Basketball season will be here before you know it. After a busy offseason, let’s take a look at how the Sixers’ guard rotation could shake out.
OK, so maybe it’s not way too early. Believe it or not, the Sixers will be back on the court for regular season basketball in just two months.
So, with another offseason of heavy roster turnover, the local basketball team will look a lot different in how they line up next season.
By maximizing the star potential on this roster by adding Paul George, the Sixers were limited in how they were able to fill out the rest of the roster, thanks in large part to new salary cap restrictions (everyone must be tired of hearing about aprons by this point.)
With the team signing Olympic standout Guerschon Yabusele, the roster they’ll start training camp with appears to be set. So, let’s breakdown the different ways the Sixers will try to maximize their big three of George, Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey.
The Guards
So, to begin the season at least, it looks like Kelly Oubre, Jr. will start at shooting guard next to Maxey. It was framed as much when it was reported that Oubre was coming back to Philadelphia this summer, and the team seems pretty open about the fact that him and Caleb Martin will round out the starting five.
At 6-foot-8 and a career 32.7% career three-point shooter, Oubre doesn’t profile as a typical, true two-guard. Nor does the 6-foot-5 Martin profile as a traditional power forward, where he is listed to start the season.
It’s easier to look at them, not as a shooting guard and a power forward, but as two switchable wings playing fluid positions. They are both capable of scaling up and down defensively, giving the starting group a lot of switchability on the wings alongside George.
Whether those two will be able to provide proper spacing for this lineup is a different question. Martin has only shown himself to be a slightly better shooter than Oubre in the regular season. He’s hovered around 35% for his entire career on similar volume. While these two are the most talented non-stars on the roster, one of them being ignored on the perimeter, like Oubre was at points in the playoffs last year, may cause a need to switch things up in the starting lineup.
If that change is necessary at a point this season, the likely first candidate to slot into the starting group is Eric Gordon. Shooting 37.8% on nearly six threes per game last season, he is the most proven shooter the team has on the roster at the moment.
Out of all the guards on the bench at the moment, Gordon also makes the most sense playing next to Maxey. Their other options, such as Reggie Jackson or Kyle Lowry, will likely take on a lot of ball handling responsibilities when Maxey goes to the bench.
While Jackson will get a lot of second-unit minutes, how the Sixers will manage Lowry, who will turn 39 this season, will be interesting. He only played two possessions without Embiid on the floor in the entire Knicks series.
He is pretty much a non-factor in trying to get his own shot inside the three-point arc at this point, so it makes sense to tie his minutes to Embiid’s hip going forward. That’s also a good reason for Lowry to play the stretches of games where Maxey sits but Embiid is still out there.
The wildcard in the backcourt will be whether rookie Jared McCain is able to earn a shot in the rotation. His summer league certainly didn’t go as planned, but he showed plenty of signs over those games that could be seen as encouraging. If he is able to adjust to the higher level, he could be one of the only elite level three-point shooters on this bench, and that might force his way into more playing time.