Short-Handed Sixers Turn in Embarrassing Stinker in Charlotte Afternoon Game

The Sixers went into a weird afternoon game without Joel Embiid and Paul George on the first leg of a back-to-back and got absolutely smoked by the Charlotte Hornets. The game should've been played at an airport so that they could immediately get back in the air and head home because they were not mentally at this game at all.

Here's what happened.

Maxey sets a bad tone

It's difficult to say how much of this game was a result of the Sixers playing an afternoon game on Sunday, immediately boarding a plane ahead of a snow storm, spending an extra day in Charlotte and then playing another afternoon game on a weekday while being under-manned. Athletes are creatures of habit. They do not like it when you mess with their routines.

The Sixers played this game as if they were just checking off a box so that they could get back on normal scheduling. That does not make a blowout of this magnitude acceptable. Their focus was horrendous. The attitude and body language was awful. They were not mentally ready to play a game at 3 p.m., Eastern time, at all.

Why does this come back to Maxey?

Maxey is unquestionably the head of the snake when Embiid and George are unavilable. As has been said about Embiid for years, body language sets a tone. Maxey failed to set a tone from the very start of the game. He couldn't get anything to fall, so Maxey never found anything resembling a rhythm.

But his aggression and energy were not there. He spent a lot of time slumping his shoulders, waving his arms in exasperation when he felt victimized by a lack of a call and shaking his head at mistakes.

That message goes down the line, and the rest of the team followed suit. When you're the face of the franchise's present and future, amassing All-Star starter respect, it is on you to establish what is acceptable under any circumstances.

He approached the game as if it was unwinnable without his two co-stars, and it affected everything. It would've been one thing if Maxey came out and fired away, missing over and over again but staying aggressive. He took 12 shots in 25 minutes and looked completely disinterested.

The guard play behind Maxey is sorely hurting this team

Now, to be totally fair to Maxey, it is incredibly difficult to summon your best stuff when you emerge from a ball screen and get into the paint, only to see the defense shifted entirely toward you because they don't respect your teammates.

There are major spacing issues when you start Dominick Barlow and Andre Drummond together. VJ Edgecombe didn't have it — perhaps because he saw his backcourt mate look checked out and followed the lead. Kelly Oubre Jr. was aggressive but no one is guarding him as a shooter.

That brings us to the guys coming off the bench. It's difficult for Maxey to remain hopeful when the offensive plugs behind him are completely underwhelming. Quentin Grimes is not in a rut. At this point, he's simply underachieving. Or maybe he's just a wildly helter skelter player who caught lightning in a low-stakes environment after the trade deadline last season.

Whatever the case, defenses certainly aren't afraid of him. At least not at the expense of letting Maxey attack against one body. The same goes for Jared McCain, who has more latitude given his experience and return from a meniscus injury. But those two offensive sparks have not provided much fire all season and they show no signs of doing so.

In a game without Embiid and George, Nick Nurse can mix and match all that he wants, teams are going to shfit their defenses to plan explicitly for Maxey. It's a very difficult task when players aren't carrying their weights.

It's worth wondering if they couldn't actually use Kyle Lowry or Eric Gordon. Seriously.

Over-helping is hurting

Nick Nurse has very, very little responsibility in his team shooting 39 percent from the field and committing 17 turnovers. He has little to do with opponent shooting luck, the Hornets dousing the Sxiers with 55-percent shooting from the field and 40-percent shooting from three.

But is it really luck when the same things beat you game in and game out?

When teams get hot from three against the Sixers, it is usually because they send helpers to stop dribble penetration. That leaves someone open, be it one pass or a skip pass away. They get beat by three-point shooters because they over-help, stepping way too far from home to try to help thwart drives. Eventually, your defensive scheme is your defensive scheme. It becomes a matter of how stubborn you are against adjusting away from it when it's clearly not working.

The base of the problem is that the Sixers are not full of personnel who are adept at stopping dribble penetration, so you're coaching to stop layups and dunks and that means you're vulnerable to open threes and dump-offs to the big.

But even when the Sixers aren't over-helping off the ball, they're trying to thwart drives by blitzing or hedging the ball-handler. When the ball-handler beats it by making a timely pass, it's a four-on-three advantage for the offensive team with the rest of the floor to use.

Spare thoughts

This game, in a vacuum, is not a big deal. Every team is going to get stomped a couple times over the course of an 82-game regular season. The Sixers have had two hideous games all season. This game should burn the Sixers because they let a team out of the playoff picture in the east run them over. They've compiled two handfuls of games that they had in their grasp and let get away. They could be the two seed in the conference right now if not for those games. Instead, they are fighting to stay out of the Play-In tournament. Games like this one, when the approach and mental preparation are so bad, make you question what exactly they're working toward.

Nurse certainly is not coaching his team to foul guys 30 feet from the basket. They are pros and they have to be smarter. But there are mistakes that are so jarring that you wonder if the fundamentals are being emphasized enough. The Sixers foul three-point shooters all the time, and it's usually the same offenders. Adem Bona should know that he can't step out to the perimeter and defend with his hands. So why is he reaching and being overly aggressive against a shooter at the end of the clock? Why are these procedural things in question at this point in the season?

Grimes cannot fool me, all that fourth-quarter scoring isn't changing anything.

Nice to see McCain knock down some shots when the game was well over. Hopefully it leads him to something because it shouldn't take much for him to usurp Grimes in the rotation.