edgecombe appeared fresh as a daisy compared to most other players on the court. The shotmaking and rebounding were excellent, but he needed a bit more help from the vets.

Other notes

— Jared McCain being boxed out of the rotation down two stars on the second half of a back-to-back makes it even more inexplicable that he was pulled away from the Blue Coats to dress for Monday’s game vs. Indiana. He hasn’t justified playing time with the big club, but when that’s the case, why rob him of G-League minutes? They had a game he could have played in on Monday by simply not recalling him.

— Why were the Sixers helping off of Devin Booker?

— Andre Drummond has been bad for most of the last month and a half, which is a relatively big problem with Bona’s inconsistency and Embiid’s semi-frequent absences. If he wasn’t, he’d still be firmly ahead of Bona in the pecking order, because the younger option has nothing but hope and prayers when it comes to defensive rebounding. Having terrible hands and a terrible sense of where other guys are coming from is a wicked combination when you’re trying to end possessions.

If you have two backup centers, you really have none.

— Would have been nice to have Paul George available for this game. Hope he’s ready to go for Houston and New York later this week.

— I really respect the competitive fire of this Suns group. They gave the Sixers 48 minutes of hard-fought basketball on the second half of a back-to-back. A lot to admire about that.

— Quentin Grimes taking and missing a layup down six with 15 seconds left feels like a fitting summary of his general approach to basketball.