Weaponizing Thybulle's Offense, Benching Tobias
Simply put, this was always the role that Thybulle was destined to play, but he just hadn’t had anyone on the team to unlock it for him.
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As the James Harden era has continued, our initial takeaways have only been confirmed. The team just keeps on winning whenever he plays, the chemistry with Joel Embiid continues to be good, Tyrese Maxey continues to score at a rampant pace, Tobias Harris continues to struggle, etc. etc. Here in this piece, I’ll be diving a bit deeper into the trends that we’ve seen so far, plus look ahead to what the future holds in each of these categories. Let’s begin.
Matisse Thybulle’s offensive renaissance
Last spring, I wrote a piece detailing how the Brooklyn Nets employed Bruce Brown, Jr. in their offense, and why I’d like to see the Sixers try to emulate that with Matisse Thybulle. The gist was simple: Brown is limited offensively as a wing, but the Nets had made use out of him by essentially turning him into a big man – screening and rolling, flashing in the lane for duck-ins, crashing the offensive glass, etc.
Over the next several months, my hopes went unanswered, and Thybulle’s role changed very little. But, suddenly, James Harden’s arrival has brought exactly what I’d hoped for all along: Thybulle is flying around the court as a roll man in the pick and roll, and is playing the role of a big man in just about every respect.
Since the trade, Thybulle’s scoring splits on a per 100 possession basis with and without Harden are staggering:
With Harden: 19.6 points/100 poss.
Without Harden: 6 points/100 poss.
Simply put, this was always the role that Thybulle was destined to play, but he just hadn’t had anyone on the team to unlock it for him. In the form of Harden, he now has the perfect player to be the yin to his yang.
Teams simply have no idea how to guard the Thybulle-Harden pick and roll. Playing a drop coverage feels unnatural on a guard-guard pick and roll, and even if that’s your choice of poison, guards aren’t particularly used to treading water in those situations – giving Thybulle chances to stampede past the likes of Zach LaVine here.
Sixers *might* just have something with the Harden-Thybulle PnR pic.twitter.com/F7aKonFcjX
— Harrison G. (@Harrison_Grimm) March 8, 2022
I’ll be curious to see if teams start switching these actions, rather than make their guards try to play 2-on-1. That seems like the easy solution, but will leave Harden lots of mismatch opportunities.
So far, it seems like Thybulle has solidified his place as the fifth starter. If teams can find a way to neutralize his rolling, and he starts to feel like a major offensive liability, that could change – I’d be interested to see more of Danny Green or Georges Niang with the rest of the starters, just to see what it looks like. But for now, it sure seems like Harden is making a useful offensive player out of Matisse Thybulle.
Should they bench Tobias?
I’ve started to get a funny feeling watching Tobias Harris lately. As he has continued to struggle adjusting to Harden, and the worst of his habits have been increasingly glaring, I can only compare it to a feeling I had at the very beginning of the 2018-19 season. At that time, the Sixers were starting Markelle Fultz over JJ Redick, and by about the second or third game of Brett Brown’s well-meaning experiment, it was abundantly clear: they can’t keep doing this. It was being done for appearances and as a motivational tactic, but it was very clearly not what’s best for the team.
To be clear, the specifics of these situations are not remotely the same – Harris is far, far better than Fultz was, there is no one playing behind him as good as JJ Redick, and I’m not even proposing that they take Harris out of the starting lineup. And yet, my continued feelings of unease lead me to reminisce about that situation.
Simply put, Georges Niang has more value to this team than Harris does. The efficiency on Harris’ individual shot creation is borderline to begin with, and with ample creators elsewhere on the roster, there simply isn’t much need for it, anyway. And as Harris continually passes up open 3s, and pump fakes to drive into nowhere with excruciating tunnel vision, one can’t help but contrast it with Niang, who flies around setting screens and launching 3s with an inch of space. Niang is currently shooting more than twice as many 3s as Harris on a per-100 possession basis.
Harris’ 3-point attempt rate is downright anemic for a player with his level of accuracy. Here are just a few of the players attempting more 3s per 100 possessions than Harris this season: John Collins, P.J. Tucker, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Serge Ibaka, and Andre Iguodala. Per NBA.com, there are 36 centers who have appeared in at least 25 games this season who attempt 3s at a more frequent rate than Harris, one of them being Joel Embiid. It is, quite simply, unacceptable.
Nothing that Harris does in other aspects of his game are good enough to justify keeping him as a 38-minute per game guy in the playoffs. If anything, his lack of passing ability, general offensive awareness, and sheer inability to throw a basic entry pass will be even more costly in the playoffs. Every single thing that he does feels laborious and forced at the moment.
To me, the proper move is to keep Harris in the starting lineup – to avoid drama and tanking whatever is left of his confidence – and close games with Niang in his place. It will open up the floor tremendously on offense, and they will barely be sacrificing anything on defense; Niang even has a level of toughness and competitiveness that Harris does not have. He thrives in big moments, and Harris gives off a strong vibe that he is simply scared of fucking up.
Harris is not a total albatross to the point that having him out there in any capacity is untenable. But with Niang’s emergence, there is an obvious better option. Doc Rivers and the Sixers can posture and ignore it for now, hoping to keep up appearances. But when the playoffs come around, I have absolutely no idea how one could justify playing Harris over Niang in crunch time.
Can Shake Milton come alive?
In Friday’s win over the Cavs, Shake Milton looked like a useful rotation player for the first time in… months? More?
It has been a truly bizarre couple of years for Shake. He burst onto the scene in 2020, looking like the savior of that season, and continued that with an excellent start to the 2020-21 season in which many Sixers fans considered him the frontrunner for Sixth Man of the Year in the opening month. And then, slowly but surely, the wheels completely came off. By the end of the year, he was out of the rotation, and so far this season, his impact has felt anywhere from a total zero to eminently replaceable for the entire year. In the ecstasy of Maxey’s emergence, and the joy of acquiring Harden, it feels like Milton’s fall-off has somehow gone under the radar. Let’s not forget that we all once considered him an integral part of this team.
That brief stretch in the Cavs game was a reminder that the player we thought he could be is still in there somewhere. If it is to continue, he’ll first and foremost have to rediscover his jump shot, which has tailed off and at times completely abandoned him after the 2020 season. He shot just 35 percent last season, and is at 29.5 percent this year, after years (dating back to college) of being at or above 40 percent on solid volume.
If Milton can rediscover his groove from outside, there is a massively useful player in here somewhere. He would become perhaps the only bench player who can both shoot 3s and attack close-outs while making good decisions. Milton still has the chance to be an excellent connecting piece within this offense, but he’s been lying dormant for months. If, somehow, he becomes 2020 Shake once again, I don’t think many have considered what a jolt that would be to the Sixers’ bench.