Sixers Bench Scoring Problem Reaches Breaking Point in Playoff Loss

Playoff basketball doesn’t wait for you to figure things out, and the Sixers are finding this out the hard way right now.

Game 3 exposed what the regular season let them ignore: this roster has almost no margin for error. Tyrese Maxey and VJ Edgecombe played almost the entire night because there was nobody behind them worth trusting. The bench was outscored 26-6. Six points. The second unit contributed six points in a playoff game, and somehow, those six points feel a bit inflated.

“Everyone comes in, whether the starters, the guys come in off the bench trying to play hard,” Joel Embiid said after the Sixers’ 108-94 loss to the Knicks on Friday night. “Rebounding was a big issue [Friday], especially in the second quarter. So same mentality we had against Boston, just find your man, and instead of watching the ball find your man and try and do the best job possible.”

By the fourth quarter, you could see the drain on Maxey’s body. Not his decision-making, not his shot selection, his body language told the story. The way he walked back on defense. The way possessions started taking longer than they normally do when he’s not playing on tired legs, the ball movement slowing to something resembling a crawl, and the offense going from sharp to just surviving. He still made plays, but he always makes plays. But there is a version of Maxey that dissects a defense and a version that is willing himself into plays, and by the fourth quarter of Game 3, you were seeing the second version. That’s what exhaustion looks like when one player is responsible for every meaningful possession and plays nearly every minute of the game.

Edgecombe deserves credit. He kept attacking and competing, but the Sixers are asking a rookie to take on huge playoff minutes because the guys behind him are so ineffective. This is something that the front office needs to address in the offseason. The roster construction and not bringing in bench help at the deadline is stinging the Sixers in this series.

“His usage is very high. So, it’s just tough on VJ,” Kelly Oubre said. “It’s tough on me to just go pick him up every single possession, but it’s a sacrifice we have to make. We have to figure that part out.” 

The Jared McCain trade is even more important right now. It keeps coming back up, because they are sorely missing what he consistently gave them: movement shooting, secondary creation, and actual bench offense. This is exactly what’s missing and what’s causing Maxey to not be able to sit, leading him to be running on fumes late in games. Granted, McCain wasn’t a solution to everything, but he was a solution to this specific problem — where the second unit needs to hold a game together for six minutes without completely hemorrhaging points and giving away momentum, and right now this is eating the Sixers alive. His absence isn’t a storyline anymore. It’s a real problem that’s showing up in playoff games.

None of this is a surprise. Depth concerns were there all season; they got overlooked because top-end talent pulls all the attention, and the Sixers starters can compete with anyone in the NBA. It’s easy to wave off a weak bench in November. In a playoff series against a team with more trust in its rotation, there is nowhere to hide. The Boston series showed some of this, but this series against the Knicks is truly exposing the Sixers bench.

There were many reasons the Sixers lost this game. The rebounding was bad, the late-game execution was bad, and the shot quality in the half-court deteriorated as the game wore on. Some of that is the Knicks playing their game, and some of that is guys playing 38 minutes. But those problems look different when your starters are rested. They look like correctable mistakes instead of symptoms of something bigger. The season is on the edge right now; the time to correct mistakes has passed.

The Sixers built a roster with almost no margin for error, and now every flaw is getting amplified at the worst possible time. The rebounding issues are there, the missed shots are stacked up, and the late execution escaped the Sixers. But none of those things exist in a vacuum when your starters are carrying this kind of workload every night while getting almost nothing from the players behind them.

Get New Articles Emailed Right To Your Inbox: