Jerardi: Enjoying the Sixers' slog out of basketball hell – Philly.com (blog)

I am not sure if it says more about how dead a sports time this is or how dead the Sixers have been, but who is not watching the Summer League games? Now that management has said it is not only trying to acquire talent, but also trying to win games, the Sixers have suddenly become hot.

For the longest time, the Saturday night game with the Lakers was as bad as basketball can be played. Still, it was fun, entertaining, tantalizing. And the hoops actually did get better down the stretch.

The next night, there were Ben Simmons’ four consecutive baskets and a hint of the player the No. 1 pick can be. It is all so enticing, especially after the long slog in basketball hell.

I do not want to tamp down anybody’s enthusiasm, but the reality is that, at the moment, the Sixers are just a collection of players, nowhere near a team. Putting together a basketball team that Brett Brown can actually coach successfully is going to be general manager Bryan Colangelo’s most difficult job.

Brown has been talking lately about how the Sixers are unbalanced — too many bigs, too few shooters, not nearly enough defense. One or more of the bigs probably has to go, replaced by quality shooters and perimeter defenders. If you can find a shooter/defender in the same person, that would be lovely.

Colangelo, of course, has to try to put together a team without really knowing if Joel Embiid is going to be part of it for the long term. So, do you trade Nerlens Noel (is Jrue Holiday available?) or Jahlil Okafor (can he be traded for a rumor to be named?) or Dario Saric (can a player be traded before he actually signs?) not really knowing about Embiid?

I’ve really been thinking about Okafor lately and trying to ascertain his true value. He is a scoring savant who does an imitation of a statue on defense.

If you went just by traditional numbers, Okafor (17.5 points, 7.0 rebounds) in 53 games last season would probably be identified as the Sixers’ best player. If, however, you went by one NBA.com metric, he could be identified as the worst. The team’s offensive rating while he was on the court was 92 points per 100 possessions. Its defensive rating while he was playing was 108.7 points per 100 possessions, an overall rating of -16.7, worst among the rotation players.

It is also true that Okafor was a player with a unique skill playing on a team that was just awful for all the reasons everybody who watched them play understood. When he was on a team the previous season that had comparable or better talent than its opponents, Duke won a national championship.

The Sixers have several young, interesting players, but the truly great players are rarely hard to identify. I have not identified any.

I shall wait to make any determination on Simmons because his game is so unique and, in the end, he alone is probably going to determine his place by how much he wants to be great.

Simmons is already a passing genius who sees the game like the great masters see a chess board. He is always thinking a move or two ahead and has the skill to execute any pass. Just about everything else about Simmons is to be determined. We could all critique his few NBA games and his college career, but this is not just about what he is, it is about what is going to become.

Moving up in the NBA is quite difficult and no team had farther to go than the Sixers when this offseason began. They are on the way to better, but when your record is 63 games worse than the best record and the team with that record just got Kevin Durant, the climb is quite steep. But at least the climb has begun.

Published: July 12, 2016 — 8:56 AM EDTPhiladelphia Daily News

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