Positives and negatives from Sixers’ first home win of the season vs. Hornets in overtime

For the first time in just over 2 weeks, we can finally rest tonight knowing that the 76ers have won a basketball game. A season of championship aspirations has turned into an unmitigated disaster through 9 games, but given how early it is in the season there is still hope to hold out for.

A lot of key players showed a lot of flashes tonight so let’s go over the positives and the negatives of the Sixers home win, 107-105 over the Hornets in overtime.

Positive: They FINALLY won

It wasn’t anywhere close to pretty, but god this team needed a win so badly. Bad game after bad game, bad headline after bad headline, something needed to give and it did.

This win is especially important with the NBA Cup group tournament play beginning Tuesday and a pretty rough patch in the schedule that follows with it. They finally get Joel Embiid back from injury/suspension on their group play debut against the Knicks on Tuesday and hopefully can ride the momentum from tonight’s win and turn it into a streak

Positive: Jared McCain is AMAZING

He’s 2 wins into Philly, but he’s 3 lectures behind. Bad jokes aside, McCain was unstoppable tonight dropping 27/3/2 on 10-18 shooting. With the team set to be without All-Star Tyrese Maxey for weeks McCain’s presence as an offensive threat would be crucial to staying afloat in the East.

Positive: The Yabu experiment is working!

Signing Guerschon Yabusele over the offseason felt like a very low-risk, high-reward move for Daryl Morey and so far the rewards have been great. Yabu had 20 and 8 on 8-13 from the field and the hope now is that as the team continues to heal up he can add the level of depth that the Sixers lacked noticeably in these last few seasons.

After a somewhat quiet October Yabu has taken full advantage of the extra minutes he’s earned so far in November and has emerged as a solid if not above average role player for the team. He’s strung together 2 straight solid performances now and it will be interesting to see if he can keep it up.

Negative: PG looked really, really bad

I know it’s too early to judge and I know he’s coming off an injury but we still haven’t seen the player that was advertised to us during the offseason. Against the Charlotte Hornets, Paul George couldn’t get anything going, putting up 15/3/9 on 6-18 shooting. All but a liability on the court.

The cherry on top was him channeling “Way-off P” after putting up a game-winner that couldn’t have been less close to making it in.

Negative: We got taken to OT by the Hornets

No matter how injured we are, or how good LaMelo Ball is this still shouldn’t have been this close. The entire point of this off-season was to make it so that even when Embiid doesn’t play this is still a competitive basketball team while also giving Embiid more help when he’s on the court.

So far this hasn’t been close to the results. A win is nice for sure, but to this point in the year, this team has proven to be nothing but just a reskinned version of past 76ers teams.

It’s been an unpredictable beginning of the NBA season all across the association and Philly has been no different. We’re gonna learn a lot about this team on Tuesday night which has now become a game that is a lot more important than it should have to be. Hopes should be raised as Embiid is set to make his return after being suspended for shoving a reporter in the locker room.

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