The Brooklyn Nets absolutely embarrassed the Sixers on national television Thursday night, allowing Ben Simmons to look on with pleasure from the sideline in his big return to Philadelphia. There are a lot of people wondering the same thing a day later — what the heck happened?

We tackle that question below.

Defensive gameplan vs. Kevin Durant

To describe Kevin Durant, all you need to know are the words that adorned the wallet of Samuel L. Jackson's character in Pulp Fiction. Even if you come into a game with an ideal strategy and brilliant execution, he can shoot over your coverages, blow by your slower defenders, and embarrass your best attempts at lockdown defense.

The Sixers hardly offered their best version of defense in Thursday's game. For much of the blowout loss, they made the decision to send extra help in Durant's direction, trapping him and hoping that forcing someone else to beat them would end up being the winning path.

They ran into multiple problems by opting to take that path. For one, as Doc Rivers noted after the game, they didn't execute the strategy well in the first place, with physicality a common theme in all of their struggles against Brooklyn.

"I thought we were slow on everything, I thought our traps were awful," Rivers said Thursday. "If you’re going to trap, I didn’t think that had any physicality either. They were more physical offensively, with the ball vs. any trap we had, than we were defensively. I just thought they were the superior physical team tonight."

No play better exemplifies that issue like this play from the second half, where Kevin Durant crosses Tobias Harris up and steps into a pull-up three:

It should be borderline impossible for Harris to get beat to his left on this play. The whole point of Embiid showing high and trapping is to take both sides away that Durant can attack, leaving him in a spot where he either has to split the two defenders or get rid of the ball. It's unclear what Harris is thinking or doing here, which I suppose was true on a mountain of defensive possessions throughout Thursday's game.

Frankly, though, chalking all of their problems up to physicality lets them off of the hook for a gaggle of mental errors. After getting off to an excellent start with James Harden on the floor, the Sixers finally looked like a team that didn't have many reps together. A player not understanding his assignment, his teammate's positioning, or the goal of a possession was all too common.

This decision by James Harden, for example, is mystifying on just about every level. Georges Niang is already in position as the low man to meet Nic Claxton on the short roll, and Harden for some reason decided it was time to help off of Seth Curry in the corner:

This is the sort of play people will pounce on with Harden because of his longstanding reputation as a poor defender, and he has definitely earned that distinction. But as a collective, the Sixers played braindead defense, even the guys who are supposed to be helping to prop the rest of the group up.

Matisse Thybulle is on the floor ostensibly because he's supposed to help you generate stops and make up for the porous defense played by other guys on the roster. Helping off of Kyrie Irving in the corner to grab James Johnson is, to put it plainly, one of the single dumbest things I think I have seen a Sixers defender do this season:

James Johnson came into this game shooting under 27 percent from three. Kyrie Irving is an elite, high-volume three-point shooter. What are we doing here?

We could sit here and do this with clip after clip after clip, but you get the point. These guys were an absolute disaster. To me, it's a poor plan on paper to commit an extra guy toward Durant with the shooters they can put around him. But even if you believe in the approach, the execution was absolutely embarrassing.

The Sixers claimed before this game that they were focused on basketball and their own execution rather than the circus surrounding it, but the level of stupidity shown on defense in this one suggests otherwise. If they were actually focused on the task at hand rather than the hoopla with Simmons, that's honestly even worse.

Brooklyn hunts exploitable defenders

Philadelphia's lack of trustworthy defenders wasn't exactly a secret coming into this game. This paragraph was published by yours truly exactly one day before Sixers-Nets:

Whatever you think of the respective title chances for these teams, the Nets are a stress test for Philadelphia's defense, spearheaded by Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving and flanked by a gallery of shooters. The Sixers seem to be short on options against a team with multiple high-level guys on the perimeter, with Joel Embiid's rim protection ability only going so far to slow them down.

As it turns out, that was a major problem against Brooklyn on Thursday. The Nets did the work to make Philadelphia feel uncomfortable and unsettled, and everyone learned the hard way what it might look like when the games slow down and teams have time to extensively gameplan for them in the playoffs.

