January 27, 2026
Bill Streicher/Imagn Images
Tuesday night's Sixers win had to feel better for Jared McCain than any other player.
PHILADELPHIA – Sixers head coach Nick Nurse took to the podium for his pregame media availability on Tuesday evening and announced he was ready to move on from the monstrosity that was the day prior.
"Just one of those days where we didn't have a lot of energy," Nurse said, "and nothing went our way at all."
Nurse's comments were not exclusive to the basketball court, where the Sixers were thrashed on both ends of the floor from wire to wire by the Charlotte Hornets. The team had to board a flight to Charlotte a day early because of weather concerns; that flight and their return flight were both delayed. The Sixers did not land in Philadelphia until Monday night had become Tuesday morning.
"You get a chance to bounce back quick," though, Nurse pointed out, and his team did exactly that on Tuesday night, with Joel Embiid's scoring dominance and a resurgent unit of depth pieces powering the Sixers to a 139-122 win over the Giannis Antetokounmpo-less Milwaukee Bucks. The Sixers controlled the game for just about its duration, handling their business against a vulnerable opponent with a flurry of standout individual performances to boot.
Takeaways from a win the Sixers needed badly:
Before Tuesday's game, Bucks head coach Doc Rivers talked about his team being better when it spent less time dribbling. To some extent, the same might be true of the Sixers. Their issue is not ball-handling, but perhaps overthinking. The Sixers have their bread and butter – two-man work between Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey – and several players with outlier skills that are easy to identify and utilize. Far too often, it feels like they are making all of this harder on themselves than it needs to be on the offensive end.
On Tuesday, there were no such issues. Even without Maxey posting gaudy scoring numbers, his two-man work with Embiid was excellent and helped Embiid score 24 points prior to intermission. The attention those two players commanded also led to open three-point looks for role players, and on this night the Sixers benefitted from standout showings from multiple supporting cast members.
But while Embiid's continued progress is the most important storyline surrounding this team, Paul George owned the night on Tuesday. This was his best game in a long while; George was outstanding as a decisive three-point shooter who did damage off the dribble and off the catch. He tied the high of his Sixers tenure with his seventh triple before the third quarter had ended; early in the fourth quarter he set a new high and then added onto it. George was on a nuclear three-point shooting heater, and it lifted the Sixers out of their lone offensive lull in the middle of the third quarter. He was outstanding; this was arguably his best game in two seasons in Philadelphia:
PG IS GOING OFF.
— NBA (@NBA) January 28, 2026
32 POINTS AND 9 (!!!) THREE-POINTERS. pic.twitter.com/0xnbDb3QuB
Free-flowing is the best way to describe the Sixers' offense on Tuesday, and even against a subpar defensive team in the Antetokounmpo-less Bucks, it is worth putting some stock in. The Sixers were on the second night of their hellish road-home back-to-back; Milwaukee's previous game being postponed meant the Bucks had three days off leading into this game. Yet the Sixers generated quality looks on possession after possession, no matter which assortment of five players Nurse had on the floor.
This game reflected the vision of what these Sixers are supposed to look like as an offense: a team that constantly forces defenses to pick their poisons and proceed accordingly.
After two weeks of irrelevance, it felt for the second time in as many days that McCain was a central figure for the Sixers. In Monday's horrific loss to Charlotte, it happened by chance: the Sixers were dominated to such an extent that nearly the entire second half was garbage time. It enabled McCain to play for a prolonged stretch, and in the fourth quarter he finally started to feel some sort of groove, knocking down four triples. "Tough way to find those minutes right there, for sure," Nurse said on Tuesday evening, "but at least we got that done."
Jared McCain made four three-point shots in the fourth quarter of the Sixers' loss in Charlotte on Monday: pic.twitter.com/xEEuxHOvoj
— Adam Aaronson's clips (@SixersAdamClips) January 26, 2026
Moments later, Nurse talked about the Sixers' need for more dynamic guard play behind Maxey, whose recent struggles are being attributed by many to fatigue. VJ Edgecombe has been a helpful two-way presence all season, but after a stellar start that put him in early Sixth Man of the Year talks, Quentin Grimes has struggled for well over a month. His scoring spark has been nonexistent, which is even more costly because of McCain's inability to earn rotation minutes once the Sixers reached full strength.
On Tuesday night, though, Grimes was ruled out with a right ankle sprain, which put McCain back under the spotlight as the team's third guard. McCain's opportunity heightened when Edgecombe picked up two early fouls; suddenly the 21-year-old was in the game at the 8:40 mark of the first quarter. McCain knocked down his very first shot of the game, a 28-foot spot-up triple off an Embiid assist. On the Sixers' next possession, he rejected an Embiid screen en route to one of his signature "inside hand" layups:
McCain ➡️ the hoop! pic.twitter.com/SgSC2eZ8tP
— Philadelphia 76ers (@sixers) January 28, 2026
Jared McCain hits another three-pointer off the bench, scoring 17 points on 6-of-8 shooting from the floor, including 5-of-6 from deep pic.twitter.com/VUDcwHC3Mp
— MrBuckBuck (@MrBuckBuckNBA) January 28, 2026
In so many respects, an optimal version of McCain would make the Sixers better. Not just for his on-ball scoring and doses of playmaking, but for the spacing he would provide as a feared three-point shooter and for the relief he would provide Maxey as the closest thing the Sixers would have to a reliable backup offensive engine. All of that is why his sophomore campaign looking like a lost season has been such a disappointment – and why a night like Tuesday can be so encouraging.
Some additional notes:
• McCain was not the only slumping sophomore to submit an impressive early cameo; Nurse called on Justin Edwards for early minutes and the hometown product responded with terrific ball pressure, forcing a pair of Bucks turnovers, knocking down a corner three and throwing down a transition dunk. His productive stint of 11-plus minutes in the first half earned him more run in the second half, where Edwards did not do much to stand out in the box score but continued to play with the energy the Sixers have at times lacked in recent weeks.
Edwards looking more like a rotation-caliber wing moving forward would give Nurse much more flexibility with his rotation; he does not have much on the wing right now outside of George and Oubre.
• As always, Rivers was full of fascinating soundbites in one of his bi-annual visits to his old stomping grounds. Among the highlights: Rivers called Embiid "the most talented player I've ever coached" before saying "Unfortunately, I never had him healthy once in the playoffs," minutes after telling a story of anxiously sitting in the Sixers' 2020 NBA Draft war room hoping players above Maxey on the team's big board would be taken over him so the Kentucky guard could be the team's choice at No. 21 overall.
• Earlier in the season, Maxey told reporters a story about Embiid imploring him to throw the former NBA MVP a lob. Maxey, with his words and his expression, expressed quite a bit of skepticism that Embiid could get that job done. Well...
OH MY JOEL! pic.twitter.com/iexdk58PhF
— Philadelphia 76ers (@sixers) January 28, 2026
Shortly after this play, Rivers saw Maxey and Embiid discussing the play and yelled something at them. Whatever Rivers said, it made both Embiid and Maxey laugh quite hard.
Up next: The Sixers will welcome the Sacramento Kings to town on Thursday night.
