One of my truly cherished memories of the Joel Embiid era — one that maybe has gotten lost to time a little — was Game Three against the Heat in 2022. He’d gotten elbowed in the eye by Pascal Siakam at the end of a Sixers blowout victory to close out the Raptors in the first round, and reports said that it fucked him up so bad he could barely even look at his phone in the days to follow. His return was without a timetable, and with DeAndre Jordan starting in his stead, the first two games of our second-round series in Miami were both absolute laughers, as we wondered if the series would be over before we could even have a serious conversation about Joel’s return.

But against all odds, Embiid made it back for Game Three in Philly. His numbers in the game were pretty meh by his standards — 18 and 11, four turnovers to one assist — but the lift he gave the Sixers, particularly on defense, was enough to power a 99-79 victory. It really seemed like he had saved the season, and after a superlative James Harden performance in Game Four knotted the series at 2-2, it felt like a potential turning point in the Big Man’s entire career arc. Then Miami steamrolled Philly in the next two games, and it was immediately back to Same Old Sixers. But still, the emotional wallop of watching a masked Embiid gut out that Game Three victory, pushing his body to the absolute limit just to be there for his team and for us, is a feeling I’ll never forget.

Sunday night against Boston could have felt like that too. Maybe it did for a few minutes. But instead of saving the Sixers from oblivion in Game Four, this time Embiid’s return game brought them back to its edge, halting the momentum of a series that had gone better than expected and raising the usual barrage of questions both practical and existential about what the hell we’re even doing here. And I can’t even get mad at any of it anymore — at Joel, at his teammates, at management, even at the Celtics. All I am now is sad.

I’m certainly not surprised. Though after his availability for Game Four was officially announced, my timeline was filled with Sixers fans predicting Joel’s return could very easily bring the series even with Boston — perhaps even give them the edge moving forward — all I could really think about was the ways it could go wrong.

Certainly, I had visions of Jo taking an elbow to the midsection from a Sam Hauser type and walking gingerly to the locker room as a million Philadelphians Googled “How easy is it for stitches to get torn out after an appendectomy?” But more practically, I thought of Embiid predictably struggling in his first game action in nearly three weeks, of the shot not going down and the ball going the other way as he tried to force shit that just wasn’t there. And more importantly, I thought of him knocking the rest of the team out of the groove they’d developed in three games in this series, of Tyrese Maxey and VJ Edgecombe being overly deferential as the team tried to get him going early, and then being unable to quickly microwave themselves once it came time to provide offense of their own.

In truth, Joel’s own performance went a little better than I expected. Yes, he was out of rhythm — only three for his first 12, missing the kind of open mid-rangers that he can usually hit in a Shirley Temple-induced coma when he’s really rolling — but he never forced anything, generally taking the shots that were available for him, and actually moving the ball quite well to try to get his teammates going at the same time. And after hitting his groove in the third quarter, his final stat line was totally reasonable for a first game back against a good defense, and far superior to that night four years ago against Miami: 26 points on 21 shots, with 10 boards and six assists to just three turnovers.

But it didn’t matter. The rest of the team couldn’t figure out anything on offense: Embiid grinded his way to 10 points in the first quarter, but his teammates could only combine for eight total, as Payton Pritchard started shooting holy hellfire from his fingertips and the C’s sped out to a 16-point lead. The Sixers clanged away any hopes at a comeback effort from there: Neither Joel nor anyone else could hit in the second quarter, and when Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown got hot in the third as Pritchard refused to cool down, that was pretty much it. I spent most of the fourth quarter reading Keith Richards’ autobiography Life while the Sixers ran out the clock on a game — and in all likelihood a series — that had long slipped away from them.

Four years ago, I probably would have been angry about this game — about the offense crumpling around Joel, about the defense making it too easy for Boston, about Nick Nurse’s rotations and challenges raising a lot of process questions that last night’s results absolutely did not answer, about Payton fucking Pritchard. I haven’t heard last night’s Ricky yet, but I’m confident Mike was able to bring the fury of a Southern Baptist minister incensed that his congregation seemed to be losing the battle to Satan. I’m sure a lot of Sixers fans feel the same way. Maybe I should too.

Unfortunately, I can’t get past the level of it is what it is. Because it really is: None of this should have been hard to see coming, either from this year’s Sixers and Celtics or the respective histories of the two teams the past decade. The last two games in this series — a shocker Sixers win in Boston and then a to-the-wire C’s victory in Philly — gave us hope that the gap between these teams wasn’t as big as we’d believed at the beginning of the series, and particularly after the Celtics’ Game One blowout, and I do still think that it probably isn’t. But however big that gap truly is, if we thought it was going to get immediately bridged in this series by a sooner-than-expected Embiid return from injury, we really just haven’t been paying close enough attention the last year, or the last 10.

In our heads, us Sixers fans have this fantasy vision of a late-career Joel who just kinda comes and goes from the lineup unobtrusively: one who’s not the offensive threat he once was, and doesn’t get fed the ball like he is, but who can occasionally bail the Sixers out of late-clock situations, hit a wide-open jumper when passed to, and just be a general upgrade in intelligence and ability on both sides of the ball from whoever the team’s current backup C is. We dream of a version of Embiid who only adds, never subtracts — sort of the big man version of what Paul George is currently giving us, where he’ll never win us a game totally on his own, but he can maybe hold down his part for long enough to at least give the team’s younger guys the chance to do so themselves.

That version of Joel has never come for this team, and at this point I think we should probably accept it’s not going to. He’s still just too fucking good on offense, too fucking valuable, even at some limited percentage of health and capability, to stash him in the corner or dunker’s spot and have him be a bystander to the team’s primary action. Maxey is never going to watch Joel set a pick at the top of the key and either roll to the basket or pop to behind the arc as both defenders wall off his own drive and not think to himself I should get the ball to Joel. Boston seemed to both anticipate and encourage this last night, blitzing Maxey and leaving Joel relatively unattended for jumper after jumper. They knew that even after so many years and so much time missed, even after the past two Sixers-Celtics games went the way they went without him, that the team would still default to Jo Ball — and that most likely, things would unravel for the Sixers from there.

Again, I’m not really blaming anyone for any of this. Not Joel, who’s just doing what’s come naturally to him for a decade now, and who has an MVP, multiple scoring titles, and an eventual ticket to Springfield after he retires to show for it. (And who even in this limited and frustrating season for him, still averaged 27 points a night with a PER around 25.) And not Tyrese, who for sure could’ve stood to be a little more aggressive last night, but who generally got the ball to the Big Man in his spots — which has been the answer to qualify offense for this team for Maxey’s entire career. Not the rest of the team, who (outside of PG) couldn’t hit a shot to save their lives or season— that shit’s frustrating as hell, certainly, but there are gonna be games like that in the playoffs, especially for a team knocked out of their rhythm, and especially from a guy like VJ who’s never been here before. And I certainly don’t blame the franchise itself for bringing Joel back in the first place: However close this series was, Philly absolutely wasn’t winning it without him, so holding him out in the hopes we could bow out in a slightly neater and feel-goodier fashion would’ve been unimaginably losery, even by Sixers standards.

But despite the lack of anyone to truly hold accountable for it, the result is that now, everything feels bad. The Celtics have once again wrested control of the series. The Sixers have once again fallen on their faces in front of a cackling national audience and a pissed-off local one, courting boos from the home fans and sarcastic (and disconcertingly loud) chants from the away fans. Joel Embiid has once again stepped up to be the hero and will have to once again slink away as a failure. The series isn’t technically over yet, but it may as well be: The idea of winning one more game against Boston suddenly seems impossibly daunting again, let alone each of the next three. We’re out of time for this season.

And of course, we may be out of time for this team, period. As we’ve reiterated time and time again, this season went about as good as could reasonably be expected for the Sixers — 45-37, with half a healthy and productive Embiid season, another leap from Maxey and a breakthrough rookie campaign from Edgecombe — and it still couldn’t get us anywhere but here. Joel got one more chance to rewrite his playoff narrative — not a particularly good chance, mind you, but a chance — and failing some miracle end to this series, has instead written one more chapter like all the rest. Maybe this time it’s the last chapter.

But I should say here — and I probably should’ve said it much earlier in this column — that I love, love, love Joel Embiid for the game he played last night. I love him for playing in it at all. I love how hard he fought to get back here, that after spending such an unfair percentage of his career waging battles against his own body, he still had it in him to go back into that breach once more. I love that after all these years, he still wants to be out there, that he still wants the chance to put right what for so many seasons and so many reasons has gone wrong, that he still believes he can and should will us to a different end to the story this time. I love that even though some part of him probably knows at this point it’s all going to end in heartbreak, he’d rather the heartbreak come with him on the floor than him on the sidelines. If he had finished 4-21 for 13 points and given way to Adem Bona for the entire fourth quarter, I still would have loved him for it. At some point down the road, we’ll all look back on Joel’s career and love him just as much for his hard-fought failures like this as we do for any of his achievements.

In the moment, though, it’s just sad. Sad that we’re gonna lose to Boston again, sad that we have no idea what the version of this team that could possibly actually beat Boston might look like. Sad that Joel deserves a warrior’s reception today and will instead be treated like a punchline. Sad that this team is more likely to break up than to make up by this time next season. Sad that it’s been 10 years of this shit. Sad that it’s been an entire lifetime of this shit. So very, very sad about us.

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Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the ‘If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders’ section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.

It was a really weird feeling last night going into the start of the postseason already feeling pretty hopeless. As bad as things have ever gotten with the Sixers during the seven playoff runs they’ve had during the Joel Embiid era, I don’t think we’ve ever kicked off the second season feeling so mentally defeated. We’ve been underdogs in the first round, but at the very least, we always had Joel — there was the chance he could pull off a miracle practically by his lonesome, or at least do enough cool shit in an eventual losing effort to make us feel good about the future.

But this year, there’s no Joel, and there’s not much hope for this team’s future, at least not one with him still in it. There’s not much dread or despair, even. There just isn’t much of anything. In truth, I barely even thought about the play-in game before last night — if you’d asked me my prediction for it (or even just my general take on it) I probably would’ve just shrugged. The outcome felt pretty low-variance: Losing would’ve been bad, but also kinda whatever, and winning would’ve been good, but not really that good.

Well, the game happened. The Sixers won. And yeah, it wasn’t that good. But it was good. It felt good. I dunno how much there is to say about its larger meaning, but it’s a thing I’m really glad happened — a little more glad than I would have expected.

To get it out of the way, because it’d feel dishonest not to start with it: This felt way more like an Orlando Magic loss than a Philadelphia 76ers win. My main thought as the Sixers started to very sort of take control in the second half was how much I would fucking hate to be an Orlando Magic fan right now, to have this pretty impressive core of young players who just don’t seem to be going in the right direction together at all, who seem to be capping out at the same ceiling as the Oladipo/Gordon/Vucevic teams of yore and who need their veteran hired gun to have one of the best offensive games of his career to even be able to compete in the play-in. And now Paolo Banchero is scared to shoot? Better them than us, for once in this life.

