Are Philadelphia 76ers having an identity crisis?

Players

When push comes to shove, the players ultimately decide the outcome of a game. And in the case of the Philadelphia 76ers, the players are on the wrong end too often.

Too many games are straight-up duds from this group. Basketball is a game of runs, no doubt, but this team is too talented to have as many cold spells as it does. The stars are staggered in ways that should lead to success, but there are far too many stretches of bad basketball.

The player that most will blame is Ben Simmons. He’s a ridiculously good player as is, but to best fit in with the current roster, he needs to embrace more of an off-ball role.

He needs to become more of a roller, like he was against Houston on Friday. This would not only utilize his world-class athleticism, but also make his passing more of an advantage than it is when he’s the primary table-setter.

And to become useful off the ball, he will have to — you guessed it — shoot some freaking 3s. Not a stupid 15-footer or whatever (which is a bad shot for most players anyway), just one or two corner 3s a game. He has to go somewhere when Joel Embiid posts up; it can’t be the dunker’s spot.

Speaking of the big fella, it may be time for him to just go Super Saiyan. Embiid has become much better at reading double teams and only forcing the issue against mismatches, while the Sixers are great when he’s committed to aggressiveness. The best version of this team is him going right at the defense’s throat, something he’s backed away from doing during this putrid stretch.

I’m not here to chastise him like Charles Barkley and Shaquille O’Neal did, but the team is at its best when its best player gets going.

As for everyone else, well, they make up the biggest part of the problem. It seems as though everyone in the starting five is afraid of taking 3s. Josh Richardson leads the team in 3-point attempts at a measly 5.0 per game and Tobias Harris only takes 4.6 a night.

For reference, J.J. Redick, Robert Covington and Dario Saric attempted more than that last season (8.0, 5.9 and 5.4 per game, respectively) and those three all met or surpassed that threshold in 2017-18 too (6.9, 6.6 and 5.1 respectively).

Even in an ideal world where Simmons takes some corner 3s, he and Embiid, the team’s best players, do their damage at the rim. There’s no more J.J. Redick release valve; Richardson and Harris have to up their 3-point attempts for Simmons and Embiid to breathe.

The same can be said for Al Horford, who is only taking 4.0 3s a night, but he has other issues. Horford is supposed to be Embiid’s insurance policy so that the Sixers don’t completely suck without him, but the they’ve been blown out in the latter’s last two absences.

His last 11 games since returning from injury have been horrible by his standards. The basic stats never speak kindly to Horford, but his 44.7 percent true shooting over this stretch is especially awful. He’s been a streaky player in years past, leading to the logic that he’ll bounce back, but the meantime is worse than butt ugly.