How the Sixers' Loss to the Pelicans Illustrates Years of Problems

As the Sixers folded like a beach chair early in the fourth quarter, you couldn't help but think about what the theme has been here for months. Before the Jared McCain trade. Before the start of 2026. Aside from the first 15 games of the season, they've been a below-average three-point-shooting group.

Saturday was merely the latest installment of wretched three-point shooting that stalled out the entire offense.

For a while, Tyrese Maxey could mask it with his heroics. But as his minutes have crept up and defenses have gotten less and less scared of everyone outside of Philadelphia's top three, it's become incredibly obvious that this team's problems run much deeper than just whether or not Joel Embiid is available.

Don't get me wrong—I believe that they have the power at the top of the roster to be the last team standing in the Eastern Conference if Embiid is healthy enough to function. He is that valuable. He, Maxey and George, together, can cover up a lot of the holes in this roster.

But take a look at the Boston Celtics. Jayson Tatum has not stepped on the court this season. Boston made several trades to lower payroll. Everyone wrote them off. Yet, here they are, the two seed in the east. Don't get me wrong, Jaylen Brown has elevated his game to the degree of several leaps at once. He and Maxey are two different archetypes of players.

But look at his teammates. Brown, Payton Pritchard and Derrick White are shooting well below league average from three. That does not matter because they have six teammates playing meaningful minutes who are all shooting quite well from deep on varying volumes. Even if the volumes vary, the skills support Boston's style. The Celtics' leading shot volume, by far, is threes. Their team makes sense. They're built to play the style they strive for. So when they toss out the cliché "next man up mentality" quote in response to Tatum's absence, they can actually back it up.

The Sixers cannot back that cliché up for multiple reasons.

One is that Embiid is simply better than Tatum is. Another is that they don't have the supporting cast to fit any style of play. A third is that because they don't really have a supporting cast that fits any style of play, they can't possibly have a dedicated style of play to shift to when any of their three big names has to miss time.

Let's unpack that. They don't have the supporting cast that fits any style of play. What does that mean?

If Embiid is not available, the offense should run through Tyrese Maxey. Makes enough sense given that he's a 25-year-old two-time All-Star, no?

What types of players could possibly fit that?

Knock-down shooters come to mind. But in the current CBA environment, you can't just mindlessly pay the best three-and-D role players the league has to offer. You will have to get some specialists. That means you're probably giving up something on defense.

Why?

You need to open up the floor for Maxey. A 6-foot-1 lead guard needs to be able to attack gaps and explode off the dribble. He needs to be able to punish defenses that protect against the drive with his jumper. And if defenses are going to load up on the driving lanes or send two or three at Maxey, he needs teammates who will punish those defensive coverages more often than not.

Thus, spacing isn't just an item on the shopping list. It's a premium commodity that should be treated with the utmost importance.

But if you need to lean into having some less versatile players, you probably need a big who can protect the rim because you're going to give up drives or a big that pulls down a league-leading volume of rebounds on either end of the floor. Playable bigs are not plentiful in this league. The ones that run two or three tools deep are usually starters.

But if you're going to put the ball in Maxey's hands to quarterback the offense, you need that big to have a decent feel in the middle of the floor. At least then, if the trap comes, Maxey can connect the ball pressure spot to the rest of the floor by flipping the ball to the big after he screens.

You don't need a big who can create or shoot. You don't need him to be able to switch on the perimeter. Two of rim protection, rebounding and decent feel with the ball will suffice.

What does that all do?

You can actually lean into a three-point-heavy offense that makes Maxey's life easier. And when the ball gets into the paint, you have some mechanism in place to deter high-quality shots at the rim.

That would at least support modern concepts of how NBA basketball needs to be played.

What do the Sixers currently have for a plan for Maxey when Embiid isn't available?

Let's take a look.

Player	Three-Point Attempt Rate	Accuracy
Justin Edwards	64%	34%
Quentin Grimes	53%	34%
Jared McCain	48%	38%
Paul George	47%	38%
VJ Edgecombe	41%	35%
Kelly Oubre Jr.	41%	36%
Jabari Walker	40%	26%
Tyrese Maxey	38%	38%
Dominick Barlow	22%	27%

(All data via Cleaning The Glass.)

Now, only George can take the blame for his 25-game suspension. That is crunching this group in Embiid's absence. Edgecombe knocking down 35 percent of his threes is a win for a rookie who was not billed as a shooter coming out of the draft. Oubre's 36 percent is a good outcome relative to his historical accuracy from deep.

But Daryl Morey's front office traded away McCain for draft capital a few weeks ago. The Sixers chose to entrust the unproven Grimes. They invested in the undrafted Edwards. They got Jabari Walker on a Two-Way deal after the Portland Trail Blazers went in a different direction and then signed him to a minimum deal this week.

The roster is composed of bargain-level players with little-to-no track records of success in the NBA. The guys they've hired to support their tentpoles are either woefully inconsistent shooters or they don't even take enough of them to support a modern style of basketball.

The most glaring example of that is the disparity between Maxey's rate of threes and Barlow's.

Make no mistake, no one shooter was changing this team's world. Sure, the Sixers might've given up on McCain too soon. But neither he nor any one other guy was changing the defense's calculus against the Sixers.

The Sixers may be drawing dead in their support of Maxey on offense, but at least they're also supporting him on defense with teammates who cannot stop dribble penetration and non-Embiid big men who are fatally flawed in their own ways.

Maxey worked tirelessly to keep this group going when Embiid was more often out than available and limited in minutes when he could play. Embiid worked tirelessly to build himself back up to resembling the top of his powers.

The Sixers' decision-makers paid that forward by not investing in the team at the trade deadline. They expressed disbelief in what this group is capable of.

The decision to make no additive move is more egregious than the decision to trade McCain.

They have a wizard-like center who changes their world at his best. They have a lead guard whose ability to carry the load is dictated by his size and his teammates' abilities to do anything right. The Sixers have a do-it-all forward who can carry his weight. And they have a bag of misfit toys who can each do some things but don't coherently fit any dedicated style.

This isn't a one-year issue, either. Maxey has been a star-level player for three years running. We still have to ponder how much of the team's struggles are directly caused by him not being good enough to be a top option and which are because he hasn't had teammates who can actually accentuate his abilities.

Embiid and Maxey do not overlap in many ways. But there is one thing you certainly need to surround them with—shooting. That skill is maybe the most valuable in the entire sport right now. That should be at the forefront of what you build around them.

Yet the Sixers don't have it, in volume or accuracy.

It feels impossible that an NBA team with star power could have this little shooting. It makes you wonder whether those in charge really, truthfully believed that Embiid could recover as much as he has.

But forget about McCain. Forget about continuously surrounding Embiid with disappointment, from the limitations of teammates to the failures of coaches. Maxey is invested in as a pillar of the present and future, and yet we still can't answer whether he's just an elite second star or a capable top star. The biggest crime of all is that this is year three of him being asked to shoulder the load and he still doesn't have the infrastructure to prove what he's reasonably capable of.