But even if the win was more about the other team falling apart than ours coming together, it did still feel like a growth win for the Sixers. It was one of the most complete games they’ve played all season without Joel — they played hard on both sides of the ball, they crashed the glass surprisingly effectively, they created turnovers when they needed to and they never let a couple bad possessions in a row spiral into a total collapse. They even won the third quarter by one point! More than any individual performance, I was heartened by just how much they fought in this one as a team, down to the bench guys really popping for some of the best moments like a bench mob should. (Shoutout Playoff Cheerleader Kyle Lowry, who’s 100% gonna leave it all on the sideline floor for this upcoming Celtics series.)

And there were a lot of great individual performances too! Tyrese Maxey had that killer fourth-quarter run we desperately needed to keep the Magic at arm’s length, and a huge block in the final minutes to keep them from getting back in it. VJ Edgecombe was up and down but basically had the meet-the-moment plays on both sides of the ball we needed to confirm that Playoff VJ was gonna be even doggier than the regular season version. Paul George hit the shots he had to hit. Kelly Oubre Jr splashed a whole bunch of threes. Adem Bona sent Banchero to a deep, dark place and he had fun doing it. Andre Drummond... maybe played the game of his entire life? Considering we only played eight guys and didn’t get much from Quentin Grimes or Dominick Barlow, it still felt like a surprisingly full team.

The offense was still very, very rough in stretches. Tyrese Maxey had a lot of drives to nowhere, VJ had four turnovers trying to do too much, and as is always the case without Joel out there, the pick-and-roll just doesn’t work as a bread-and-butter play when nobody gives a fuck about accounting for the roll man. (Although now that Andre Drummond has unexpectedly turned into Nikola Jokic with ups, perhaps that won’t be the case much longer.) It’s hard to see this team having enough offensive juice to outscore a team like oh I don’t know let’s just say the Boston Celtics, especially when said team gets a whole bunch of chances to learn the ins and outs of their not-that-sophisticated-or-varied offensive schemes.

So I’m not exactly talking myself into this team having a real chance in the first round just yet. If Maxey stays hot and VJ continues to get stronger, a stolen game isn’t out of the question — maybe even in Boston? — and the more I think about it, the more likely it seems that, for better or worse, Joel will try to hurry himself back for a late-series cameo if it goes long enough. But beating Boston four times? Beating Boston three times, even? It’s tough to see the roadmap there. Good vibes and low expectations are great and all, but a lot of times, those only last until the first timeout in Boston where Payton Pritchard is whooping up the crowd, and Jayson Tatum is doing the This Is My House and Horf is there for some reason and all of a sudden everything feels totally hopeless again.

But if nothing else, it’s nice to see the guys get a signature win without Jo. We don’t know what the future holds for the Sixers or for the big man, but playing big games without him is something the Sixers are going to have to do a decent amount of pretty much regardless, and having the confidence to know they can hold tough in a basically do-or-die scenario without The Process on the floor will undoubtedly be meaningful for them moving forward. The guys need those reps eventually, may as well start getting them now.

And most importantly: The “We Want Boston” chant at the Excema last night? Fucking aces, man. I was a little incredulous about it at first, of course — we emphatically *do not* want Boston and never legitimately have in my lifetime — but it was a great moment of a temporarily sauced-up fanbase piling it on and going back for seconds, because really, why not? We haven’t gotten a lot of feeling-ourselves moments lately, and we might get even fewer of ‘em in the months to come. Let the Cus Crisers throw it back in our faces after their douchebag’s sweep of us; that’s two-weeks-from-now’s problem. We’ll never want Boston, but we do still want basketball moments like last night. It was good to be reminded of that.

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Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the ‘If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders’ section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.

The more time I have to internalize the likely season-ending — for him, for them, for us — news that Joel Embiid is suffering from appendicitis, the more I’m just glad it happened now and not a week ago. After the back-to-back wins against Chicago and Charlotte (ah for the simpler times of fighting over Best Wins of the Season), and after the VJ Edgecombe-led Hospital Sixers went 5-2, and after it seemed like we were finally getting healthy at the right time, the rug getting swept from under Joel’s feet yet again would have been devastating. It still is, kinda, but it’s a gentler crush coming after two bad losses to the Pistons and Spurs — and right before a quickly inevitable L to the Rockets — which had already removed a sizeable amount of the dip from our collective chip. Now, the sudden reminder of this team being cursed anyway feels less like “Ah c’mon, really??” and more “Yep, checks out.”

The fact of the matter is, even when this team was good, they weren’t that good, and even when they were totally healthy, they weren’t that much better. As Beckett pointed out in his most recent article (and Spike cited on last night’s pod), the two main lineups this team ultimately had to decide between for their postseason starting five had produced results that were just slightly varying shades of mid — and that was supposed to be them at the Sixers’ best and fullest. Maybe in a perfect world, the healthy version of this team would’ve gotten four months together to build familiarity and optimize lineup patterns and become best buds on and off the court, but that perfect world might not exist for any NBA franchise in 2026, and certainly not this one. This one was always gonna be a little leaky, and with Joel now out for weeks if not longer, there’s a big hole in the center that the team can’t possibly hope to plug quickly enough.

In other words, this is gonna be my biggest challenge of Sixers sicko self-delusion yet.

Generally speaking, I’d like to think at this point that my work in the field speaks for itself. I’ve talked myself into the Sixers winning it all in the pandemic season, into Justin Edwards being better than Paul George, into Tobias Harris being different this season (??), into the Knicks series loss being a good thing for the team long-term, actually. When Joel suffered an orbital fracture against the Raptors at the end of their first-round series in 2022, it took me like an hour of airport drinking to decide that fuck it, we were gonna beat the Heat in the second round anyway. Even when I maybe didn’t totally 100% believe it, I’ve always felt it.

This one is proving tough for me to feel. The Sixers dropping three straight games they really needed to win at least one of means they’re practically guaranteed a play-in spot, which means a strong chance of a pre-playoff exit and a best-case result of a first-round matchup with the wildly superior Pistons or Celtics. None of those scenarios would inspire optimism for the Sixers even if they were fully healthy; the fact that they’ll be without Embiid means you need a magnifying glass the size of Texas to find the slightest crumbs of hope for a path to an upset, or even a feel-good-ish loss.

On the podcast last night I felt obligated to at least ask if it was worth playing the calendar game with Joel, wondering if there was some universe where we could extend our playoff timeline long enough to once again contemplate Jo rejoining for part of it. Spike shut me down, and rightly so: The playoffs begin in nine days and Jo’s surgery almost certainly will knock him out for a minimum of three weeks. We’d basically need a seven-game series to have any hope of him coming back in the first round, and even then he’d have to rush back in a way likely no one would or should be comfortable with. I don’t know if there’s any road map to Sixers optimism this postseason, no matter how skewed, that involves Jo playing a part in the first round.

So is there any way to talk ourselves into getting to round two without him? We do still have two all-stars on this team, and we’ve got Kelly Oubre Jr and Quentin Grimes and VJ Edgecombe and let me stop me right there because we’ve seen way too much of what this team looks like without Joel to really go much further with this one. The Jo-less version of this team couldn’t beat the Hawks once this year, let alone the Pistons or Celtics four times. Hell, we saw how overmatched the Jo-less squad looked against Detroit a week ago, and that was when the Pistons were still missing Cade Cunningham and Isaiah Stewart, both of whom have since returned from injury. Besides, Tyrese Maxey still looks hurt or fed up or both, and relying on Paul George to save your season is like relying on DJ Khaled to elevate your new single. If these are the guys we’re hoping to shock the world with right now, a new slant might be something we need to find.

The best I can do right now is VJ. Not that I’m trying to sell you or myself on him being able to lead the team to the second round and a Joel reunion essentially on his own, but he can give us something real to root for. While Maxey seems to be getting increasingly smothered by the baggage of his six seasons in Philly and PG seems to be weighing his give-it-all on a possession by possession basis, VJ is still howling at the moon. He’s crashing for offensive rebounds, he’s lunging for deflections, he’s trying to dunk on everyone and multiple generations of their dead relatives. He still wants to win, and he still wants that winning to matter. No matter how stacked the deck is against the Sixers right now, he’s the one guy we can count on to keep battling until he’s dragged away from the table.

And so I at least want him to get a taste of the real thing. Even if it’s just in a sweep, even if his numbers don’t ultimately end up being all that, even if it comes against the fucking Celtics. I want him to get out of the play-in and into the playoffs, and I want to see what four-plus games of Playoff VJ looks like. I may not be delusional enough to think we can win a series, but I bet you I can talk myself into VJ winning us a game. Maybe he comes up with a steal on a pivotal possession? Maybe he finally gets that big poster he’s been hunting all season? Maybe it’s on fucking Jayson Tatum or Al Horford (who’s undoubtedly somehow found his way back to Boston by now)? Any one such memory could keep us warm throughout what’s looking to be a bitterly cold summer offseason.

Plus, who knows — VJ gives the team a bit of a spark in the play-in, maybe the guys start catching his vibe a little... could there be life left in this team? Could there be a one-last-go-around mentality that takes hold, knowing that almost certainly the team is going to look very different at the start of next year? Could going in with odds this long be just the thing the team needs to rally behind and produce the miracle we’ve so long hoped for with them? Ehhhhhhh... we’re probably getting a little ahead of ourselves here. Let’s see if an historically unburdened VJ can get this team to the show first and then we’ll take it from there. One sicko delusion at a time.

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Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the ‘If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders’ section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.

Sorry to disappoint the surprising number of people who tweeted at me about it after the game on Saturday night, but I have no strong take about whether or not the Hornets win was the best of the season. It was definitely awesome, though — over an I-still-can’t-totally-believe-how-frisky-this-team-is-level-frisky Hornets squad, in Charlotte, where it felt like they were exposing all our weakness and getting all the whistles. To see the Sixers dig in like they did in the final quarter and a half, and not only keep the Hornets from pulling away but to battle back and steal the win, in most of our guys’ first or second game back from weeks-long injuries, was a real heart-sweller. Everyone played a big part in it, even Rock and Roll Coach. Great win.

The funny thing about playing the better part of a month with nearly all your good players out is that when they’re all finally, suddenly back, it feels like you’re trotting out a full-fledged All-Star team every night. Of course it helps with that when you actually do have three multi-time All-Stars in your starting lineup — but even that feels kinda surreal with this team, especially when they’re all playing at that level like they were in Charlotte. Three? We have three star-level players on this team? At once? I mean that’s cool. And then you remember we still have VJ Edgecombe — who definitely reached another level towards the end of his one-man-show run in mid-late March — and Kelly Oubre Jr.’s back too, and Quentin Grimes is still chilling, and hey maybe Justin Edwards is a thing again, and holy shit are we even allowed to have this many dudes on one team? Do we need to worry about Adam Silver intervening again?

And of course, this is when the real sicko part of me kicks in, because we also have a standings race to invest in. There’s three or four games a night beyond our own that really, really matter to our playoff seeding — and another couple more that matter to us more indirectly, like the Pistons maintaining enough of a standings lead over the Celtics (or the Thunder over the Spurs) that hopefully neither Detroit or San Antonio has all that much to play for when we face them with five and four games to go in the season, respectively. Sometimes a couple of these teams play one another, and basically any outcome ends up benefiting the Sixers in some way; sometimes one of them loses a game they really have no excuse not to win (like Miami dropping one to Indiana on Sunday) and it’s delightful enough to make your entire night.

