Instant observations: VJ Edgecombe injured in Sixers’ humiliating defeat vs. Spurs
· Yahoo Sports
The Sixers allowed Victor Wembanyama and the visiting Spurs to turn Tuesday into a San Antonio highlight factory, suffering a 131-91 defeat at home that undersells how rancid their performance was. A VJ Edgecombe injury before halftime was another stinky addition to yet another miserable Philadelphia performance without Joel Embiid.
Here’s what I saw.
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A team with no answers
We are going to start in a weird place to open the recap of a game against a 44-win Spurs team: Andre Drummond. The veteran center has not been good for most of the last few months, but Tuesday night showcased everything that is wrong with this team in a three or four-minute run.
Drummond’s job in this game was as straightforward as making Victor Wembanyama have to work on either (and preferably both) ends of the floor. But that requires a role player’s focus in that role, an understanding to do your job and not get baited into some kind of larger one-on-one battle with a much better, much younger player than you. Defend hard, rebound, play opportunistic basketball around the rim, and set hard screens. What we got instead was a second-quarter stretch where Drummond decided to make Sixers-Spurs about his own personal battle with Wembanyama, jacking up four first-half threes and missing every single one of them, one nearly missing the rim entirely from the right wing. He, for whatever reason, found himself in a trash-talking battle with the fiery Frenchman, who was happy to woof in Drummond’s face after cashing out a three with Drummond sinking toward the rim.
I wouldn’t mind Drummond trying to “meet the moment” by playing aggressive offense vs. Wembanyama if it had come with focused, determined effort on defense, but he was as lazy and cynical on that end as he has been for most of the last 12 weeks. He had no feel for how to cover Wembanyama with or without help. If he played up, Wembanyama drove past him and kicked to open shooters in the corners as help swarmed the middle. When Drummond dropped, Wembanyama punished him for leaving him extra space. As a helper, Drummond was brutal, uninterested in swooping in at the rim and often swiping at air instead of trying to slide into favorable positions.
Here’s a fun stat alert courtesy of my ALLCITY friend Tim Cato: Drummond became just the second player in NBA history to start a game, play less than five total minutes, and shoot the ball seven times.
And Nick Nurse’s response was…leaving him in the game, up until he picked up his third foul midway through the second quarter. Drummond was able to do all of this because he was allowed to. And it’s not the first time Drummond has gotten a bit too big for his britches in Philadelphia, apparently unafraid of losing his spot in the rotation. That was it for Drummond on the night, and I have to ask at this point, why wait until now?
Anyway, focusing too much on one guy misses the real point. Drummond feeling he has the rope to completely hijack the game is a symptom of a directionless style and structure the Sixers have chosen. Comparing Philadelphia’s structure to San Antonio’s setup, there was a night-and-day difference, with the Spurs pinging the ball around the floor and moving constantly off-ball as the Sixers tried to win in isolation over and over and over again.
The Spurs, if Tuesday’s meeting didn’t make it clear, invent ways to get everyone involved and roster players with several skills to fall back on (including defense!) if their main things go awry. The Sixers have limited players who crumble while mostly standing around or going side to side in dribble handoffs on offense, conceding open threes with overzealous help from the blindside on the other end. Humiliating losses are beginning to pile up, inspiring questions about how the foundation can be this shaky after lessons should have been learned after the debacle that was 2024-25.
The talent gap on Tuesday was very obvious, of course, but we are 61 games into the season, and there have been very few moments where you’ve thought, “Boy, the Sixers sure did something inventive” to describe a quarter, a game, or a stretch of the season. They’ve been pretty good because the top-end talent is pretty good, and one of the ugliest watches in basketball when a less talented group has to try to play the same style their stars are winning nailbiters with.
No one needs to explain to me how important Joel Embiid is to the Sixers as a basketball team and an organization. I don’t need a reminder that Paul George is a huge dumb ass for getting a 25-game suspension connected to the league’s anti-drug policy. But I don’t view it as an impossible ask for the Sixers to have an identity without those two players that goes beyond rampant overhelp on defense and relentless isolation play on offense. One of the key tasks Nick Nurse was asked to attack after last season’s joyless slog was building out a plan and an identity when the vets are out. They believed they had done so in the sunny days of October, and have fallen flat on their face when asked to make something of themselves in 2026.
One could reasonably point the finger at the front office for failing to upgrade this team at the deadline, trading away Jared McCain for future-focused assets in a move that effectively said “later is more important than now.” Morey’s message to the fans was that fans had to be pretty pleased about what it looked like when they were healthy, ignoring that they needed to maintain that with a cast of characters led by injury-plague stars, all while trading away a fan favorite the public was willing to be patient for. It’s hard to ignore, of course, that the head coach couldn’t find much use for McCain before the second-year guard immediately began producing in a bench role for the reigning champions and current No. 1 seed in the Western Conference, on a team with more guard depth than Philadelphia has to offer.
There was nothing the Sixers did well in this game. There is nothing they have done well lately aside from rostering Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey. That seems bad for a team that keeps drifting toward a potential play-in battle as time runs out on the regular season.
VJ Edgecombe injured
The other primary factor in the Spurs’ blowout was a miserable start for Philadelphia’s young backcourt. With the fanbase heavily invested in Tyrese Maxey and VJ Edgecombe, a lot of excuses can be made for poor shooting outings and underwhelming starts to games, leaning on injuries and the rest of the roster as excuses. So let’s be clear — they were terrible all on their own to start this game against San Antonio.
Edgecombe had an absolute nightmare of a time attacking the Spurs, and not for lack of trying. He may have been a little too up for this meeting with a Western Conference contender who boasted the newest Western Conference Rookie of the Month, with Edgecombe hunting his shots early and missing all of them except for a dunk in transition. Even when he was able to create separation for what looked like an easy midrange jumper with Wembanyama nowhere close, Edgecombe missed badly, adding to a pile of team bricks.
Tyrese Maxey was at least able to get some third-quarter stat padding in after knocking down a pair of threes after halftime, but I find it remarkable how willing people are to excuse horrendous starts of his simply because he’s available more often than Embiid and George. He came in unfocused on the defensive end, playing either needlessly risky or otherwise uninterested defense,
Talk about going from bad to worse. At the tail end of a miserable half for the backcourt, Edgecombe was fouled by Carter Bryant and fell hard to the hardwood, limping to the line for his free throws before taking off the rest of the night. We’ll see if that was just a precautionary measure in a blowout or a sign of a bigger problem, but it was a cherry on top of a steaming poop pie for the Sixers against the Spurs.
Other notes
— Cam Payne shot it well in the first half, I guess.