The Philadelphia 76ers defeated the Atlanta Hawks in a game with major In-Season Tournament implications. Joel Embiid was great and Tyrese Maxey had a brutal start but still contributed to the victory. The reason he was able to do so was partly because of Nick Nurse skewing from his typical rotation plans.

Nurse threw a curveball with his second-half rotations by playing Maxey the entire third quarter. Previously this season, Nurse has taken Maxey out roughly halfway through the odd-numbered quarters so that he can play the entirety of the even-numbered ones. Embiid usually plays the final halves of the second and fourth quarters and plays all of the first and third quarters.

This time, Embiid had Maxey to help him close out the third quarter but it left the Sixers without some crucial offensive firepower in what was, at the time, a seven-point game. Nurse explained that it's sometimes necessary to call someone else's number if the flow of the game calls for it.

“I mean, you've watched all the games, right? So you know that the rhythm of trying to start the second and fourth with him and usually Tobias is the game plan. But you gotta coach the game that's in front of you,” the Sixers head coach said in his postgame presser on NBC Sports Philadelphia.

Nurse said that the Embiid-Maxey tandem “just felt like it was clicking. They had a really great rhythm going, and it's just sometimes…you're trying to think about later, sometimes you gotta coach the three minutes in front of you. We kind of just decided these guys are in such good rhythm, let's leave them and then we're gonna have to do something a little different at the start of the quarter. And so we did.”

Essentially, the Sixers bet that stretching the minutes their two best players played together would give them a big enough advantage to survive a few minutes without them. Maxey, who went scoreless in the first quarter and started to pick it up in the second, had seven points and three assists in the third alongside Embiid, who had three assists of his own along with 13 points.

The two stars went to their empty-side pick-and-roll a few times and Maxey fed Embiid at the foul line and played off of him on other possessions. Philly pushed the pace and came away with some crucial buckets.

A lineup of Jaden Springer, De'Anthony Melton, Danuel House Jr., Tobias Harris and Paul Reed took the floor to start the fourth quarter. At face value, that's a lineup with two guards who aren’t great ball-handlers, two unproven perimeter shooters and only one guy who can really create his own shot. There are many scenarios where a lineup like that forces Nurse to call timeout after sputtering and giving the opponent a run. But in this game, it worked.

Harris scored eight points at the beginning of the final period as the other four each contributed key hustle plays — none better than this sequence from House — while clamping up on defense despite Trae Young leading the way for Atlanta in those minutes. The Sixers' 15-11 run prior to Embiid's return to the floor was the most important run of the game.

“I thought Jaden made a key play, House made a key play, Tobias made some key plays, the other guys made some good plays,” Nurse said. “I was really, really happy with the way they executed. They ran, they pulled a couple of sets out that were, well, we hadn't used yet and we hadn't used very much this year and got a couple baskets out of them. I thought, ‘Man, that was a good idea by probably Melt or somebody to run it.’ They kind of moved the pieces even and so it was great that they could execute and find some baskets.”

The Sixers making such a drastic in-game tweak to their rotation ended up working out in their favor thanks to a great Harris performance and huge contributions from the bench. Nurse's gamble ended up landing some major winnings for Philly as the team looks to advance to the Las Vegas stages of the In-Season Tournament.