Then, for those of us who are really intent on getting nuts, it bears mention that we also have a first-round pick that doesn’t belong to us (how’d we get it? who’s to say??), so we’re in a stealth late-round tanking race too. Which means that every night, there’s five or six games that matter to us for one reason or another. Maybe not exactly appointment viewing to make sure that the Timberwolves take care of business against the Pelicans or whoever — thus maintaining their standings lead over the Rockets, and keeping the latter’s pick at No. 20 — but also maybe at least worth flipping over to it after the Phillies or Sixers and catching the end of the fourth quarter. It’s fun to have so much stuff to care about again, no matter how ultimately trivial.

It’s also just cool to be relevant again, to not know exactly what this team’s ceiling is, to have The Other O’Connor tweeting about them being a potential Conference Finals contender. A few weeks ago, some Sixers fans were wondering whether we could pile up enough late-season losses to fall to the very bottom of the playoff race and maybe sneak back into the lottery one more time; now it feels a lot more practical to wonder whether we could find our way out of the play-in altogether. We may not be all the way back in Could This Be The Year??? territory yet, but we’re willing to think about the team as a real team again, not just a time-killing distraction for running out the clock on some bad contracts. Mike and Spike didn’t even talk about Jared McCain on the last podcast. It’s a wild reversal of vibes.

And at the risk of defending one of the least popular of my many unpopular recent takes, I will say that this is why I did consider the Portland win such a huge one. Them surviving the VJ-only stretch of the season — going 5-3 just as a light gust of wind could’ve sent the team tumbling towards total collapse — kept the team just viable enough to still have things to really fight for once Joel, PG and Tyrese all got back. And while four of those wins came against the tanking faithful, the Portland victory was over against a still-trying team that they had every excuse to lose to. Scraping together that W with basically the Summer League version of the team represented a huge swing for how bad things could’ve gotten vs. how good they suddenly feel again now. It allowed us to get back here.

Now here we are. The fun may not last; eight games is still plenty of time for someone else to get injured, or for an easy win to slip out of our fingers at great cost, or for us to do everything right but still fall short in the standings; like when we went 8-0 to end the season after Joel’s return in 2024 and still couldn’t escape the play-in or an eventual first-round series with the Knicks. And even if everything does go according to plan, the most likely outcome for this team is still a first-round playoff exit, and this portion of the season being rememberable primarily as “The Tease,” as Mike put it in this weekend’s pod. But we might not have a lot of memories of any kind left with this version of the team, and for a while there it seemed like they were due to all be some combination of frustrating and miserable. To have some legitimately positive, fun ones as we close the season — with the possibility of more still to come — is a joy I don’t take for granted.

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Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the ‘If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders’ section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.

The news of Adem Bona being upgraded from questionable to available for the Philadelphia 76ers’ afternoon game against the Brooklyn was not met with much fist-pumping excitement from the Sixers faithful this Saturday. After all, it came after news of the Sixers going down two more rotation players — Jabari Walker with illness, Andre Drummond with back spasms — to go with the four significantly more consequential starters we knew they were already down: Tyrese Maxey, Paul George, Kelly Oubre Jr. and Joel Embiid. And of course, it was already a game against the woeful Brooklyn Nets, a game to be watched by some combination of gambling sickos, stoned undergrads and families on a very strict live-event budget and essentially no one else. There was no reason for anybody besides Adem Bona being listed on the active roster for this game besides Adem Bona, and even he was probably pretty 50/50 about it.

And yet: Not only did I check my Bluesky feed multiple times for updates on Bona’s playing status, when he was announced as a healthy go for this game, I said to myself, OK, we got this.

Yes, friends, that’s me in the corner losing my rationality about the 2025-26 Philadelphia 76ers. As the rest of the fanbase is dusting off their ping-pong-ball-counting glasses for another late-arriving tankathon season, I am checking the upcoming schedule and doing the mental math of what the Sixers need to do to at least stay competitive for the 7-8 play-in slots. Despite the Sixers’ prospects currently looking bleak in the short, medium and long terms, I am living and/or dying with mid-March matchups against not-even-that-glorified NBA Summer League squads. I am firmly back in anti-tank mode, and frankly it feels like I never left.

Devoted followers of the Ricky blog will likely recall my losing campaign last year for the Sixers to Just Go For It, to throw caution to the wind in the midst of an injury-racked campaign and try to build whatever kind of competitive squad they could around Embiid, Maxey and George, even if the odds of it actually putting it together for any kind of meaningful run were slim. My logic was that, tank as we might, we still might end up getting screwed in the lottery — and in the meantime, we were running out of high-level Joel seasons to burn through, and had no guarantee (or even strong reason to believe) that things with this team would be significantly better the next season. Hardly a foolproof argument, granted — and while I never regretted making it, it obviously was harder to defend once the Sixers bottomed out injury-wise landed VJ Edgecombe in the draft, and then actually did improve drastically to begin the 2025-26 season.

Imagine my surprise over the past couple weeks, then, to find the fanbase right back where it started. Despite the Sixers being a winning team all season — since winning Game One again t Boston, they’ve literally never dipped back to .500 record-wise — and despite there only being a month left before the playoffs, the whispers have recommenced: Is it too late for the Sixers to tank? At first it felt mostly like a joke, a coping mechanism for doomery Sixers fans to deal with the team’s seemingly inevitable collapse. But from there, the temptation to fall into old patterns was too strong for many Process Trusters, who crunched the numbers and decided that losing out in pursuit of a <10% chance of jumping into the top four of this summer’s draft — and keeping our protected pick for a second-straight year — was the most reasonable way to spend the final month of the season.

I can’t act like there’s no logic to the argument. If you’re in championship-or-bust mode with these Sixers — hell, if you’re even conference finals-or-bust — a less-than-10% chance still sounds like a pretty good bet compared to the odds of a legit Sixers playoff run. They are firmly in the play-in section of the standings now and unlikely to find their way out, which means they need a little luck even to get into the proper playoff bracket, and then even at their healthiest would still be a heavy underdog in any of their prospective first-round matchups. Plus, there’s extra motivation to chase the pick again this year: Not only is 2026 supposedly a very strong draft class in its top tier, but due to some fine print likely only understood by SixersAdam and the Real GM dudes, the Sixers’ pick not conveying to OKC would mean they also get to keep their 2028 first-rounder currently owed to the Nets, with that pick instead turning into a second-rounder if we out-tank our coverage again this year.

Still.... no. Not even with all that we stand to gain with the pick not conveying, not even with the Sixers failing to compile convincing wins against the absolute dregs of the league right now, not even with the peace of mind that would likely come with tuning out the actual games and coolly responding to the many inevitable L’s with a Seinfeldian “Well that’s a shame.” I couldn’t do it last year, and I really, really can’t do it this year.

At least when we started having this discussion last year, it was early enough in the season that the Sixers’ campaign ending up a true wash was still a plausible outcome. Hard to say the same about a year where they’ve already amassed 35 wins — 36 after the hilarious escape job against Brooklyn this weekend — a total that on its own would disqualify it for strong lottery consideration in the overwhelming majority of NBA seasons. To try to flip the switch with under a month to go feels undignified, even by both Sixers and tanking standards. Even in Spike’s wouldn’t-it-be-funny-if, vaguely pro-tanking column on Friday, he admitted that the only defensible way we could actually root for L’s at this point would be subconsciously.

Fair perhaps for some, but I can’t even get that far. (Shocker, I know.) It’s just too late, both in this season and in The Process. This season has hardly been an electric one for the Sixers, but at least it’s one where they brushed off an absolutely miserable 2024-25 campaign, overachieved individually almost across the board, and even let us dream a little bigger for a month or two about what their ceiling might be — which is a month or two more than I expected to spend contemplating such things this year. Things fell apart due to injuries, regression and unforced errors from both our players and front office, but I still mostly like this team. I want better things for them than to have to spend another month playing out the string before having to play from all the way behind in the play-in tournament to even have a shot at a real postseason run.

I also just can’t abide any amount playing for losses with Joel still on the Sixers. Not with as hard as he’s had to work to get back to where he’s been this season, not with as well as he’s played when he’s been on the court — not what he once was, of course, but way ahead of what we still expected — and not with what he’s meant to this city and team for the past decade now. Every season with him playing at a high level on an even slightly competitive Sixers squad has to be treated at this point as his last, because chances are pretty high it will be. The next game the Sixers drop even slightly on purpose should be one where they have no plans for Embiid to ever suit up for them again afterwards.

And that’s the thing that really separates this season from last one: There is, at least in theory, still a version of this team to get back to. Basically everyone is out right now, but no one’s down with a season-ender; if our guys stay on track, they could all be back by the end of the regular season. And as stomach-emptying as our three wins against Utah, Memphis and Brooklyn were in the past week, they were also all wins — and we’ve got three more games against committed tankers coming up in our next six. The other three are likely blowouts going the other direction, but if we can play .500 ball over the next two weeks with an average scoring differential of -30, that should still be good enough for us to tread water until we can start trickling some guys back into our lineup. With a strong end to the season, we could at least hold in the 7-8 range, with two chances to win one game and earn a first-round matchup against Detroit, Boston, New York or Cleveland.

Does that sound like a particularly great postseason fate for this team? It emphatically does not! I don’t know what the chances are of even a mostly-healthy Sixers squad pulling off a first-round upset against any of those teams — I’d probably peg it at higher than 10%, but like, not a lot higher. Chances are it ends something like the Knicks series two years ago, with the Sixers playing tough and providing some memorable moments but ultimately going down in six — and that might be a high-end scenario. Maybe we get swept by the Celtics. Maybe it’s demoralizing enough that the front office does what it takes to break up the team in the summer. It’s certainly not off the table, or even particularly close to its edge.

But I still want to see the guys get their best chance to fail or succeed on their own merits. It’s bad enough they had to throw away last year, it’s bad enough that the front office and ownership threw additional unnecessary challenges at them at the trade deadline; they don’t also deserve us rooting against them giving themselves a shot just so we can better bet on a way-outside shot of getting bailed out by the lottery (again). Or maybe what they deserve’s got nothing to do with it and I just want to continue watching the games and caring about the results, even if there’s not much of consequence to root for besides V.J. further discovering his Jimmy Butler mid-range game, Quentin Grimes getting some semblance of his groove back and Justin Edwards making my prediction of him ending this season as a better player than Paul George seem infinitesimally less ridiculous.

Regardless of the why, I can tell you that I will absolutely be leading the Sixers’ anti-tank movement once again this season. I can feel my blood getting hotter with every Sixers lottery simulation I see getting posted, with every attempt to pretend that what’s going on with the players at the top of this year’s draft class is absolutely any of our business. See you on the battlefield once more, Mike: I have once again been activated, and I will be watching breathlessly through every game of extended Marjon Beuchamp and Dalen Terry minutes, of Trendon Watford playing the three and refusing to shoot from three, of Cam Payne searching in vain for a Cam Payne Game sequel, in the hopes that it will somehow lead to something more. And if it ends in disaster and/or pointlenessness again that’s fine. I will go down with this ship. I will not be putting my hands up and surrendering. Look above my door for a fucking white flag and I promise you there will be none. I’m still in love with this injury-stricken, star-crossed, low-ceilinged team, and I always will be.