Tyrese Maxey was at the center of this story, and perhaps it was time for a reality check with Maxey, whose performances in the first few games of the Harden era had many people (yours truly included) anointing him as the potential third star in Philly. A bad offensive performance for Maxey doesn't really register as anything important or concerning long-term. Brooklyn abusing him on the other end of the floor is another story.

Putting Maxey in an action is one of the higher-percentage plays you can make as an offense, thanks to his tendency to die on screens. His smaller stature is a factor here, no doubt, but Maxey often doesn't help himself with the route he takes to try to chase his man, with the second-year guard making long, looping runs that take him out of the play even when he can bounce off of a pick.

When you're not able to slip through/around screens with ease, it puts you in a position where you're rushing on defense, scrambling to try to get back into the play and stop your man. Once you're playing on the opponent's terms and in helter-skelter mode, you've already essentially lost the possession. And former teammate Seth Curry did well to exploit Maxey's eagerness to get back into the play, sending him flying by with pump fakes before picking up easy midrange makes.

The real crime of watching Brooklyn do this for most of the game is that there was hardly even an attempt made by Philadelphia to do the same thing. Curry, whose performance in the second round last year was marred by Kevin Huerter cooking him in Game 7, got to hang out and do nothing for most of the game. It was a repeat of the Hawks series, where Trae Young served as the tip of the spear and then rested for most of the game on defense. There needed to be more urgency to get Maxey the ball when Curry was assigned to him, and when he wasn't, Philadelphia had to have it in their minds to force switches to get the matchups they wanted. Chalk that one up to coaching, at least partially. 

James Harden melts down offensively

For many, this will be the headline coming out of the game. With many documented clunkers in Harden's playoff history, any failure in a game with even moderate stakes is amplified.

I'm not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater, because if one game was all it took to define a player's tenure, there are a lot of Sixers legends who would be scared to show their faces at Wells Fargo Center. But I would be lying to you if I said to you that this game was unfamiliar, if the concerns about Harden's performance were new and fresh rather than a repeat of his lowest moments throughout his career.

The simple fact of Thursday's loss: if Harden wasn't making a stepback jumper, he was damn near hopeless. This was about as bad of a performance as he could have possibly put together on both ends of the floor. Maybe he got a tough whistle on a couple of occasions, but broadly speaking, Harden spent way too much time trying to put himself on the line, forgetting that you still have to try to put the ball in the hoop when contact comes from the defense. 

One thing that would really concern me if I was a Sixers fan or member of the organization is what Harden didn't or couldn't show when the Nets showed him single coverage instead of trapping him and getting the ball out of his hands. Theoretically, Harden getting to attack a guy like Goran Dragic (who only recently returned to the floor after months on hiatus in Toronto) should be free money for Philadelphia. On multiple occasions Thursday night, Harden had Dragic in front of him and simply could not go by him, allowing help defenders to move into position and turn him away around the basket.

Harden doesn't need to be the heliocentric force he was in Houston for the Sixers to win a title, but the basic idea of this team is that either Harden or Embiid are going to be given single coverage as a result of their partnership, putting either one in an ideal position to win depending on how the defense wants to play it. Embiid has responded to those opportunities by absolutely bludgeoning teams recently, as he has all season. With a chance to do so at times on Thursday, Harden looked horrific.

Trust is going to have to be earned in big moments because Harden does not have the track record to fall back on here. Score one for the doubters here. 

Underneath all that, the Nets simply wanted this more

You only had to see what Kevin Durant said after the game to understand the juice Brooklyn had coming into this one:

The only thing that I thought was strange after the game was the national-level reaction regarding Simmons, with memes aplenty about how he "won" and "got revenge" and so on and so forth, with about 15 outlets making a bad photoshop of Simmons in the "RIP BOZO" image Embiid posted when he was traded. Ben Simmons sat on the bench in a hockey jersey on Thursday. Those arguments and claims are no different than a little kid trying to claim superiority because his dad makes more money than your dad, or that his big brother could beat up your big brother. It's a game that shows he has teammates who might be able to protect him from his own weaknesses and render them irrelevant, sure, but there was far too much gigantic loser energy circulating around the internet for my liking.

In any case, the Sixers did not meet the level required in this game to compete with the available Nets. 

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