Warriors humiliate Sixers in embarrassing end to West Coast tour

The Sixers decided they had had enough of playing West Coast basketball and unloaded a steaming pile of horse manure on San Francisco, falling 139-105 to the Warriors at the end of a grotesque performance.

Here’s what I saw.

The good

— Guerschon Yabusele, I want to make sure that the people of Philadelphia remember you. I appreciate the smart cutbacks and rebound efforts even if your team gets sticky.

The bad one

– If the Sixers have a worse defensive performance under their belt this season, I have a hard time thinking about it. Even with the low expectations of a back-to-back scenario, you figured they’d make the most of the legs they had with the team in desperation mode at the start of 2025. No!

Pick a guy on the list and you can find something they did wrong. Golden State absolutely destroyed Sixers with cutbacks in this game, even on possessions that seemed to be going well for the Sixers. For example, Embiid picked up Steph Curry on a switch while the Warriors guard was heading to the rim, and he ran the No. 30 back to the perimeter before a double from Paul George. They had stopped Curry in a good spot until Caleb Martin completely lost his man and was flat-footed when Curry hit a pass for an open layup.

As has been the case for most of this season, Philadelphia’s transition defense was abominable. This is the one area where I really want to bash Embiid, because he had some brutal, half-hearted possessions running back in the first half, and you can’t afford that when you’re playing a Curry-led team. Even if he isn’t the one who ultimately takes the shot, Curry will drag defenders around the floor with him and open up space for drives in the early offense. With Embiid only partially in the picture and his teammates following suit, the Warriors won for points that you would have called embarrassing if the plays had happened once or twice. Dear reader, it happened far more often than that.

You’d be hard-pressed to find five or more plays in this game where the Sixers got a big effort out of a perimeter player while handling a ball screen. Great effort.

– If I was hard on Maxey after the loss to Sacramento, I guess I should have saved my real life for this despicable performance. If there was an obvious fatigue-based excuse to point to here, you might say he could get off with a caution, but his errors were mostly execution errors. This was a guy who didn’t have it, couldn’t find it, and buried the team with suspect decision-making. He shot when he should have passed, passed when he should have shot, and so on.

Thursday’s first half featured three of the worst layup misses I’ve seen from Maxey in his career. We’ve gotten used to seeing role players like Caleb Martin smoke layups without anyone contesting the shot, but Maxey is usually someone you can count on to make freebies. Not so in this one, and unfortunately those open or open layups represented a pretty large portion of his shot attempts.

I’m also getting a little tired of listening to and seeing him complain about calls he never gets. You’re allowed to be upset that one of “your guys” doesn’t seem to catch a break, but there’s no grand conspiracy against Maxey as a player that prevents him from getting calls. He ends up on the baseline looking up at the sky and the umpires over and over, and that’s because he doesn’t initiate contact well enough to draw fouls. Teams have found effective ways to defend him inside the arc because he is limited as a passer, making it easier to time rotations and contests accordingly.

While his defensive stats look good coming out of this one, I thought he was a big part of their early problems on that end. I will give him some grace after playing 42.5 minutes the night before, but he was lazy on finishes early in this game, allowing the Warriors’ shooters to get hot and stay hot.

— I will write a lot of nice words about Joel Embiid and then use it to make a negative point. Ready?

With some issues we’ll get to below that don’t go unnoticed, this was pretty much a good outing from Embiid. He rebounded the ball better than he has most of this season, he moved effectively in space and he finally got into his stuff from the free throw line and in after a rough start from the field. Embiid deserves to be held accountable for his lack of effort in transition defense, but I think that was the only area where you could say his level of “will” was off the pace. Otherwise, I think he was committed to trying to pull them back in this game, even though it was clear they were trying to climb the face of a mountain in tennis shoes.

The problem, then, lies in Philadelphia’s approach to this season. They continue to stick with the bumpy plan that prevents Embiid from playing in back-to-backs and congested parts of the schedule. It might have been something you could get away with if Embiid hadn’t missed the season opener (plus more time), leaving the Sixers well behind the conference leaders in the standings. But the Sixers are splitting the kid right now. They are still selling the idea that they are doing things with the playoffs in mind while remaining out of the playoffs with plenty of hurdles ahead. They lose without him and then they absolutely have to win the games with him so they don’t create this cycle of torture we’re all going through right now.

Let’s just take the Sixers on their assumption that you can make the play-ins with a pretty bad record. What have you seen from this team that suggests they will be able to limp into a do-or-die situation and be counted on to win an important game or two? What have you noticed that says they would buck the trend in the ENTIRE HISTORY of the NBA to go from a low seed to a team that can win a title? This is a team that still operates as if that goal, the championship goal, is all that matters. Great, but it means you can’t pick and choose the games that matter for the rest of the year. Either you’re ready to compete with the big boys or you’re not.

– Speaking of frivolous approaches, I understand he’s not the ideal guy for the job, but Clippers fans must have laughed when he saw Paul George hanging out on the floor while Jeff Dowtin was tasked with guarding Steph Curry .

The Ugly

— I bring up again that Kyle Lowry is useless in a Sixers recap. I’ll repeat for probably the 25th time, I don’t blame him for being ineffective as a small guard in his 30s. I blame the coach for starting him and trusting him a lot.

We’re at the point where I think it’s asking too much to get another playable guard in here. It’s the right thing to do from a basketball perspective because they miss Jared McCain’s production, and it’s the right thing to do when you consider that it might be the only way for Lowry to be benched entirely. A nurse starting him in the second half was pure comedy, but at least it didn’t last long, I guess.

— Here is a bigger question about the head coach: I am not convinced that he is the one style of coach the Sixers need for this team. It doesn’t mean he’s a bad coach, it doesn’t mean he won’t be successful here, but I’m starting to think he’s an odd fit with the staff and the needs they have.

Nurse, at his core, is a guy who wants to play simple, free-flowing basketball. I don’t think that’s inherently a bad thing, and in fact it’s how I’d like teams to play at a wider level. You let smart and talented players feel their way through possessions. The problem is that the Sixers don’t have a collection of high-IQ players or skilled passers. They don’t see the floor well as a team, which means many possessions end with an isolation attack or a player chasing a turnover after the initial weaving of DHOs leads to nothing.

What they seem to need is an offense that schemes them open, that is more deliberate with its actions and off-ball moves to form some kind of synergy beyond, “Let’s hope, the talent winner.” There are definitely some pet plays that the Sixers run, and I even like a few of them. I’ve highlighted when they’ve used a flare screen for a PG look from the left wing in recent postgame shows. They have a HORNS look after a duck-in or fake duck-in that has worked relatively well early in the game. But there are long stretches of games where they just default to the aimless, let-the-stars-work style. Embiid’s pick-up points are too far out as a result of what they run (or don’t run), one of many issues plaguing the offense.

Maybe it will end up working out in the long run if they get a consistent run of games with everyone healthy. Even then, the Sixers need to get the right guys on the floor, and Nurse hasn’t been good at that. Kyle Lowry, it bears repeating, started again. Guerschon Yabusele, who was one of their only positive players in the first half, played only 11 minutes. Coming off one of his best performances in months, Eric Gordon didn’t appear until nearly halfway through the second quarter.

Fans always want blood when things go wrong, especially the coach’s blood. And I’m not one to demand it pretty much ever, as I put coaches low on the general blame list. Don’t do it here. These are just some thoughts that I can’t escape watching the Sixers right now.