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Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the ‘If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders’ section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.

For the first four months of this Sixers season, we had the luxury of looking at playoff seeding and prospective first-round matchups as our biggest concern. We got over .500 immediately to start the year, and despite some dips that felt serious in the moment, have stayed pretty comfortably in the black for the season record-wise, even with some humiliating losses on the court and some highly unforced losses to our personnel off it. None of the teams below us in the standings looked particularly threatening; maintaining our slightly-above-average level of play seemed more than good enough to keep them at bay. Up until now, making the postseason was still a matter of “when,” not “if.”

Well now is here, and “when” is looking a whole lot more like “if,” or maybe even “in the unlikely event that.” The Sixers have lost games and available bodies at an alarming rate over the past week. A laughably unconvincing last-minute win over the tanking Utah Jazz is all that’s keeping them from currently being on a four-game losing streak, while Joel Embiid missed all four (with at least three more DNPs still to go) with an oblique strain, VJ Edgecombe has been shelved for the last two and a half with a lumbar contusion, Kelly Oubre Jr missed one with illness and Paul George still isn’t a thing again for another nine games. Most disturbingly, our golden boy Tyrese Maxey collided with Adem Bona at the end of yet another dispiriting finish Saturday night against the Atlanta Hawks and now may be due for an unscheduled spring break of his own. And just to make things extra spicy, every team directly below the Sixers in the standings has suddenly gotten red hot — including the Hawks, whose escape job against us on Saturday marked their sixth straight win — and as a result, two of those teams are no longer below the Sixers at all, as the Heat and Magic have both moved a half-game up on them, dropping the Sixers firmly into play-in territory.

Yes, everything is currently going wrong for these Sixers, and it might be some time before they can even start to go right again. Now the most pressing question with this team might not be whether or not they can avoid going totally off the rails, but how much motivation anyone even has to really ensure that they don’t.

Missing the playoffs this season would seem like an absolute disaster for the Sixers. Given that they have two max players well into their 30s, that they’ve gotten better-than-expected productivity from most of their players, that they’ve spent the first three-quarters of the season over .500 and that they don’t have their first-round pick this year unless it falls in the top four again — not technically impossible, but with 34 wins already in the bank, certainly improbable even in a best-worst-case scenario — to not even make it out of the play-in would feel pretty damning for this team and everyone involved.

But would it actually be? Is it actually that important to this team and the people that run it if they make the playoffs? Is it even really that important to us?

Certainly, very little about the way the front office and/or ownership has operated this season has suggested a ton of urgency when it comes to maximizing the team’s regular-season performance. The Sixers started this year with a big ol’ question mark at power forward — one which our couple converted two-way guys have done a decently impressive job of answering, but which still leaves the starting lineup out of balance a lot of the time. They’ve taken the long view with Joel’s health, ruling him out in advance when in doubt and determinedly not over-promising on his eventual return, and never even attempting to play him in back-to-backs. And of course, regardless of their larger intentions, they let the trade deadline pass not only without bringing any extra help in, but with actually sending a couple guys out, at least one of whom would certainly be playing big minutes for this undermanned team right now. Nick Nurse might be playing Tyrese Maxey an ungodly number of minutes — or “might have been,” depending on the injury news — but otherwise you couldn’t say this team is tilted to give themselves every opportunity to win games.

And even at its best this season, it’s not like this team ever really looked like a credible contender. They’ve stayed above .500, but never more than eight games over, and since the first couple of weeks, their scoring differential has never been much more than a couple points into the positives (and indeed has since fallen all the way back to the negatives). When everyone’s healthy and playing, they’ve looked pretty good but never quite great. At best, we could’ve talked ourselves into them being the team no one wants to face in the first round — national media have even suggested as much on occasion — but probably not even the most delusional Sixers fan really ticketed them for multiple series wins this postseason.

So if we don’t really believe in the team this season, and the team doesn’t necessarily even believe in itself, is it really even worth scrapping for playoff positioning down the stretch? At the very least, the team is still decently safe to secure a play-in spot — they’re 6.5 games up on the Milwaukee Bucks in 11th, who can’t be totally discounted with Giannis back, but who haven’t shown much life all season — so maybe they play it conservative with so many of their guys out, hope they get a couple strong weeks of play to end the season and round back into form, and then pray they can pull off some play-in magic and back into the postseason that way. And if not, well, nobody really expected that much more from this team anyway.

I’m sure Joel has some thoughts, though. Up until this past month, this had been his healthiest season in a few years, and a more productive one than we ever thought we’d see again from the big man. If we can’t even get him in any kind of position for a real postseason run this year — and there’s no reason to assume we’ll be in better position for one next year — we might officially be out of chances together. I’ve wondered since the trade deadline if this team wasn’t headed for an inevitable breakup with its longtime franchise player this summer, and if Joel’s watching the first round of the playoffs from his comically oversized couch, that certainly might expedite things there.

And both Nick Nurse and Daryl Morey could probably use a strong finish to bolster their job security. Certainly Sixers fans are increasingly out for blood with the two of them — with most of the guys on the court seemingly overperforming individually, the blame tends to fall on Nick and Daryl for the team not being in a better position to weather these brutal last few weeks. Whether that’s fair or not about this season (and personally I could kinda go either way there), neither guy has the consistent record of undeniable success during their tenure here that another disappointing finish can be easily overlooked. Perhaps the front office has grand designs on how to revamp the team this summer, but they’ve got to get there intact first.

But as Spike wrote about earlier in the week, this is just sorta life in the middle. It’s a very confusing place to be, where you’re not sure what matters or how much or to who. You get swept up in the many small triumphs and failures of this year until you zoom out and realize that maybe nothing actually matters for the next five years anyway. The difference between being sixth and being tenth feels both like the end of the world and also ultimately not really that big a deal, as you watch your last chance of true relevance slip away and release eh, that last chance wasn’t really that great anyway. You look for someone to blame, but you know the middlingness runs deeper than any one dude on the court or on the sidelines or in the front office. There’s a lot of questions and not many convincing answers. And how much you care about any of it is entirely, terrifyingly up to you.

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Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the ‘If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders’ section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.

While I’m still deeply disturbed by how bad the Sixers have been since the trade deadline — 1-5 in their last six, including double-digit losses to the Blazers, Hawks and now of course the Fly the Processed Pelicans — I am no longer stupefied by it. I have Sixers Bluesky luminary Avi Wolfman-Arent to thank for that, since he pointed out the simple fact that while we now remember the first couple months of the season as halcyon days for the Sixers thriving while shorthanded, the team in fact was never that good when both Paul George and Joel Embiid were out. Losing Embiid as we have for the past four games is predictably devastating to this team’s ability to compete at the highest levels, but without George on the wing to at least credibly space the floor for their guards and generally provide two-way competence, it’s very difficult for them to compete, period. I get it, kinda.

What I still don’t get is how the front office could know how tricky things were likely going to be for the Sixers to stay afloat post-trade deadline, and how they could decide that it was an acceptable outcome to have a deadline with players going out — never mind one who certainly seems like he’d be some degree of helpful right now — and none coming in. The team may have fallen apart around this time of year anyway, but it’s pretty hard not to look back at that deadline activity and not see that as the nudge that sent the already-teetering Sixers towards full collapse.

Now, of course, Daryl & Co. didn’t know Joel was going to miss four straight at this particularly vulnerable moment. And it’s true that the post-deadline team was still 1-1 before Jo started missing games, with a forgivable-if-dispiriting loss to the Lakers in L.A. and a pretty solid win in Phoenix. But they did know George still had about 20 games to go on the suspension for his drug policy violation. They did know that Tyrese Maxey was leading the league in minutes, and that his December and January numbers had already slipped a little from his October and November dominance. They did know that VJ Edgecombe was at least starting to careen into the rookie wall, and that Quentin Grimes had been pretty frosty since Thanksgiving. And most importantly, they did know that Joel was Joel, that it was something of a miracle that he was as available and productive all of January as he was, and that banking on him being healthy enough to drag the team across the regular-season finish line was like planning a cross-country road trip in a 2001 Chrysler Sebring.

This is all to say: This Sixers team wasn’t one equipped to weather any additional losses. Even at their winningest this season, the margins were thin — their scoring differential was never that positive, and their staying in the black record-wise relied on an unsustainable amount of rookie clutchness. Paul George’s suspension made it that much thinner, though with Joel still around and Kelly Oubre Jr. providing a decent-enough PG facsimile, it was still manageable. With Joel out for the last four games and possibly more to come, we now officially need all the help we can get. But not only did we not call in backup for our lineup at the deadline, we sent some of our current troops packing. And now, after a 15-point loss to the woeful Pelicans, things look dire, and they probably should.

I’m not sure how much the specific loss of Jared McCain is the thing currently dooming the Sixers. Certainly, the Pelicans rouler-ing les bons temps all over the Sixers from deep on Saturday night we absolutely couldn’t buy a triple for the final 18 minutes makes McCain’s absence feel even more conspicuous — especially while Jared is shooting 45% from deep in Oklahoma City and going off for 21 in their most recent win over Brooklyn (and while our reacquired emergency backup PG Cam Payne is 1-9 from three to start his second Sixers tenure). But it’s worth remembering that much of McCain’s current productivity is coming in garbage time for the Thunder — who are much better at getting to such run-out-the-clock opportunities than the Sixers have been this season — and that while he could potentially offer some relief for Maxey and Edgecombe, he probably couldn’t play alongside them enough to make things all that much easier for them on the court. McCain probably would have been helpful for this period, but he ultimately might not have changed that much.

It’s not the loss of McCain himself that’s stinging me right now, so much as the unforced removal of a rotation guy — any rotation guy — with no obvious substitute either brought in or already waiting in the wings to replace him. (Payne, playing in the Serbian league up until his reacquisition, emphatically does not count.) For the Sixers to make such a future-fortifying move and then do nothing else to offset the damage to the already-weakened present... I can’t say for sure how much of a psychological effect it has, but I would certainly have some frustrations (and some questions) if I was one of the guys taking the court right now.

And again, this is why I wonder if the Sixers haven’t mentally pulled the plug on this season already. Spike and Mike have said that they didn’t agree with my article positing that the front office’s behavior this deadline projected a lack of belief in this version of the team to do anything real this season or likely ever, because maybe there just wasn’t a good trade out there and why force a trade if we believe in the guys we have. And I don’t disagree with those specific points, but I feel like they’re missing the main argument I was making – which is not that we should kill the team for not making a home-run trade, but that we should perhaps take it as meaningful that they *did* make trades to actively and inarguably make the team worse this year. Usually a controversial trade deadline for a contending team awkwardly reshuffles a roster, or trades youth for experience, or plugs one hole while creating another. I could have understood a deadline built around any of those types of trades, or indeed one built around no trades at all. But when all said deadline does is shrink the active roster by two, that to me says something about how close the front office does or does not consider this team to being a contending one.

