PHILADELPHIA — The boos Friday night at the Center followed a general sense of befuddlement. The New Orleans Pelicans had their reserves on the court. Not their best reserves either, since the lineup was without Brandon Ingram and Herbert Jones due to injury and Zion Williamson due to chronic tardiness, forcing the better reserves into the starting lineup around CJ McCollum and Dejounte Murray. The 76ers didn’t have Tyrese Maxey on the court, but otherwise most of their crop of starting guards/wings were there. Yet the Pelicans — the depleted, last-place-in-the-West Pelicans — were taking it to the 76ers at home. How it was happening, the 76ers could only offer snippets of, after a 123-115 loss. More certain was what transpired: The 76ers, with a modicum of momentum from a successful holiday road trip, were languishing through three — in Maxey’s words, “very winnable” — home games this week, managing a measly, narrow win over the glorified G League team that is the Washington Wizards. “There’s sort of a desperation that we need to start to play with and look at every game like it matters,” Paul George said afterward. “From this point forward, every game matters. So I think we have to approach it in that manner, because it’s not getting easier.” It’s also not getting easier on the court, which 36 games into the season should be happening, even if the team’s one-time NBA MVP has only played 13 of them. Instead, Friday’s latest dour outing was another example of the game of whack-a-mole coach Nick Nurse and his team have played with middling success all year. Once one thing starts to resolve and look like a potential strength, something else breaks, whether on the injury report or on the court. The stretch late in the third quarter and early in the fourth takes its place among the perplexing passages of play from the 76ers this season. Brandon Boston, Jeremiah Robinson-Earl, Daniel Theis and Jose Alvarado — a group notable in these parts as including one former Villanova player and one not-Phillies reliever — were a combined plus-66. They fueled a stretch late in the third quarter and early in the fourth where the 76ers were outscored 27-17 as New Orleans steadily pulled away. The Pelicans scored on 14 of 17 possessions, capped by a Jordan Hawkins’ 4-point play midway through the fourth. The run, concerningly, came against what should’ve been a solid if undersized defensive lineup that included George, Caleb Martin, Kelly Oubre and Ricky Council. It came with McCollum, who splashed home a game-high 38 points and was 6-for-11 from 3-point range, and Murray mainly on the bench. The offense was built around Thies, a 6-8 journeyman on his sixth club in five years, giving the 76ers fits in elemental pick-and-rolls. They missed switches, lost shooters and generally were a step late to whatever action the Pelicans opted for. “We just didn’t do a good enough job of either matching up, but our secondary defenders weren’t plugging the gaps and providing the help,” Nurse said. “The game was moving pretty fast for us as well. We were just behind on some of that.” “It’s just talking more,” George said. “I think talking is always a subject that comes up in teams, especially early on. Obviously, when you’ve been together for a long time, you kind of just know where guys are going to be, you know rotations, you know coverages. But I think for this being our first year together, the communicating aspect of it is fairly new to this group, of talking and making sure we know what’s going on, who’s switching, who’s supposed to be in this spot. So I think we just got to continue to grow from that aspect.” The way the 76ers chased Pelicans’ shadows is emblematic of how the club has fallen short of the specter of what it could be this season. It’s the battle of who is available each night for a team that, not yet at the halfway point, has had only Guerschon Yabusele appear in every game. Within each five-man unit, it’s finding ways to minimize liabilities. A team in the bottom third in the NBA in shooting percentage simultaneously needs guys like Eric Gordon and Reggie Jackson for offense — on nights like Friday, where it started 3-for-15 from 3-point range — instead of defense-first players like Martin and Council. But then those offensive players get beat defensively, and the pendulum has to swing, and the offense dries up, and it swings back. It applies with crafting lineups Friday with George as the nominal center. Yabusele, best at providing offense as a stretch power forward, was exhausted by defensive duties at the pivot, where he is the only healthy — Andre Drummond and Joel Embiid were both out — and capable — Adem Bona is out over his skis and overexposed as a rookie — center option. It applies to the consideration of pace, with George and Nurse wanting the team to play more quickly more often, thus minimizing half-court offensive deficiencies but exposing defensive vulnerabilities. Those problems are at least clear and, to the credit of Nurse and the players, openly acknowledged. They come with Nurse’s creeping concern that Maxey averaging 37 minutes a night and Oubre at 33 might come back to bite them eventually, though that’s a worry for a different day. But they all resolve to the logical vanishing point that is, none of it matters much until Embiid returns. At which point none of it might matter if Embiid can’t stay healthy. “As soon as we get some type of continuity, as soon as we get flowing, guys miss,” Maxey said. “It’s really difficult because guys have to kind of change their roles every single night, and that puts pressure on us. We miss Joe, we missed Paul, we miss KJ (Martin). Those are our rotation players. Those guys haven’t been playing, so it makes other guys have to step up.” Contact Matthew De George at [email protected].