New Headline: Ripley's Raiders Fall 84-13 to Shocking Defeat!

Why are you the way that you are? Nick Nurse does not have a roster that he can win with against good teams right now, and any sane person would look at a matchup with Denver and come to that conclusion. I would also argue that most people would look at a league that is aggressively hunting corner threes and wonder why I was still playing a defense hellbent on selling out to defend the middle of the floor at the cost of conceding that exact corner three to every team and every player imaginable.

And it’s not like those shots are the only threes the Sixers give up as a result of their help principles, either. When the Sixers can go through the proper rotations to cover the corner, most teams typically find a way to swing the ball to a shooter in space. Denver doesn’t exactly need anyone’s help to brutalize you with their offense.

The Nuggets boast the league’s No. 1 offense with a savant passer as the hub of the team, and with a much smaller roster than usual and Jokic able to pass out of basically any situation, the Sixers nonetheless decided to crash the middle and pray that they wouldn’t be punished for it. It will shock you to learn that even with foul trouble in the first half, Jokic had 10 assists without breaking a sweat in his first 15 minutes of action.

They routinely sent a player to help on Jokic from one pass away in the strong corner, and I can’t imagine a more useless defensive strategy if you were trying to get your doors blown off. The entire sales pitch for Nurse’s hiring rested on two things: championship pedigree and inventiveness. Here was a coach, it was said, who would bring in fresh ideas and experiment frequently and adapt as the moment warranted.