And I don’t want to keep writing versions of this article. I think Daryl has generally done a good job getting this team to where it is this year, and I think that still being over .500 is something of an accomplishment for them. I don’t doubt that he had intentions of pulling off additional moves at this trade deadline, and that perhaps external (and/or internal) forces prevented him from doing so. (Though I still feel like this probably was an acceptable outcome for him, or he wouldn’t have done the McCain trade in the first place.) I wouldn’t have dealt Jared and would’ve liked to have gotten more for him if we did, but I can’t say for absolute certainty that he’ll end up being worth more than this bounty of picks we got for him, especially without knowing what future deals having these assets at our disposal could lead to. And hell, if it is indeed the front office’s/ownership’s position that this team isn’t close enough to true contention to even feign at making moves to put it over the top, I don’t necessarily disagree with that — they probably aren’t. In the long term, this all may very well be justifiable.

I just don’t know what else to write about watching these games this season, though. The team doesn’t seem competitive right now. They seem overmatched. They seem like they’re looking around for answers that aren’t there. And that’s not entirely the doing of this trade deadline by any means, but when you have to deal with so many things that are beyond your control as a basketball team, I have to imagine that when the rare things you can control are also serving to make it tougher and bummer-ier on you, that’s gotta make for a disproportionate part of the load you carry. Hopefully Joel comes back for the Wolves tonight, we turn things around quickly and the vibes can persevere. But everything is fragile right now. And when the cracks are showing as obviously as this, it’s really gotta suck for the team to remember that its own front office was wielding the hammer that caused one or two of them.

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Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the ‘If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders’ section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.

So this trade deadline was bad. I was maybe a little less dispirited by or angry about it in the moment than some, if only because I’ve gotten used to it over the previous five years of Daryl Morey trade deadlines —which have included one blockbuster trade for James Harden, and four years of smaller deals that left me some degree of underwhelmed and/or annoyed. Whether through genuine team-building strategy, intractable ownership mandate or just some combination of bad timing and bad luck, the Sixers have long conditioned us to expect the unimpressive at the deadline, that we’ll be sending out a little more and getting back a little less than we’d like. I spent my last remaining shock and outrage about it two years ago when we dealt Jaden Springer to the Celtics for a second-rounder. Losing Jared McCain at this point is a bigger but ultimately shallower hurt.

But if there is something about this trade deadline that I’ve been unable to really shake the past few days, it’s that our inactivity in improving the team this year — and whether or not Daryl really meant this to be the final sum result, our activity to actually worsen it — speaks to something of a larger existential crisis with the Sixers. At previous trade deadlines, there was always some amount of reason to justify punting for another year: Joel’s uncertain health, or a lack of available assets, or the team not really being close enough anyway or whatever. This year, I’m not sure what that excuse is: The team is unusually healthy, they’ve got at least some picks (and apparently young players) to spare and they’re in the middle of the playoff hunt in a wide-open East. So that just leaves one possible reason left to accept a trade deadline where the team sends players out without getting any in return: The front office just doesn’t think this team is good enough to have a real chance to contend this year.

And that may be right. But if that is right... isn’t that a much bigger problem? If things are going so much better than most of us expected this year with this team and it’s still not enough to earn any amount of faith from the powers that be, doesn’t that mean that this version of the Sixers is just never going to be good enough? Was this trade deadline the front office openly admitting that it’s already over with this team?

Plenty of people have pointed out what kind of message a trade deadline like this sends to Joel Embiid, for him to openly call out the team for ducking the tax in so many years past and essentially ask them not to do that this year, and for them to still do it and to give him literally nothing in terms of on-court help in consolation. Some have gotten really upset about it, even wondering if this was going to lead him to ask for a trade in the offseason. And my first instinct was to go All right, let’s settle down, Joel understands the business by now, this wasn’t about him, it’s not like Jared McCain was really doing much this season to begin with, he’s probably not even gonna remember this trade deadline in a couple months anyway. I thought everyone was overreacting.

But the more I think about it, the more I feel like we may even be underreacting. I think Joel kinda should be that mad about it. Because, against all odds, this season has turned into something close to a best-case scenario in terms of his overall performance. The past month, not only is he back to averaging 30 a game on elite shooting numbers and good distribution, not only is he playing in every game that’s not part of a back-to-back, but he’s making the Sixers a legitimately winning team again. It’s been a little obfuscated by the team going 1-4 in their last five games without him, but in their last 17 games with him, they’re 12-5. His defense isn’t what it once was, and his rebounding has felt particularly putrid (though Statman says it’s not as bad as all that), but his stats are hardly empty: In fact, in 20 total games so far this year, Joel has had a positive plus-minus in 18 of them. We couldn’t ask for more than what he’s given us, and we would never have guessed he’d ever be giving this much of it to us again.

And apparently it’s not good enough. Joel has improved his play for the season to All-Star levels, and has been near-MVP-caliber for a month — with his truest superstar co-star yet in Tyrese Maxey, and one of the best supporting casts he’s ever had — and the front office still went eh we’re not seeing it. Joel’s play wasn’t enough, Joel’s health wasn’t enough, Joel going on the record and essentially begging the Sixers not to do what they always do this time of year wasn’t enough. The team saw all that and said “not this year.”

Now, Daryl says that the team was trying to actively upgrade at the deadline, but that “nothing materialized” — and I believe he probably was at least exploring those avenues. He says that he still thinks the team can make a deep run in the East, and maybe he legitimately does. But the sum total of actions can’t help but speak louder than words here, as clearly the team was comfortable dealing McCain (and to a lesser extent Gordon) for picks, knowing that there was at least a pretty good chance we wouldn’t get anything else back but future flexibility. (And say what you will about the whole of McCain’s sophomore season; he was 15 of his last 26 from three and helped us win multiple games in the past two weeks.) Making the team worse at the deadline was certainly not an untenable outcome for this team, because it was the outcome they arrived at. So the logical conclusion to draw from that is that they didn’t believe the team was really that great to begin with.

Now, once again: They might not be wrong in reaching that conclusion. Even with as many things have gone right with these Sixers — Joel’s health and return to all-world play being the biggest, but also Maxey’s making the leap, V.J. Edgecombe’s rookie excellence, Dominick Barlow’s scrap-heap revelatoriness, Kelly Oubre Jr.’s and (until recently!) Paul George’s reliability — things have still largely topped out at “uninspiring” with these Sixers. They lose a lot of games they should win. They can’t maintain consistently strong play for 48 minutes — usually not even for 36. They break down late way too often. Their advanced stats and point differential suggest an upper-side-of-middle-of-the-pack team, and the eye test doesn’t suggest much different. If Daryl & Co. saw all that and decided that objectively, it wasn’t the smart play to make any kind of all-in push this year, we certainly can’t say they’d be crazy for thinking that.

But why would next year be any different? The year after? We can’t possibly expect things to go better, or even this well, with Joel and PG again — it’s something of a miracle to get this much out of Jo again for even one season. We don’t have incoming cap space, and while it’s always better to have more picks than fewer, it’s not like the McCain deal landed us some magic asset that we can obviously use as a key to unlock the final piece of the puzzle for this team in the offseason. We have every reason to think that this incarnation of the team is as good right now as it’ll ever be. So to project that it’s not good enough means one of two things: Either the front office is actively planning on being kinda not good enough for the foreseeable future, or they simply don’t plan to keep this version of the team together much longer anyway.

Either way, if you’re Joel Embiid, I imagine it has to sting a little. I don’t want to treat him like a martyr; he’s certainly being paid handsomely regardless, and his record with public-message-sending is hardly without blemish either. We don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes — maybe the team is making him assurances or offering him consolation beyond what’s public, and trying to temper his hurt feelings and earn his continued loyalty that way. Or maybe the team just thinks that’s what the money’s for. But in any event, to make it so clear to Joel and whoever else is paying attention that the team doesn’t believe it’s worth really trying to contend this year, even with him back and playing at such a high level... it really could lead to Joel looking around in the offseason and going you know they’re right, if I actually do want to contend, maybe I should try to do so elsewhere. And I don’t know what Daryl or anyone else would say to him at that point to try to convince him otherwise.

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Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the ‘If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders’ section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.

All we ever hoped for with this team was a chance to watch them at full strength. The story with the Sixers the last few years — for as long as we can remember, really, but particularly the last few years — has been a never-ending relay race of individual mini-tragedies, one player always handing off the injury baton to another, with Joel Embiid always in the anchor leg position. The team seemed to be a real team as constructed, but we’d probably never get to see proof of it one way or the other; there would always be some nagging malady, some latent excuse, some reason why we couldn’t judge this team as The Sixers, but rather some substitute version we’d have to make do with until the real one arrived (or more likely, didn’t).

Well, for three and a half weeks, we finally got The Sixers. And it sucked. And now it’s over.

Paul Geroge, as no doubt dozens of different notifications across your various social media platforms and messaging services have by now informed you, is out for the next 25 games. That in itself is hardly unexpected; by this point in The Process, we get reflexively antsy anytime we go the better part of a month without needing to consult our medical journals over some Shams update or another. The only surprising thing was that this was not an overdue karma bill delivered by the injury gods, but a direct punishment handed out by the league itself: Paul George would be suspended due to his taking of a banned substance, only allowed to return with 10 games left in the season.

I’m not particularly interested in condemning Paul George for his unforced error, or debating what related “P” alliterative nickname we now must dub him with as further sentencing for his crimes. In his statement following the news, George gestured at the illicit substance he’s getting dinged for taking being related to treatment of his mental health, and apologized for not being more careful. Fine. I truly have no idea how unfair, arcane and/or confusing the league’s drug policy is (or how easy it is to mistakenly violate), nor do I care to dig into the particulars of what PG was trying to do that ended up being off-limits. All I care about is that this officially brings an end to the Sixers’ shockingly lengthy period of lineup normalcy, dragging us back to more familiar grounds of calculating timetables and bargaining emotionally while the rest of the league points and laughs at us.

And the worst part of it is: Those three and a half weeks of the Sixers being chill weren’t even that cool. If the Sixers had gone 10-2 over that 12-game period since SixersAdam’s fateful All Clear tweet, blowing out teams left and right while Tyrese Maxey and VJ Edgecombe went viral for doing Kid ‘n Play dances to our victory music, then fine, yes, of course some random shit would be about to befall us. We’re not unreasonable people in the Sixers fandom at this point, we understand that any extended period of unchecked good vibes for this franchise is bound to be immediately rebalanced with some heinous nonsense to keep us all in our place. It’s been 13 years since Sam Hinkie was first hired, we know how the game works by now.

But we didn’t get that, at all. We got 6-6. We got two losses to the Donovan Mitchell Cavs in a row, at home. We got a chokejob against the Raptors when we were up two possessions with under 20 seconds to go. We got a blowout at the hands of the Hornets — the motherfucking Hornets — on Monday, as our distraction from a weekend of some of the worst news headlines imaginable. We got the indignity of riding a two-game winning streak, capped by a comeback from 10 down in the fourth quarter against the Kings, as now marking the peak of our pride before the fall. This was The Sixers, at full strength, at maximum normalcy, and it could not have been more mediocre. And even that was apparently way too good to last.

Who knows, maybe this is just what the Sixers need. Maybe this team has lived inside dysfunction for so long that time spent on the outside of that leaves our guys uncomfortable and frightened, craving the familiarity of chaos. Certainly some X factor has been missing from this season; nearly every player individually seems to be having a better year than expected, and it still adds up to the Sixers treading water, just trying to keep their heads above .500. Paul George had been playing well — though it’s hard to even remember what standards we’re supposed to be holding him to these days — but not so well that his loss will be untenable. Spending 25 games without him will certainly not be a death sentence for this team.

