The Sixers’ Offense Is the Reason They Lost Game 4, Not the Rebounds

In spite of all the offensive boards they gave up, the Sixers could have still won Game 4 if they'd just figured out how to fix their offense in time.

This is the possession where the Sixers lost Game 4. 

That was Isaiah Hartenstein’s fifth foul of the game, and with his starting center in such dire foul trouble before the fourth quarter even began, Tom Thibodeau made a decision that flipped the entire series — he put OG Anunoby on Joel Embiid. The Sixers would only score 18 points in the 13 remaining minutes, and Hartenstein never saw the floor again. 

Ask the average fan how they’ll remember Sunday’s loss, and odds are the Sixers’ absolute inability to grab a rebound is what they’ll point to. The Knicks finished Game 4 with 15 offensive rebounds, seven of which came in the final quarter, and seemingly every time the Sixers needed a big stop, a defensive rebound would slip through their hands, or they’d be whistled for a foul at the last second, and New York would capitalize with more points. Their inability to rebound cleanly was undoubtedly one of the driving forces behind their loss. 

However, the No. 1 reason the Sixers lost Game 4 had nothing to do with their defensive rebounding. Rather, it was their horrific fourth-quarter offense that cost them the game. For 12 straight minutes, the Sixers couldn’t figure out how to deal with the way Anunoby and the other four New York defenders were guarding Embiid. 

Things on that side of the ball actually started out well enough. Through the first seven minutes of the quarter, both teams had scored 13 points apiece — nothing to write home about, but far from an abject disaster. However, after making six buckets in those first seven minutes of the fourth, the Sixers would go the final five minutes of the game without a made field goal. This Kelly Oubre dunk was their final made basket of the game, and depending on how things go on Tuesday, perhaps their final bucket at Wells Fargo Center this season. 

Even with Anunoby being one of the best pound-for-pound defenders in the NBA, it felt like the Sixes should be able to take advantage of the matchup every time. The Knicks were doubling Embiid on the catch every time he caught the ball, in fear that he could bully Anunoby for shots at the rim if left in a one-on-one. They dared Embiid to trust his teammates to convert in 4-on-3 situations, and for the most part, he obliged. 

“They trapped [Joel] almost every single time he caught the ball,” Tyrese Maxey said after the game. “It’s hard to be aggressive when you get trapped. He made the right plays for the most part, guys [just] missed shots. I missed shots that I normally make.”

For Maxey, he’s likely thinking of this play, when he clanked a wide open three after Embiid was doubled inside. Hard to complain about the decision making from Embiid or Maxey on this play. It’s a perfect look, but one that they just missed. 

More frustrating might be the possessions where the Sixers actively ruined their chances to capitalize on Embiid’s gravity. Watch how all three of Oubre, Tobias Harris and Nicolas Batum either space the floor incorrectly or are simply incapable of finishing the scoring opportunity created for them by Embiid. 

All of it was bad and disjointed. Tobias kept roaming around the interior and clogging the space of open teammates while being unable to contribute anything as a dunker spot finisher. Oubre had poor timing on his usually pristine slot cuts, taking himself away from open space behind the arc that he was already inhabiting. Even in the play where Embiid eventually made a great pass, whipping the ball to an open Batum at the rim, the 35 year-old Frenchman simply wasn’t athletic enough to get up and finish over the young guns on the Knicks. 

The entire offensive process over the last five minutes felt like a complete encapsulation of every problem the Sixers could’ve encountered. Maxey’s jumper went cold, Embiid was gassed from having to play the entire second half on one healthy knee, and the three players around them were so incapable of creating offense for themselves that the Knicks could continually guard Embiid and Maxey with three players and get away with it. 

The Anunoby matchup almost acted as bait for the Sixers. With Hartenstein no longer on him, the Sixers tried to force feed Embiid post touches, and got away from all the ball screen and dribble hand-off actions that so many were accustomed to. Gone was all the movement and flow that led to the Sixers having one of the NBA’s most potent offenses during the first four months of the season. What resulted was a bunch of guys just standing around idly, waiting for something to work, waiting for the Knicks to make a mistake they could take advantage of, and yet that moment never came. 

So many little details are disregarded by the Sixers in those above plays, and they all come back to hurt them. In the first clip, they take too long getting the ball over the half-court line, and thus are running out of time as they’re unable to enter the ball to Embild. On the second, the Knicks can essentially guard both Oubre and Tobias with one player, as neither is flashing to open space at the right time, and when given an open shot, Kyle Lowry passes out of it with less than a second remaining on the shot clock. And in the third clip, it feels reasonable to assume Oubre wasn’t supposed to pull up for the contested three there, with no prior movement at all, getting a bad shot when the Sixers needed a good one. 

