Sixers vs. Bulls: Everyone's Terrible, Chicago Wins

This Sixers team is like a heavy-handed sociopolitical film -- like, we get it already. They're mediocre, they have no offense to consistently speak of, and they're pretty poorly coached. Game in and game out, they prove this to us. We keep watching. I don't get it.

Nobody played well. I don't care about the 26 and 9 line from Jrue Holiday -- he played terribly inefficient and careless basketball for most of the game. They aren't going to win many games when he takes 28 shots and three free throws. Evan Turner had similar problems. Lazy jumpers, forced isolation plays... both guys are good enough to set their teammates up by accident, so they made a bunch of nice passes that resulted in baskets at the rim. But otherwise it was intentional heroball nearly from start to finish. Disappointing game.

Your daily reminder that Spencer Hawes is terrible happens right now.

Look, the Bulls aren't good. They'll hang with you and make you beat them. The Sixers played right into their hands, and Joakim Noah douched his way to a terrific game and completely blitzed a legless Hawes for 21-7-5-3 on ten shots. Luol Deng hit some tough shots. He does that. But they didn't do enough to win the game -- the Sixers did more to lose it. Also Kirk Hinrich didn't play. That hurt.

Doug Collins decided to shorten his rotation to seven players. All seven played terrible basketball at times during the game. Arnett Moultrie, who Doug had said would not be going to the D-League because he's jumped living corpse Kwame Brown in the rotation, played 4 minutes in the first half. Dorell Wright played 2. Maalik Wayns almost played a minute.

Doug would go on to say the team was fatigued after the game. This is against a Bulls team who got into Philly at 4AM after flying from Chicago the night before. Talk about fatigue. Thibs was just as terrible with his rotation (44 for Noah!), but Collins managed to flub this worse. Any reason to play Hawes for 29 minutes is a bad, bad reason.

Not hitting free throws or three pointers is a bad thing. It's why True Shooting Percentage is worlds more important than FG%. They shot 45% from the field. Not bad. But when you look at 5 made foul shots and 2 made threes... shove a starfish into my cornea.

Jason Richardson looks old and bad. Nick Young... well I love Nick Young, but he can't be counted on for 28 minutes of offense when there isn't an offense for him to work with. It's shoddy picks, lackluster rolls, and minimal off-ball movement. It's not enough when you're a struggling offensive team and you don't have a defensive anchor to shut teams down.

I don't want to talk more about this game. I don't really want to talk about this team. I can only stand so much hideous basketball before I decompose. December 20th will determine how many games I watch the rest of the season. Not like I run a Sixers blog or anything. Read Blog a Bull because we are the same.