But it still feels cruel. It feels unnecessary. It feels like we’re being punished for something we didn’t even do, like we’re being given detention for thinking too hard about skipping school. And now that this piece has been pulled from the Sixers’ Jenga Tower of Normalcy, it would be zero percent surprising if the rest crumbled from here. And the tower wasn’t even that high. And building it wasn’t that fun. And it didn’t feel like anyone was playing by the rules. And maybe the whole game is stupid anyway.

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Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the ‘If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders’ section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.

We should’ve known when we saw the injury report. It was on January 7, when following weeks of being out of the lineup for a left adductor strain and a sprained LCL, respectively, Trendon Watford and Kelly Oubre Jr. were announced as officially available for the Philadelphia 76ers’ upcoming game against the Washington Wizards. That meant that when you looked up and down the Sixers’ lineup for the inevitable players sitting out with nagging, frustrating, often inexplicable injuries, for the first time all season (and seemingly for the first time ever), there were none. “No Sixers are unavailable for tonight’s game because of injury or personal reasons,” proclaimed an incredulous SixersAdam on Bluesky, as the bells of St. Mary’s rang loud and true across the Philadelphia countryside.

Uh-oh.

We thought we were ready for everything with this Sixers season. Ready for them to stink out loud again, ready for a decrepit Joel to play him himself into a trade demand — either his or ours — ready for VJ to clang his way through a growing-pains rookie season, ready for Tyrese to lose that loving feeling until “Mad Max” finally became an appropriate nickname for him, ready to spend all season playing with four starters and the chalk outline of where a power forward should be, ready to find a new litany of appropriately insulting “P” nouns for Paul George’s latest nickname, ready to call for heads to roll on the bench and in the front office like we’re ordering from an a la carte sushi menu. And most of all, we were ready for injuries — to spend the entire year playing with somewhere between 50-70% of our active roster actually active, getting one guy back only to lose two more, thinking to ourselves “well OK but if....” knowing full well that if would never come.

But if HAS come. Expectations are here. And we’re gonna find out if we’re actually ready for the Sixers to once again be the Sixers.

As you may have heard, the Sixers just dropped two straight home games to the Cleveland Cavaliers. They were two bad losses, and wildly different types thereof: In the first they were outscored by 15 in the first quarter and never got close again, with Jared McCain and Justin Edwards mopping up the final minutes, while in the second they were up seven with three minutes to go, until seemingly all of their good players took turns coming up short and the Cavs seized the game in the closing seconds. The losses dropped us to 22-18, seventh in the East standings, officially back in the play-in part of the playoff bracket. On the Ricky the next morning, Spike and Mike concluded that the Sixers were “ultimately just like... a pretty good team. “

They’re probably right about that. But I don’t think any of us were ready for the Sixers to be this kind of pretty good team. We ready for “pretty good” to be the compromise between what they in theory could be if everything went right and the brutal reality of what would likely happen when everything went wrong. We definitely were not ready for them to potentially max out at pretty good — not with Joel largely playing like Joel, with Tyrese a potential All-Star starter, with PG doing the two-way veteran stability thing we always wanted from him, with VJ a true rookie of the year candidate and even with Dominick Barlow and Jabari Walker both feeling like diamond rings in our boxes of Cracker Jack. And certainly, we weren’t ready for the team to ever be totally healthy, and still have moments where we still feel like a couple guys short.

As annoying as it is to root for an injury-laden team, it does come with the blessing of always having a built-in excuse for any less-than-desirable results. You can tell yourself the team you’re watching isn’t really the team, that the players on the court can’t be held responsible for their underperformance any more than the dudes who should be there but aren’t. But when the team is totally healthy and they still just aren’t quite good enough, all you’re left with is yourself, and the nagging suspicion that this actually is and always has been just a big waste of time. If that sounds dramatic, it is. Welcome back to Sixers fandom.

And the reason it hurts is the same reason it’s basically always hurt with the Embiid-era Sixers: Because it still feels like we’re just so close. The Sixers are 6-4 in their last 10 games; three of those four losses came by a combined four points. They lost by one point to the Nuggets in overtime against an impossibly short-handed team that nevertheless seemed to have gravity on its side, they lost by one point to the Raptors in overtime in a game where they led by four in regulation with under 20 seconds to go, and they lost by two on Friday in the second Cavs game when it felt like one more good play at any point on other side of the ball in the fourth quarter would’ve sealed the W. And outside of the first one, an overtime squeaker in Memphis, the six wins were all easy, all decisive and double-digit. Win one of those three games we shouldn’t have lost and we’re still probably feeling pretty OK. Win two of ‘em. and we’re starting to end every sentence with “The Year.” Win all three and we’re already scoping out parking options near Broad Street for the parade.

Instead, we’re forced to try to talk ourselves back down to No Expectations, to go, “OK, well that’s fine, this was never really supposed to be a contending season in the first place,” to revert to our preseason hopes of simply being in the mix and feeling like that in itself would be good enough. But it might be too late. We’ve gotten a taste of what this team could look like as originally envisioned, and it’s pretty serious. It’s hard to argue that at full strength, this team isn’t the strongest lineup the Sixers have put out in this era — maybe even in this century. A week or two ago I was starting to put together my trade deadline wishlist — for a version of the Sixers whose primary priority wasn’t simply ducking the luxury tax, anyway — and as I scanned the current lineup, I was shocked how few obvious holes there were to be plugged. I guess in a perfect world we’d have a version of Dominick Barlow who was also a threat from deep to play next to Joel, but that felt more like a luxury good than a basic necessity. The Sixers basically have all the dudes they truly need. It’s a real team, Jack.

So if they’re still just not good enough, what does that mean? Nothing good, certainly. It means that there is something intrinsically lacking in the team’s makeup, in their very core. It means that they could have all the supporting talent and youth and athleticism and shooting around their main guys that you could possibly ask for, and the main guys still wouldn’t be able to get the job done. It means that maybe Spike’s Trade Embiid column wasn’t premature, that it’s time to move on from him because winning at the highest levels with him is just never gonna be an option. It means that... well, you can judge for yourself if it means that it really has all been a waste of time, but it’s certainly a discussion.

Way too early to be talking about any of this after just a few bum losses with half the regular season to go, you say? Fucking right it is. It’s way too early to be thinking this conclusively about anything. The real version of this team just showed up for the first time a couple weeks ago, we still don’t know hardly anything about who they actually are or what they actually can be. But they’re here now, in full, which means so are we. We don’t get to play cute with this team anymore. We don’t get to say it’s all gravy now, that we’re fine with 43 wins and just getting out of the play-in or whatever other bullshit we were hawking early in the season. As long as the Sixers are this mostly-if-not-entirely healthy version of the Sixers, it’s back to Eastern Conference Finals or bust, back to all the petty small-time worries and cowering big-picture anxieties, back to going to sleep with a hole in your stomach and waking up with it still there, back to all potatoes, no gravy. That’s just the way it is. Sorry y’all.

The good news, question mark, is that it likely won’t last too long anyway. I half-expect my tweet sharing this article to get buried under seven different Sixers reporters I follow telling me who’s OUT for Monday’s game against Indiana. Betting on the Sixers to stay healthy is like betting on Oasis to continue getting along; sure the recent indicators may be encouraging, but at a certain point the history is the history. When Dominick Barlow went down against the Cavs in the first of the two games I fully expected the injury to be season-ending, it being just a back contusion and him being back the next game felt like the fates letting us off with a warning. Maybe in a week we’ll be back to watching a skeleton crew representing the on-court Sixers, and we’ll all get back to talking “If...” Maybe in a lot of ways we’ll be happier like that.

Until then, though, the Sixers season is officially back on, and all corresponding hopes, dreads and expectations with it. Get ready, ‘coz here they come.

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Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the ‘If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders’ section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.

On Sunday’s Ricky, Spike and Mike summarized a discussion they’d had the prior pod about the morality of reclining your seat while on public transportation when there’s a person directly in back of you, based on a listener email about being in such a situation with another stealth Ricky listener.

“You think in all scenarios, that plane, train, whatever, that the person in front of you should never recline their seat,” Spike recalled as Mike’s take.

“I do think that,” Mike confirmed. “And I know that that’s...”

“It’s controversial,” Spike finished the thought.

And with that, we already have our frontrunner for 2026’s understatement of the year. It shouldn’t be that: If anything, discourse around something as relatively minor as transit etiquette should be uncommon enough that no takes could potentially register as commonly contentious. But ask any group of 10 people in a room for their thoughts on this subject, four will be violently pro, four will be offensively anti, and two will be so shocked and weirded out by the aggressive tenor of the debate that they’ll exchange nervous glances and silently plan their mutual exit strategy. Even in such naturally divisive times, the topic of reclining on planes and trains still has the power to split up parties on hard and intractable lines like no other subject I’ve ever encountered in casual conversation.

What’s more, unlike most matters of philosophical debate, it’s almost impossible to predict who in your life will end up on what side. I know plenty of people with whom I share 95% ideological overlap, but find myself so far apart from on this issue that it may as well represent the entirety of the remaining five percent. And the disagreement is never friendly: One friend of mine is among the sweetest, kindest, most open-hearted people I know, but suggest the possibility of taking away her right to recline with impunity and she reacts like a 65-year-old North Carolina senator presented a bill banning the sale or use of tobacco.

My stance on the matter is one of truly radical compromise: I say if you want to recline, just fucking ask the person in back of you first if it’s cool with them.

By nature, I am anti-reclining on trains and planes. I don’t do it and I generally resent people who do, particularly if they’re sitting in front of me, of course. The guy who called in to follow up on this on the last Ricky episode suggested that his research concluded that reclining on planes and trains doesn’t really affect the person behind you; if that is the common experience, it certainly ain’t mine. As a wide 6’3” man with big feet, mass transit is all but guaranteed to be somewhat uncomfortable for me, but it gets worse by multiple magnitudes the more someone chooses to recline on me. (And it is on me, directly and unignorably.)

All that said, however, I do understand that there’s people out there smaller than me who are less affected by being reclined on. There are also probably people who are better than me at sleeping comfortably on trains or planes — something I am largely incapable of doing, regardless of how my body is angled — and get more out of the practice of reclining themselves than I do. I get that. Unlike the pro-reclining people I’ve talked to — most of whom are offended by the mere notion that anyone could have say in whether or not they recline other than they themselves — I am willing to allow there is nuance and larger context to be had in this debate. I’m firmly anti-reclining, but not so firm that I consider it an inflexible, universal stance. There’s potential for compromise. There’s room for dialogue.

But I can already hear the cries of outrage from the pro-reclining people as I type this. “We shouldn’t have to ask!” they wail, before echoing their most commonly cited line of defense: “If we aren’t supposed to recline then they wouldn’t have put the button there!” OK, so the presence of a button in a passenger seat means it’s automatically your prerogative to press it with absolute immunity from having to address any of the consequences of how pressing it affects the people around you? There’s usually a flight attendant call button on planes too, does that mean you should be able to push that as often as you want without regard for how much it’s probably annoying the attendant who has to keep responding to it? Do you also think it’s fine to open your backseat car window when it’s 30 degrees outside, despite how the cold will undoubtedly bother the other folks in the car, simply because there are power buttons by your arm rest? Why does the presence of one button suddenly turn half of all travelers into George Mallory?