Even after the offensive rebound, when the ball gets cleanly entered to Embiid in the post and creates the double-team advantage the Sixers should in theory want, they can’t do anything meaningful with it. The Knicks easily predicted how the Sixers would react, and calmly rotated back into their defensive shell without surrendering a clean look. 

Brunson knew Oubre would slowly wind up in the dunker spot as the ball swung around, so instead of the defense scrambling amidst chaos following the double team, the Knicks managed to take the ball out of Embiid’s hands without sacrificing anything.

Play a team four times in 10 days, and that opponent becomes predictable. The Sixers knew what the Knicks wanted to do, and the Knicks knew what the Sixers wanted to do. The Sixers knew that the Knicks were going to run through Brunson and crash the offensive glass like crazy, and the Knicks were prepared to dare anyone not named Embiid and Maxey to beat them. 

The difference was that even knowing the Knicks’ game plan, the Sixers were helpless to stop it, while the Knicks completely put a lid on the Sixers’ offense without breaking a sweat. 

“Nurse kept saying before the game, ‘I promise Thibs is gonna show [the Knicks] film of Game 1.’” Maxey said, referencing the 23 offensive rebounds the Knicks secured in the first game. “He’s gonna say, ‘This is how we’re gonna beat this team, we gotta go in there and grab every single rebound.’”

Embiid Is Different and The Year Is Officially Back On

Ultimately, there’s no shortage of things to point to as the root cause for the Sixers’ late collapse. Was it the inability to solve the rebounding issue, or the inability to find any solutions to the Knicks’ defensive adjustment? Did they lose because Nurse made a mistake playing Embiid the entire second half, or was he forced to do that due to the 14-6 run they gave up to end the third quarter that evaporated all the comfort they had in the game? 

And in reality, all of those things contributed to the downfall. The rebounds only stick out the most because of their particularly infuriating nature. Giving up a second chance to a team after 20 seconds of great defense is a stab directly to the heart. 

But anyone evaluating the two teams entering this series knew that was going to be New York’s advantage. Embiid is playing on one knee and can barely jump at the moment, while the Knicks have the more athletic players up and down the roster, guys who are stronger and jump higher than almost all the Sixers players surrounding them. The blueprint was there for them to dominate on the offensive glass.

The theory behind the Sixers winning this series, though, was that the Knicks wouldn’t find an answer to the individual brilliance of Embiid and Maxey’s two-man game, and the way the other Sixers could play off them. Even with all the offensive rebounds the Sixers surrendered, the Knicks only scored 20 points in the entire fourth quarter, and five points in the final five minutes before tacking on two more via intentional foul. That’s a close game the Sixers win if they don’t themselves only get three points off 13 different shot attempts in the final five minutes, all three of which came at the foul line. 

Heading back to New York for Game 5, the odds seem stacked against the Sixers. No matter how big a lead they get off to, the Knicks always rally back, and now have a card Thibodeau can play in putting Anunoby on Embiid in the fourth quarter when the big man is most likely to be running on empty. If he’s exhausted by that point in the game, the offense may very well again turn away from its dynamic movement and become a stagnant slog with Oubre and Tobias standing in the wrong spots, and the Knicks will slowly seize control in the clutch, as they’ve done all season. 

It’s up to Nurse and the supporting cast around Embiid to get their heads on straight if they want to save their season. Despite his various ailments, Joel has still been the best player in this series by a significant margin (even if Brunson is admittedly closing the gap). There’s not much he can do, though, if the third-through-sixth-best players on his team keep reading the floor incorrectly while Deuce McBride keeps playing like the Knicks’ version of 2018 Terry Rozier.

The Sixers are still capable of both winning Game 5 and winning another game where they give up a ton of offensive rebounds. They almost did in both Games 1 and 4, and they’re only been out scored by four points total in a series they trail 3-1. But if the offense goes on the life support again in the final five minutes of a close game, they’ve got no shot. 

The Sixers need to fix their offense in Game 5 to make up for the rebounding problem that probably doesn’t have a solution outside of “go back in time and become stronger and more athletic.” Whether it’s benching Tobias earlier to get a better passer in Batum on the court, leaning more heavily into off-ball actions for Maxey and Embiid that can keep the offense moving, or even pressing the ever-tempting Ricky Council IV button, something has to be different. 

They need the players not named Joel Embiid to step up and contribute if they want to win and save their season — a proposition that has surely never gone wrong for the Sixers ever before. 

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Daniel Olinger is a writer for the Rights To Ricky Sanchez, and author of “The Danny” column, even though he refuses to be called that in person. He can be followed on X @dan_olinger.

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