Jan 5, 2026; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA; Philadelphia 76ers guard Tyrese Maxey (0) and guard Vj Edgecombe (77) talk during the second quarter against the Denver Nuggets at Xfinity Mobile Arena. Mandatory Credit: Bill Streicher-Imagn Images Bill Streicher
For much of a three-game winning streak away from home, the 76ers showed what they can do offensively through astute ball movement.
Monday night, they showed its importance in the negative, namely in moments of stagnation in crunch time of an unsightly 125-124 overtime loss to a Denver Nuggets team missing eight regulars.
The story of a successful holiday road trip, Nick Nurse said pregame Monday, was in “getting the ball where it should be.” That location changes possession to possession, based on situations, personnel, matchups, the flow of the game and the sake of offensive variety.
Monday, against a deeply undermanned Nuggets side on the end of a back-to-back that started with a loss in Brooklyn, the ball didn’t find those locations nearly enough. When they did, it didn’t result in enough made shots.
Nurse was able to quickly sum up the problem.
“That was strictly a shooting percentage game,” he said. “We allowed them to really feel good early, and it continued just about the entire game. And just look at the numbers: 53%, 49% from three. … The shooting percentage numbers are the story of the game.”
That is 53 percent from the field for a Nuggets team that was without Nikola Jokic, Jamal Murray, Aaron Gordon, Christian Braun or a recognizable center. That is 49 percent from 3-point range in a career-high 29 points from Jalen Pickett, 4-for-5 from deep in a career-high-tying 21 points from Zeke Nnaji and 24 points from Peyton Watson, all players most commonly known for their roles sitting on the bench. The 76ers let them get hot early, bet that the hot shooting wouldn’t continue and got burned.
The defensive shortcomings would’ve been survivable, though, had the offense done more of what it’s done lately. But it didn’t, with no possession more illustrative than the final play of regulation. Tied at 120, the four 76ers who were not Tyrese Maxey stood on the perimeter waiting for something to happen. A ball screen by VJ Edgecombe came a little too late, introducing chaos that resulted in a bobbled dribble and a heaved 27-footer by Maxey wide of the rim.
“I think I'm just learning, what I want to get into, how I want to play, where I want guys,” said Maxey, who scored 28 points. “And that's the biggest thing now, kind of learning those.”
Maxey had another look at the end of overtime – Nurse classified it as, “just OK” as a sequence – on a side out with 5.3 seconds left that led to a missed floater in the lane.
Use Nurse’s lens of the ball getting where it needs to go. It needed to go into the paint often, against a Denver team that was without centers Jokic and Jonas Valanciunas, starting 6-9 DaRon Holmes in his seventh NBA game as the ostensible first-unit big and relying on the 6-10 Nnaji. Often in the first half, Embiid played the bully in the lane. He had 15 points in the first half, on 7-for-11 shooting, nine of his attempts inside the 3-point arc.
But the 76ers didn’t go to it enough after the break, in part because of Denver switched to a zone defense that made sense given its limited resources, in part because the Nuggets automatically doubled Embiid on the ball with smaller defenders. Embiid finished with 32 points on 13-for-22 shooting. But the ball, as Nurse put it, “didn't get into the paint nearly enough, early enough.”
“I think we’ve just got to have a better basketball IQ,” Embiid said. “They were fronting the post – that’s high school stuff. Flash, most likely your guy is going to be open, corner guy’s mostly going to be open. We did that a few times. I felt like we should’ve kept going to that, because everything else that was really about driving lanes, whether it was for Tyrese or VJ.”
Even when the ball got to where they wanted it, it resulted in missed shots.
“I don't think we made enough shots out of the times we did do it,” Nurse said. “I think we did move it to some very good catch-and-shoot 3s. And we were just kind of way off on a lot of them, too. A lot of bad misses on some of those.”
There was plenty missing. Nurse depended on Adem Bona for 22:51 on court, much of it with Embiid in a two-big lineup. That left the 76ers a shooter shy on the perimeter.
It’s too much to finger Bona as the culprit when Embiid twice called the team’s offensive spacing “terrible.” But as Nurse listed some of the elements missing offensively – slashing off the ball, drive-and-kick options – those are skills Bona doesn’t bring, and they didn’t have enough actions to emphasize the height advantage that Bona brought. (Dominick Barlow played just 12:37, with six points on 2-for-6 shooting; Jabari Walker provided a boost with six points and four boards in 11:34.)
The disappointment on the offensive end is that the 76ers have shown how electric they can be. While they’re just 23rd in the NBA in assist percentage – in part because of the iso creation of Maxey and Embiid – they’ve had moments on the recent trip of sustained, outstanding offense.
Monday brought 15 assists on 20 first-half baskets, well above the season percentage of 60. But the ball didn’t move as crisply after the break, on a night where the easiest path to a victory would’ve been to simply overpower Denver.
“We just didn't execute,” Embiid said. “It’s something we’ve got to work on. We’ve just got to get our spots to kind of make the reads easier. I could have made better passes tonight, but it just comes down to execution.”