Again, I don’t suggest that this means you should never be able to press said button. Certainly, if no one’s in back of you — an admittedly rare situation in modern air or rail travel, but not an altogether extinct one — go nuts. And if someone is in back of you, I think you can still use it, as long as you do them the simplest courtesy of checking in with them before doing so. “Hey, cool with you if I recline a little bit?” That’s it. Doesn’t need to be a big thing. Just 10 words to show the person behind you that you recognize that they are indeed a person, with feelings and dignity and knees, and that you are at least the slightest bit concerned with how your actions might affect them.

Submit this to pro-reclining people, and they’ll probably respond like you suggested they should have to ask for permission before registering to vote. “What if they say no?” they’ll shriek in horror. “I should be allowed to recline if I want to recline! There’s no rules against it!”

Well, if you ask like I’m suggesting, very few people are ever actually gonna say no. People generally abhor conflict, particularly in already socially uncomfortable situations like mass transit; chances are they’ll just grumble that it’s fine and immediately return to staring at the TV or computer screen of the person across the aisle one row up. I hate being reclined on, but do I hate it enough to make A Thing out of it? In the great majority of such situations, probably not — and anyway, I’d be so overwhelmed with gratitude at someone actually treating me with any degree of humanity before trying to plow their seat through my lower body that I’m sure I’d agree happily to whatever they asked of me. At the end of the day, it’s not even really the reclining that I hate so much as the idea that my thoughts on the matter aren’t worth a second’s consideration from the pro-recliners directly in front of me; show me a little compassion there and we’ll likely be fast friends even through my physical discomfort.

But fine. Let’s say the probably single-digit-percentage chance of someone causing a stink and outright declining your recline request is simply too much downside for you to even consider the possibility of granting them that power. I think even there, there’s room for compromise. I believe that if you were to say something like “I’m gonna recline a little bit, I hope that’s OK” to the person in back of you — not technically granting them any kind of implied veto power — that would still satisfy a certain baseline of civil decency. Or hell, even say, “I’m gonna recline for a little bit, sorry about that.” At the very least, you’d be acknowledging to this person that they are a participant in this situation, and expressing some degree of caring about their comfort or lack thereof. Not your top priority clearly, but it’s something.

Even that will be too much to ask of the majority of pro-recliners. They don’t just demand the ability to recline if and when they so desire, they reserve the right to do so completely on their own terms, without introducing a single other perspective into the situation. And this to me speaks primarily to two motivating factors:

1. They don’t want to have to speak to a stranger

2. They know deep down that they’re doing something a little bit rude and don’t want to have to verbally acknowledge it

As for No. 1 — fair play. Talking to strangers when you don’t absolutely have to is generally the worst, you’ll get no argument from me there. (Though I would argue that if the reclining outcome is really so important to you, approximately six seconds of Stranger Talk isn’t necessarily a super-unreasonable price of admission.)

No. 2 I’m less sympathetic towards. I think if you really believed that you were 100% justified in reclining on a person, you wouldn’t mind talking about it with them first so much. If you’ve got a window seat and you’re trying to go to the bathroom, would you just attempt to wordlessly get past the people next to you, or would you apologize for inconveniencing them while doing so, maybe ask them if it’s OK if you squeeze by them real quick? It’s almost certainly the latter, and that’s for two reasons, one of which is that ultimately, you know they don’t really have any right to deny you — you have a matter of biological urgency that clearly and easily outweighs their second or two of discomfort adjusting themselves to let you through. You can ask for permission because it’s the polite thing to do, and because you’re comfortable in the knowledge they don’t have a leg to stand on if they try to say no. Reclining is no such matter of biological urgency, it’s just a matter of prioritizing your own maximum comfort over that of the person sitting behind you. And deep down — not even deep down, shallow down really — you know it.

But the second reason also gets at the real reason the pro-recliners don’t want to have to ask for your permission, or acknowledge you at all in the reclining process: because they can recline without having to do any of that. If you’re trying to get past your seatmates and into the aisle, there’s no way to do that without coming into obvious contact with them, facing them directly, perhaps even making some kind of eye contact. But the insidious thing about train and plane reclining is that you can do it while pretending the person in back of you doesn’t even exist. You’re facing the other direction, and the seat itself acts as a natural barrier between you and them. You can basically do whatever you want to them and tell yourself that it’s of no real consequence, because you can’t see any direct evidence to the contrary. To have to speak to them would break that illusion. It would acknowledge that your actions impact those around you. Couldn’t risk that, certainly.

It probably sounds like I’m coming down pretty hard on the character of the pro-recliners at this point, so let me zoom out now to say to groups on both sides of the issue: This is what they want us to be doing. It was a pretty big lightbulb moment for me listening to the last pod, when Mike suggested that the true villains in this situation weren’t the anti-recliners or the precliners, but of course the airlines and passenger rails who’ve made such travel so automatically cramped in the first place, while making any alternative options prohibitively expensive. And rather than us all demanding better of them, the recline button gets us all turning on one another, gets us all scrapping for what little bits of comfort or autonomy still remain in such already dignity-stripped spaces. I’m annoyed with myself that in the hundreds of hours I’ve spent seething about this issue over the years, I never considered how we should all be fighting the real enemy, but better late than never I suppose.

So I’m willing to call it even from here with the pro-recliners. I’ve suffered in silence for nearly 40 years on this — well, not always in silence, but I’ve suffered, anyway — but I can let that go. Just meet us halfway on this. Make it a conversation. Let us have input in the situation, however perfunctory and ultimately meaningless. Us anti-recliners won’t be dicks about it, or at least we’ll try not to be. There are too many situations in this world already where we’re solely concerned with our rights to do what we want for our own personal ease and comfort without regard for how it affects those around us. Let’s not give the powers that be the satisfaction of us seething at each other when we should be reserving our hate for them, for making us fight over such meager margins. Let’s figure out a way to be human in this thing together. And let’s save our most virulent takes for controversies slightly more deserving of such passion.

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Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the ‘If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders’ section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.

I was in on VJ Edgecombe as the Sixers’ pick basically from the beginning. I mean, the fuck do I know about prospects — YouTube scouting is a young man’s game, and the number of men’s college games I watched in 2025 was probably lower than the number of times I watched Heat on cable — but I liked what I heard about him, he seemed like an obvious fit, The Danny was basically in, the idea of having All The Guards seemed fun, all good enough for me. I couldn’t say I was exactly excited about him, though — particularly not for him as a rookie. Even through Summer League and preseason, as everyone was working themselves into a lather over his impressive stat lines and explosive dunks, I was still pretty tepid on the Edgecombe experience. I believed in him long-term, but short-term I thought he might be a bit of a frustrating watch.

And that was for one forgivable but undeniable and unavoidable reason: He couldn’t shoot.

I loved the athleticism, the motor, the toughness, the fact that he kinda looked like Jimmy Butler on the court. But he couldn’t shoot, and I couldn’t act like that didn’t bother me. You may recall the Sixers have had something of a spotty history when it comes to non-shooting guards, and I didn’t relish the opportunity to jump head first into another long and frustrating relationship with another one of those dudes. Which isn’t to say I assumed Edgecombe would definitely be that way forever, but in his first season, it seemed a guarantee. Rookie guards who struggle with their jumper in college don’t immediately become knockdown shooters just because we want them to, and what I saw from his preseason just reinforced that while he wasn’t totally inept as a shooter, he had a ways to go to be any kind of consistent threat. History said that however long it’d take him to get there, it’d certainly take longer than his rookie year.

But history was wrong. I was wrong. We’re not even halfway into his rookie year and I already feel unnervingly confident in saying: VJ Edgecombe can shoot. And it’s changed everything about who I think he can be and what I think he can do for this team.

The wild thing is: I was proven right about VJ before I was proven wrong. When he got off to that blazing shooting start to the year — 18-41 (44%) from deep in his first seven games — and everyone was already over the moon about him, I I was taking a deep breath and waiting for the regression to hit. And it did: Over his next seven games, he shot just 10-37 (27%) from distance, dropping his overall percentage to the mid-30s, and I took a long, obnoxious Told You So victory lap over it. But then the seven games after that, he heated up again, going 13-28 (46%) and unregressing the regression. He hasn’t had an extended cold streak since.

Which isn’t to say he’s suddenly 2006 Ray Allen. VJ’s currently hitting 37.4% of his threes on about six attempts a game; respectable numbers but hardly scorching, particularly by modern NBA standards. But he seems to have found a degree of consistency that’s pretty impressive for any rookie guard, let alone one coming in with shooting as his presumed swing skill. From Nov. 9 to Dec. 20, he hit at least one three in 15 straight games: That might not sound like a lot, but that’s actually the second-longest such streak for a rookie in Sixers history — only my beloved Landry Shamet boasts a longer one, hitting in 22 straight in late 2018 before being included in the still-unforgivable Tobias Harris trade. Tyrese Maxey, now one of the marquee bombers in the entire league, never had a streak longer than two in his first year.

That’s largely due to opportunity, of course: Where Maxey flitted in and out of the rotation as a rookie, Edgecombe was installed as the starting two-guard on opening night and hasn’t left the first five since. But it’s opportunity that Edgecombe is seizing, and regularly. Just as impressive as his number of makes this year from deep has been his number of takes — he attempted 13 triples in his debut, and has shot at least two in every game since. Where a lot of young Sixers guards — even ones whose stories don’t end tragically — lost confidence in their jumper at various points and spent stretches pump-faking at ghosts, VJ shoots when it’s time to shoot, and doesn’t seem to let the results of those shots make him more or less willing to do so.

And I gotta say: I don’t ever remember a Sixer shooting quite like VJ does. He’s got the smoothest, most relaxed looking catch-and-shoot motion I’ve seen on this team — to the point where I often worry it’s a little too relaxed, that he’s gonna ease his way into his shot getting swatted into the Schuylkill. But somehow, he always has just enough time to get it off, and get it off clean and unhurried. It’s almost like he does it through sheer force of will, that he shoots so confidently and sweatlessly that no one can possibly touch him.

It’s the same every single time, too. That’s why when it comes to games like Tuesday’s in Memphis, I’d already almost rather he be shooting the open catch-and-shoot potential game-winner than Tyrese, Joel or PG. Those three guys are all capable of clutch moments, but they also get tired, they get frustrated, they get pressured, they get in their heads a little, they get to the point where they can’t quite make their bodies do the things their brains are telling them to do. VJ is always just VJ, and he’ll shoot accordingly. Not to say that he’ll make it every time — before the Memphis game he was just 5 for his last 23 — but he’ll take it the same way, and there’s something extremely reassuring in that. And even if he’d missed it — he didn’t, by the way, he made it, Sixers won, losing streak over, fuck off Cedric Coward — you knew if he’d gotten the opportunity in double OT to take it again, he would, and there’d be a pretty good chance he’d hit it the next time.

