The Sixers are still building trust as they stare down a critical stretch run

Gabriela Carroll, The Philadelphia Inquirer on Feb 21, 2025

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PHILADELPHIA — With 27 games remaining on the schedule, the 76ers are still working on building trust as a unit.

After Thursday’s loss to the Celtics, in which Boston shot 44.4% from three-point range on 54 attempts, Tyrese Maxey said the team’s struggles on defense are the result of a lack of trust across the board.

“When you guard the ball, especially when you’re picking it up, you’ve got to know your teammates are behind you,” Maxey said. “Sometimes I think guys don’t know their teammates are behind, or where the teammates are, but that’s just the continuity part that we’ve got to get better at. If you guard the ball tough, and you know your teammate’s behind you, you know they’re going to help you, then you sell all the way out and guard the ball.”

Pregame, Nick Nurse honed in on the Sixers’ poor rim protection as one of the big issues on defense. The Celtics outrebounded the Sixers, 49-44, but with Embiid and Andre Drummond available, the Sixers weren’t overmatched on the boards.

The Celtics buried the Sixers with elite shooting, including a few shots from unexpected places. Payton Pritchard hit eight 3-pointers and scored a game-high 28 points off the bench.

“Well, obviously, we didn’t guard the three-point line near well enough,” Nurse said. “Most of them were just some screen-and-roll coverages where they were coming off the high screen-and-roll with too much space to shoot. We either weren’t getting over the screen, getting hit too hard, and the secondary defender wasn’t up enough to make a play, and we just let them get going early.

“They had a couple in transition as well. We made a couple mistakes on switches where we left them as well. Just little bit of everything.”

The Sixers added Quentin Grimes at the trade deadline, in no small part because of his skill as a perimeter defender, and Grimes got his second start since the trade against Boston.

Part of the Sixers’ problem is their lack of consistency in the starting lineup from night to night. Maxey, Joel Embiid and Paul George played in just their 14th game together on Thursday night, and the Sixers have used 34 different starting lineups in 55 games, including a new one on Thursday.

Compared to the Celtics, the defending NBA champions who brought back their entire core, the Sixers aren’t connected on the floor. George noticed the difference.

“Talking, communicating, that goes a long way, especially on the floor with a team like Boston, who knows what they’re doing,” George said. “Everything is clockwork over there. You’ve got to be dialed in, coverage-wise.

“You’ve got to know what the other person is doing, and everybody’s got to know what coverage we’re in on that specific play. It just comes down to communicating. We’ve got to communicate more, trust one another in that communication, and just be there for one another.”

The Sixers know they have limited time to correct those problems as they make a final push for the play-in tournament. Nurse pointed to Saturday’s game against the Brooklyn Nets as critical for the Sixers, who hope to gain the postseason tiebreaker.

“I think we’ll be fine,” Embiid said. “We just need to keep playing, trust each other, and have each other’s backs.”