In a typical NBA season, each team has its own approach toward practice. The Sixers, though, haven’t had much choice. They’ve mostly been playing games, traveling, taking needed rest or addressing COVID-19 concerns.
Since a two-day gap between their opening-night win over the Wizards and Dec. 26 victory over the Knicks, the team had either one or zero days’ rest for each game over the next three weeks.
Finally, after having their game scheduled for Sunday against the Thunder postponed because of COVID-19 contact tracing, the Sixers were able to practice Tuesday — and with a relatively healthy team.
With our All Access Daily newsletter, stay in the game with the latest updates on your beloved Philadelphia sports teams!
SIGN UP HERE “We had a good practice,” head coach Doc Rivers. “I think that’s our first practice in several weeks and we actually had live bodies in practice, so that was good. Just getting better. It’s been so tough working out and not having enough guys, trying to teach execution but you’re teaching it with guys who wouldn’t normally be in the spot that you’re teaching it in.
"At least today we had what looked like the Sixers instead of the seven Sixers — that’s how I felt like we’ve been lately. Today we had a pretty good group on the floor.”
Seth Curry, who has been out since testing positive for COVID-19 on Jan. 7, did not practice. However, Curry wasn't listed on the NBA's injury report at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, indicating he'll be available to play in Wednesday's game against the Celtics at Wells Fargo Center. Mike Scott (right knee swelling) and Vincent Poirier (health and safety protocols) were the only Sixers listed as out.
Joel Embiid was “in and out” of practice, according to Rivers, but should be good to go Wednesday. Embiid didn’t travel with the Sixers to Memphis and Oklahoma City because of right knee pain. Furkan Korkmaz is also set to return after being sidelined since Dec. 27 with a left adductor strain.
NBA
Rivers found the chance to get his players on the same page useful, even if substantially expanding his playbook isn’t realistic at the moment. Running through some of the fundamentals was necessary, too.
“We had to review a lot,” he said. “It’s funny, we kind of did a little coaches’ test, is what we call it, where we did a lot of skeleton stuff by calling out stuff, just to see if they could run it, and (it was) probably average — some they could, some they couldn’t. … We had a chance to work on some of that.”
On-court execution is obviously not the only challenge of the 2020-21 NBA season. Fifteen games have been postponed in accordance with the league’s health and safety protocols, and players don’t tend to know with great certainty what’s next.
“It’s madness, but we make the most of it,” Matisse Thybulle said. “Everyone’s trying to learn on the fly and we’re just adapting to things as they come to us. There’s really no anticipating or really truly being prepared because once it happens, everything kind of hits the fan and you’ve just got to deal with what you have in that moment. I think we’ve done a pretty good job of working through those struggles that we’ve hit so far, and I think the league is working through it and just putting through more parameters to try to keep us players and the staff safe.”
Rivers identified the lack of regular healthy players as a key factor when answering questions about the 9-5 Sixers’ early turnover issues and whether he’d like to see Ben Simmons be more aggressive offensively. The team’s 17.2 turnover percentage ranks 29th in the NBA, per Cleaning the Glass.
As for Simmons, he’s posted 12.3 points, 9.3 rebounds and 8.0 assists per games over his first 12 contests. His 23.0 turnover percentage and 108.2 points per 100 shot attempts are well worse than his career averages, according to Cleaning the Glass.
“I really don’t care, honestly,” Rivers responded to the Simmons question. “I don’t even look. I let the world look at it. Everyone’s going to tell you anyway. I’m not that concerned with it yet. Right now we don’t have enough in to see where any of our guys are at, if we’re going to be honest. And we’re working on it. We had a day today that was important. We worked on a lot of stuff — probably too much, being honest, but we had to. In my opinion, we had no choice. Not that concerned right now.
“I swear you’re almost in let’s try to win a game mode right now, and that’s really not the way you should be in this part of the season. You should be working on your execution and in getting better mode. … Let’s figure it out, see what we can do and keep working when we have time.”
Subscribe to the Sixers Talk podcast:
Apple Podcasts | Google Play | Spotify | Stitcher | Art19 | Watch on YouTube