CAMDEN, N.J. — The Philadelphia 76ers' roster is set to change at some point again this season as the front office seeks another star-level player to help Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey. For the time being, though, the Sixers are more than comfortable with the group of guys they have right now.
The Sixers are deeper than in years past after swapping James Harden and P.J. Tucker for wings that fit the team better and allow Maxey to handle the bulk of the on-ball reps. One of them, Robert Covington, is a huge fan of the deep team he plays for and the ways head coach Nick Nurse uses it.
“Scary. Very scary,” Covington said of the Sixers' depth after Tuesday's practice. “The way that Nick has put us in a position to succeed, everyone's gonna be able to thrive with the way that we're doing things and the way he's implementing and trying and figuring out lineups. The amount of guys and the amount of versatility we have is, like I said, very scary.”
Covington sees the impending return of Kelly Oubre Jr. as something that will make the Sixers “that much more of a deep threat.” The roster isn’t perfect — it badly lacks guards that can consistently penetrate defenses, for instance — but the versatility of the wings they have makes up for it.
The Sixers have typical 3-and-D wings like Covington, who leads all qualified players in steal percentage with his lightning-quick hands. They have guys like Tobias Harris, who can generate his own shots from time to time, and Nicolas Batum, a genius passer with a smooth jump shot. Oubre has shot the ball well so far this season and has an athletic gear that makes him a very nice complementary scorer.
Much of the Sixers' lineup experimentation is the result of injuries, though Nurse has changed up rotation patterns here and there and looked for different lineups when he has to, most notably starting Marcus Morris Sr. in place of Embiid. But at least when it comes to lineups that have played together for a decent amount of time, Philly ranks behind most of the other teams in the NBA.
So far this season, Philly has seen 13 five-man combinations that have played at least a quarter's worth of minutes in total, which ties for 20th in the NBA with three other teams. There have been 449 such lineups to this point in the 2023-24 campaign. The Miami Heat lead the league with 22, the Oklahoma City Thunder are in last with eight and the league average is roughly 15. There are 17 teams who fall in the range of 16 to 12 of such lineups.
While this specific data doesn’t indicate that Nurse is averse to mixing up his lineups, it shows that the Sixers have plenty of work to do when it comes to seeing the different types of lineup combos they have. They have only had a month with their current group following the trade and have had to deal with absences from numerous players, throwing off some of their plans.
“That's what you have 82 games a season for,” Covington said. “Trying to find out which rhythms work for different guys and which guys mesh well. We have so many different guys that do so many different things, it's like matching up who can work well…that's gonna make us the most effective.”
Nurse said that he's still working on incorporating the Sixers' new players (Covington, Nicolas Batum, Marcus Morris Sr. and K.J. Martin). Even as the former Los Angeles Clippers catch up to speed with how Philly wants to play, the Sixers have been able to stay close to the top of the Eastern Conference standings to this point.
“It's pretty technical stuff,” Nurse said. “Just the terminology and way we cover certain NBA sets, anything that we do that's maybe not that widely done, maybe a few things that we do that are a little different. All those kind of things since they didn't have training camp and all the lead-up time into that.”
Once Oubre is officially back, the Sixers will have some huge choices to make over who starts and what lineup combinations become staples of the rotation.
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