Instant observations: Paul George couldn’t be stopped, scoring Sixers career-high in win over Wizards

No Joel Embiid, no problem on Wednesday night for the Sixers, who without the former NBA MVP notched a 153-131 win over the tanking Washington Wizards, improving to 42-34 on the season. They banked a valuable win in the ongoing race for the Eastern Conference’s final two playoff spots behind Paul George’s best game as a member of the franchise and a bounce-back showing from Tyrese Maxey.

The Sixers did not exactly pitch a perfect game – they let Washington hang around early, then allowed the Wizards to briefly lead the game in the second quarter – it was going to take a truly abominable effort for the Sixers to cough this game up, and they were able to avoid that.

For George, in fact, it was the exact opposite of an abominable performance. The nine-time All-Star looked every bit like one, providing absolutely brilliant shot-making from start to finish while adding in plenty of successful drives and helpful doses of rebounding and secondary playmaking. Before the Sixers’ dominant third quarter was even halfway done, George had surpassed his previous scoring high as a member of the Sixers.

George logged just 30 minutes in all and still ended up with 39 points – all in the first three quarters – plus six assists and five rebounds on remarkable efficiency, shooting 15-for-22 from the field and 6-for-12 from beyond the arc. While the Sixers had a pretty brutal night on the defensive end of the floor, the outstanding performances they got from George and Maxey (28 points on 12-for-20 shooting from the field) were more than enough to top these Wizards.

The Sixers will win more games than they lose in 2025-26. Takeaways from their latest victory:

Nick Nurse’s rotation decisions

Since the Sixers handling a team incentivized to lose is not all that telling, it is worth spending more time on the process than the results. Some notes from how Sixers head coach Nick Nurse handled his rotation on Wednesday:

• An oddity from Nurse which did not work out: he did not stagger the minutes of Maxey and George, which would be his usual plan for a game without Embiid. Staggering players, for those unfamiliar, is ensuring one of them is on the floor at all times, at the cost of having the staggered players share the floor as much as possible. The Sixers cruised early with Maxey and George on the floor, but when they both checked out at the same time, the Wizards erased a deficit and went up by double-digits in the second quarter. Nurse brought Maxey and George back, and the Sixers were back in front by intermission.

George scored 24 points on 9-for-12 shooting from the field to go with four rebounds and four assists in the first half, while Maxey scored 19 points on 8-for-12 shooting. Their torrid two-man exploits only continued in the second half; the Sixers scored 47 points in their third-quarter outburst to pull ahead for good. To be fair to Nurse, he could argue that neither of those two stars would have blended volume and efficiency so effectively had they not been leveraging the threats of each other’s skills.

• If Nurse felt compelled to manipulate each and every matchup, he might have returned Kelly Oubre Jr. to the starting lineup in place of Dominick Barlow with Embiid sidelined. Barlow appears to be Nurse’s second starting forward moving forward in large part because of the rapport Barlow and Embiid have developed, but his production drops off quite a bit without Embiid (the same is true for Oubre’s efficiency, to be fair). Instead, Nurse opted to keep Barlow comfortable in his starting spot and keep Oubre in the bench role he needs to grow accustomed to as the season winds down, though Oubre checked in for Barlow after only four minutes or so.

• Nurse went with a nine-man rotation, and Justin Edwards played while Cam Payne and Trendon Watford did not. Payne’s run as a rotation regular appears to have ended, which makes VJ Edgecombe the Sixers’ backup point guard. Oftentimes, though, lineups without Maxey will include at least three players capable of handling the ball at least a bit like George and Quentin Grimes. Edgecombe was excellent in this game, playing off of Maxey and George very well and helping facilitate to keep them both in score-first mentalities while in such strong grooves.

• In the second half, Nurse went with Payne over Edwards and the veteran guard scored on a floater immediately. That is part of the vision for his optimal role in a playoff setting: someone who is not being relied on for minutes every night, but is always available to check in and spark some offense if needed, whether it be with his shooting or playmaking.

• Adem Bona started in Embiid’s absence, as has become the norm over the last month or so. But the second-year center’s minutes were more sparing than ideal, as he dealt with foul trouble. That meant more playing time for Andre Drummond, whose minutes have improved over the last few weeks. Drummond knocked down two corner threes in a short span during the third quarter, giving him 30 triples on the season. 

A weird few days for Joel Embiid

It would have been hard to imagine Embiid missing a game in a way that was unlike one of his many other absences over the years. But Embiid and the Sixers found a way to reach a new level of absurdity as it pertained to him missing Wednesday’s game.

Embiid, who returned from a 13-game absence a week ago, played in three straight games for the Sixers; in each of the last two he was not listed on the team’s injury report at any point. But after Monday’s crushing loss to the Miami Heat, Embiid told reporters that he was sick, implying an illness had impacted his play. But when the Sixers released their initial injury report for Wednesday’s game on Tuesday, Embiid was once again not listed. And on Wednesday morning, the Sixers promptly ruled out Embiid, giving some reporters on site a few moments notice before their injury report was updated to reflect Embiid’s status.

For April Fools’ Day, Embiid quote-tweeted one of those writers reporting the Sixers’ update and implied he was going to play and perhaps the team was pulling an April Fools’ Day joke:

Hours later, still listed as out due to an illness, Embiid sent out another post:

I guess they won’t let me play basketball!!

— Joel Embiid (@JoelEmbiid) April 1, 2026

While many Sixers fans rejoiced online at the notion that Embiid was going to suit up after all, it was not the case. Shortly after a Sixers source confirmed to PhillyVoice that Embiid was indeed not going to play, Sixers President of Basketball Operations Daryl Morey told Gina Mizell of The Philadelphia Inquirer the same, adding that Embiid was ruled out once he was unable to attend the team’s morning gathering – initially the team planned to hold a shootaround before instead conducting a film session.

Embiid’s presence was not going to be necessary against the lowly Wizards, but this was an incredibly bizarre sequence of events. 

Up next: The Sixers will return home for their penultimate back-to-back of the season, which will begin when the Minnesota Timberwolves come to town on Friday night.

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