New-look 76ers flash glimpses of what could be against defending champion Knicks

NEW YORK — The thing to remember is, the New York Knicks didn’t want to leave VJ Edgecombe all by himself.

Like, all things being equal, you’d imagine they’d prefer to cover a player who averaged 16 points per game and converted 61% of his point-blank tries as a rookie for the Philadelphia 76ers, and has the kind of rocket propulsion in his calves that enable him to elevate and detonate above defenders at the rim. That’s not the kind of guy you typically like to leave open.

It’s just that, well, Tyrese Maxey had the ball at the start of the play, and he’s an All-NBA lightning bolt who looked like the best player on the floor for the bulk of Tuesday’s season-opening contest at Madison Square Garden. So when he dribbled off a high ball screen late in the fourth quarter, having watched him slice and dice his way through their defense on multiple occasions, the Knicks decided to blitz him to try to force the ball out of his hands.

That strategy worked well for the Knicks during their sweep of the Sixers in the second round last spring, as they marauded their way through the Eastern Conference en route to the NBA title that they spent the early portion of Tuesday evening celebrating. This time, though, Maxey was ready for it, slipping the ball through the blitz to the now-healthy and noticeably slimmer Joel Embiid, who’d set the ball screen and was ready to take the feed from Maxey at the foul line and keep the play extended.

Embiid, you might recall, was the Most Valuable Player of the whole stinkin’ league a few seasons ago and can still look like one of the most dominant offensive players in the world when he’s right. The Knicks didn’t want to let him run rampant either; they’d really prefer to have someone help out the low man as he steps up to stop the ball, pinching in from the corners to protect the paint.

The thing is, though, that after Philadelphia’s stunning summertime makeover, one of those corners was occupied by Jaylen Brown, who averaged 28.7 points per game last season. The other was occupied by LeBron James, who, as you might have heard, is the leading scorer in the history of the sport.

You don’t want to leave either of those guys alone, either. And so …

… VJ gets a layup, or gets fouled.

“If I can score like that the whole game,” a smiling Edgecombe told reporters after the contest, “I'm perfectly fine with that.”

You’d suspect the rest of the Sixers will be, too.

Those interior buckets helped keep New York at arm’s length late in the fourth quarter Tuesday — a night the Knicks began with a coronation, but ended with the bitter taste of a 106-100 defeat to their Atlantic Division rivals.

“That’s what we wanted to do — be a little spoiler,” said Brown, who headed to Philadelphia in a blockbuster trade with the Boston Celtics this summer and finished with 19 points, 8 rebounds and 6 assists in his maiden voyage as a Sixer. “Obviously, what the Knicks accomplished is great. But it’s a new season, new year.”

And the 76ers are a new team. Brown and James (14 points, 9 rebounds, 7 assists) bring a combination of offensive firepower, defensive versatility and hard-earned experience at the highest level to a franchise that hasn’t advanced past the second round of the playoffs since 2001. A pair of lower-wattage newcomers, guards Anfernee Simons and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, played pivotal roles Tuesday, combining to knock down five 3-pointers to help Philly’s offense get unstuck and put the defending champs on their heels.

“Those were incredibly huge tonight,” Sixers head coach Nick Nurse said. “I thought we were generating a bunch of wide-open 3s and just nobody could throw one in. And those guys kind of broke through on that and moved the scoreboard for us.”

Both teams struggled moving the scoreboard in the early going. A Knicks team perhaps a bit emotionally spent from receiving their championship rings and watching a banner hoisted to the rafters at Madison Square Garden shot just 37% from the field in the first quarter. A Philly squad still very much in the getting-to-know-you phase wasn’t much better, shooting just 40.9% in the opening frame. The two teams combined to miss 15 of their first 19 3-point tries, trading stagnant possessions, fouls and free throws in a slog of an affair.

After entering halftime trailing by four, though, the Sixers started to kick into gear in the third. They only made 12 field goals in 27 tries, but all 12 were assisted — evidence that, despite many pundits’ “there’s only one ball” doom-saying, Philly’s players were committed to sharing the wealth.

