"For better or for worse, Nurse runs an EXTREMELY simple offense. The level of sophistication to, say, the Brett Brown offense is night and day. I would say Doc’s is somewhere in the middle.
To be clear, simple isn’t inherently bad — there’s a good case to be made that it’s best to keep it simple when you have elite personnel. But right now, down 2 of their best players, some level of sophistication / being able to scheme guys open would be much, much better.
IMO, that is a big part of why Brett and Doc’s teams did better when missing key players."
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So what does Nurse actually bring to the table?
Developing an offense around a superstar center is much harder than any other position.
If, say, SGA is unavailable for OKC—his scoring and gravity will be missed, but most backup point guards can reliably handle the ball and initiate offense. Maybe not to the same level, but that is a bare minimum skill for the position.
This also goes for any wing who’s the centerpiece of their team’s offense like your Paolo Bancheros and Jayson Tatums. The team will suffer for their absence, but the backups at their positions likely have some minimum level of the skills they have.
There’s a much bigger gap between what Joel is capable of doing offensively compared to your average backup or replacement level center. He averages 3+ times more assists than the average center.
In fact, 90% of backup or replacement level centers only have 2 skills: being around 7 feet tall, and rebounding (like Drummond). He can’t pass, can’t dribble, can’t post up, has bad hands, and is totally ineffective outside of 5 feet from the basket.
I’m not shitting on Drummond, all of that’s true about almost every backup 5 in the NBA not on a vet minimum.
So when Joel is out, the Sixers can’t run a shadow version or adaption of the offense that features him the way a team like OKC can.
The only options are to either lean on very simple sets meant to get Maxey and George as many decent pick and roll and iso looks as possible, or run a complicated, movement and perimeter-based offense with a bunch of small and/or 35+ year old guards. That’s totally different than the Embiid-focused one and would take a lot of time and practice to implement.
That’s the challenge of having a very unique and specific offensive centerpiece who isn’t capable of playing a lot of games. The Nuggets have the same problem with Jokic, which is a big reason why his on/off splits are so insane (besides just being very good). The difference is, Jokic doesn’t miss many games.
Fucking preach!