“We're getting into some actions,” Nurse said. “We make the next read, and the guys are just trying to read where the ball's supposed to go. I think we're just making good decisions, and I think you could throw that around to just about everybody. Obviously, I thought Joel made some huge ones, LeBron made some big ones, but I think Tyrese made a couple, as well. So, again, just keep trying to make the right play.”

They showed that commitment on the other end, too. The Sixers held New York to 18 points on 5-for-21 shooting in the third quarter, which they closed with a 14-2 run capped by a buzzer-beating triple by Brown that sent Philly into the fourth up by seven; they would hold the lead throughout the fourth, holding Jalen Brunson, Karl-Anthony Towns and Co. at bay.

“That third quarter, that just gives you an outlook on what we can become,” Embiid said.

The Sixers limited the champs to just 14 points in the paint after intermission. For the game, they forced 14 Knicks turnovers and turned them into 22 points, with a number of them coming in the blink of an eye. They scored 1.8 points per play in transition on Tuesday and an absurd 2.2 points per play off steals, according to Cleaning the Glass — a level of offensive efficiency after a change of possession that can help you overcome a shaky shooting night.

They rotated on a string, closed out hard to shooters and forced drivers to attack Embiid, who was hobbled and largely immobile when these two teams squared off in the playoffs, but who looked notably more nimble Tuesday. He blocked three shots, altered a number of others and came away with a pair of steals — an impressive and encouraging performance for a player who needs to be excellent defensively for Philly to get where it wants to go and who wasn’t shy about saying Tuesday he feels like he’ll be returning to All-Defensive form this season.

“I told Tyrese after the game: We’ve been going against these guys for the last couple of years, and it felt — tonight felt a little different than the past,” Embiid said.

What felt different?

“We have the talent,” Embiid said. “I just think we have more focus in everything we do. Just be locked in every single possession. Defensively, I think a lot of it falls on me, and I’ll put it on me. If I want [to make the] All-Defensive team like past seasons, everything changes. If I can [do that] every single night, which I will, everything changes.”

The ceiling could be even higher if Maxey — who scored a game-high 28 points on 9-for-19 shooting with 5 assists — continues to play like the No. 1 option even when surrounded by All-Stars. Just as notable as his relentless pace with the ball in his hands, the seventh-year guard also added three blocks and three steals — the last of which led to a fast-break dunk that gave the Sixers a six-point lead with 1:52 remaining.

“I think our guys were doing pretty good as far as being connected, and whenever Tyrese darts into a lane and steals one, I'm not that surprised, because he's really got a burst of speed to make those kinds of plays,” Nurse said. “But yeah — really timely, right? It was really close, really close. It looked like it was going down to the last possession, and all of a sudden, he gets a breakaway layup, I think, to put us up six.”

“I had fun — a lot of fun,” Maxey said. “This group is very competitive. I've been saying it all training camp. And you saw it tonight, extremely competitive on both ends of the floor. You could tell the guys don't like losing.”

You could also tell, though, that the Sixers are much closer to the start of their collective journey than the finish line.

“We’ll have some of those moments in the early run of the season,” James said. “We’re still new to each other. We had a couple of moments where we had some turnovers that was kind of unforced. We had some moments where we had some open looks and we didn’t take it. And that will happen early on in the season, as we continue to build, as we continue to build our offensive sets, build our defensive sets. We will have some bumps in the road at times. But I think tonight, when we had those bumps in the road — which a good team will usually do — we were able to use what happened previously and then make the adjustment.”

The Sixers are learning and growing, and nowhere near a finished product. But if they can win while they learn and grow, while already showing some glimpses of what that finished product might be, then they might have the makings of something special in the City of Brotherly Love.

“We’re not even at the tip of the iceberg in terms of building chemistry, understanding yourself on the floor, understanding our spacing,” Brown said. “Like, we’re still at the very early stages of what we could possibly be.”