Now, it’s hard to know where exactly to cap VJ Edgecombe’s potential in either the short or long term. His stats aren’t jump-off-the-page yet — I wonder if fans of other teams look at the numbers (16-5-4 on 42% shooting) and wonder what the fuck everyone’s getting so excited about this guy for — but he already seems to be pretty good at everything, and the fact that that now includes shooting means there’s practically no ceiling to how big we can dream with him. Could he really be Jimmy, or even Dwyane Wade, but with better range? Could he be that soon? It doesn’t seem impossible. The way we’re starting to talk and feel about Edgecombe reminds me of stuff you’d hear from San Antonio folks about Kawhi Leonard his rookie year, where they would call him the future of the franchise and I would look at his Basketball-Reference or catch a quarter or two of his on League Pass and go Really? Are we sure this guy’s definitely gonna be all that? But he was, and I think VJ will be too.

Maybe he won’t. Maybe he’s thriving in this more limited role, and in a different iteration of the Sixers when he’s asked to do more, he’ll get stretched a little beyond his means. Maybe there’s a rookie wall for him still to hit. Maybe he ends the season shooting 32% from deep after all. But from everything we’ve seen from him — the two Joel-less wins before Christmas, the huge fourth quarter and OT Tuesday in Memphis, now multiple game-winners on his resumé — and the fact that his shot looks real and comfortable and repeatable, the idea of a future where VJ and Tyrese are the co-pilots of the next true Sixers contender suddenly feels shockingly plausible. And if nothing else, I’m definitely excited for VJ now. I’m fucking jazzed, honestly.

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Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the ‘If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders’ section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.

Nearly two months into this Sixers season, there is a truly unexpected amount to be celebrated with this team. The discovery of Dominick Barlow and Jabari Walker as valuable finds on the two-way scrap heap. Paul George’s return to health and a relative degree of consistent two-way production. VJ Edgecombe’s emergence as a Rookie of the Year candidate and a likely future star alongside Tyrese Maxey in the backcourt. Tyrese’s own leap to superstar and franchise player status. Joel Embiid’s... well, he’s played 11 games already, which is something. The team is 15-11, somehow a five seed in the East, and just came off their best win of the season Friday night in New York. For a team that’s given us a lot to be miserable about the past couple years, it’d be surprisingly difficult to choose a thing to be happiest about this year.

Wait, no it wouldn’t. I mean all that stuff is great, sure, we love to see it etc. But the thing to be most thankful for as Sixers fans in these final days of 2025 is easily Andre Drummond jacking threes.

For as much as the NBA has evolved in recent decades, it remains a truism that there are only two basketball things that bring 100% pure joy to fans, teammates and the world entire: a little guy trying to dunk or a big guy trying to shoot. Even in the age of Mac McClung going back-to-back-to-back at All-Star Weekend or Karl Anthony-Towns and Nikola Jokic hitting over 100 threes a year at a 40% clip, there’s just something simple and uplifting about a professional basketball player attempting to do the last thing he should be on the court to do, about wading into those unchartered waters with an open heart and a clear conscience. Their coaches certainly don’t want it, their teammates think it’s hilarious, but they will not be dissuaded from realizing the entirety of their potential being on the basketball court. I think that’s beautiful, really.

Of course it usually goes poorly. With bigs shooting in particular — especially if it hasn’t been a major part of their game from the beginning — the results can be quite gnarly. As they have been for Andre Drummond throughout the course of his first 13 years in the NBA, where he was a resounding 18-140 (13%) for his entire career before this year, never making more than five in a season and only once hitting even 30% of his attempts (a scorching 2-6 for Detroit in 2015-16). In that viral video that I think Mike even mentioned on the Ricky recently, featuring historically bad three-point shooters who just keep getting worse as the video goes on, Drum isn’t exactly the final boss, but he certainly comes more than halfway in — following such luminaries from deep as DeAndre Jordan, Ben Wallace, and yes, even Ben Simmons. Three-point shooting has not been a thing in Andre Drummond’s career to this point.

But I think we could tell pretty early on this season was gonna be different. Basketball Andre started dipping in his toes into that water last year, going 3-20 from deep — more attempts than he’d launched in his prior four seasons combined — but always with that slightest hesitation, like he was worried he was going to have to fight off one of the assistant coaches rushing the court to try to tackle him first. But this preseason, he really started to put those fuckers up without flinching: six attempts in 47 minutes across four games, with three of them actually going in. It seemed like enough of a paradigm shift for Drum that when I set over-unders for Mike and Spike in this year’s preseason predictions podcast, I set Drummond’s three-pointer total for the season at a seemingly robust 13.5, which Spike and especially Mike both scoffed at being so high. (Spike denies this, but there was unmistakable SCOFFING, I tell you.)

Well turns out said scoffing was justified, but for the opposite reason as they expected: 26 games into the season and Drummond has already sailed past that over-under. With his 3-4 shooting night from deep against the Knicks on Friday— again, needs to be mentioned that Drummond failed to hit three triples for an entire SEASON until his seventh year in his league — Drummond is now 14 of 34 for the year from beyond, not only officially hitting his over but also nearly tripling his previous career high (five makes for two consecutive years in 2018-19 and 2019-20). Most incredibly, with his 41.2% mark from deep, he is the team leader among regulars in three-point percentage; only Eric Gordon, with his 5-8 line in 57 total minutes, is higher.

And it’s been wonderful every single time. Honestly I’m grateful enough just for Drummond attempts; I never dreamed I’d get to see this many makes from him as well. And he celebrates each one of them exactly how you’d want him to — with some exaggerated SEE TOLD YOU I COULD gesture to the crowd and/or LET ME HEAR IT Y’ALL call to the bench, who of course is always more than happy to indulge him. And novelty aside, it’s actually been a real weapon for the team: They might not have even been able to pull off that 116-107 win in New York last night if not for his three big triples, which mathematically ended up being the literal difference in the game. During a year when What’s Going on With Joel’s Shooting — just 12-53 so far, a paltry 23% — has become one of the larger lingering questions, the answer might actually be simple: Drummond took it.

Can it last? Probably not, but who fucking cares? If Kyle Schwarber decided he was secretly a speedster and swiped 15 bags in 20 attempts for the month of May, would we be having serious conversations about moving him to the leadoff spot or would we be too busy dying laughing? OK bad example maybe since Schwarb’s already hitting leadoff — baseball is weird about this shit now, what are you gonna do. But point is, when Andre Drummond hits 14 of his first 34 threes for the season, you don’t ask how it happened, and you certainly don’t wonder if it can continue. You just say thank you. Thank you, Andre, for this holiday gift of pure joy and magic while everything else is so fraught with expectation and consequence. Thank you for somehow beating the Knicks. Thank you for being you, to the fullest extent.

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Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the ‘If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders’ section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.

We remember the days of Masked Joel, right? They first started when a stray Markelle Fultz shoulder in 2018 led to the first of many injury-plagued postseason runs for Embiid, necessitating him to wear a Marvel-esque protective mask that he absolutely fucking hated, throwing it to the floor on multiple mid-game occasions during the Sixers’ first-round series against the Miami Heat. (Justise Winslow stepped on it once.) Then in 2022, the Stranger-fied Joel returned when Pascal Siakam semi-literally elbowed his lights out at the end of the Sixers’ first-round victory over the Toronto Raptors, and the mask made a comeback appearance for his round-two rejoining of the lineup, once again against the Heat. “The Phantom of the Process,” he jokingly captioned a photo of his half-covered visage, something I’m pretty sure we’d already been calling him since the first time around.

At that point, the “Phantom” thing was mostly just a joke about him looking like a villain who could have theoretically been dwelling below the Wells Fargo Center floorboards, plotting his revenge against many of those who resided above. Now, it’s actually a pretty decent descriptor of the specter-like role he’s playing in the Sixers’ overall narrative this season, and about how confusing his continued semi-presence feels to this team’s larger timeline, and to us at home trying to figure out how we feel about any of this.

Joel Embiid, by all accounts, is currently an active player on the Philadelphia 76ers. He’s at the games. We’ve seen him play. He often even looks like Joel Embiid while doing so. But a lot of the time, it feels like if you were to reach out and try to touch him, your hand would pass right through him. He’s Joel Embiid, but not, like, fully. You know abstractly that he’s still on the team, but sometimes you have to remind yourself that he’s a guy who could actually take the court for them from night to night. Like Alanis Morissette, he’s there but he’s really gone.

Or maybe he’s not? It’s exceptionally difficult to say anything definitive about Joel Embiid these days. You think he’s ready to remind the league he’s still an elite player and then he gets clearly lapped by Tyrese Maxey in the team’s hierarchy. You think he’s turning the corner on the court and then knee soreness keeps him day-to-day for several weeks. You think he’s ready to come back and then he’s downgraded from questionable to doubtful on the injury report. You think he’s out for the foreseeable future and then he’s upgraded from doubtful to probable. You think he’s officially now a shell of his former self and then he scores 39 points in 32 minutes to win a game the Sixers kinda sorta really needed to win. You think it’s time to move on from the Joel Embiid experience altogether and then... well, then it’s tough to know what to think.

Spike seems to know what to think — or at least, he did a couple days ago. He’s come to terms with the Joel Embiid era being in its final days, to pre-mourning the Big Man’s inevitable parting with the Sixers, and to do so knowing that it will come unpleasantly and without a title (or anything near it) and sooner rather than later. He’s accepted that Tyrese Maxey’s leap this season has changed the team’s timeline and made him the unquestioned priority, and that Joel’s continued unsure presence on the court and in the locker room — and more importantly, his continued very sure presence on the ledger — will make it too difficult for the team to maximize Maxey’s imminent NBA prime. He’s not doing this to be doomery or reactionary or particularly hot-takey, he’s doing it because he loves and has loved Joel for a long time but can no longer deny the facts: that the chances of Joel leading this team on any kind of meaningful playoff run from this point on have dwindled from less-than-likely to longshot to essentially disregardable. He’s doing it so he can be ready for when the time comes. Because it is coming.

Unless it isn’t? As I told Spike a couple days ago, my head was willing to accept that what he was saying about Joel was almost certainly true, but my heart hadn’t quite gotten there yet. And even my head was starting to have its doubts: Since returning from his latest injury, Joel had been shooting like Samuel Dalembert, but I thought that his atrocious scoring stats were obscuring what was, at least in the Golden State and LA games, actually some pretty strong two-way play. He was generally in the right spots doing the right things on offense and had picked up his defense considerably from early in the season. He finished that Lakers game +11, and it felt that way to me watching it — that even with his 4-21 shooting he was still contributing more positively than negatively to the game. Survivors of the 2019 postseason may recall that that used to be Joel’s whole thing.

And then, Friday night against Indiana. where the rest of his box score numbers caught up to his plus/minus. 39 points on 12-23 shooting — and between his six missed threes and five missed free throws, that point total felt like it could’ve easily been in the 45-50 range. He was awesome on defense, he made big plays throughout, he helped the team separate at the end, and on the first Maxey-less night of the Sixers’ season, he proved that he could still win them ballgames basically on his own. (Easier to do against a 6-19 team, of course, but there’s no such thing as an unloseable game on the calendar for this Sixers season — and can you imagine how demoralizing it would’ve been if Indy had won?)

So does one game, one turn-back-the-clock performance, really change anything about the Sixers’ long-term outlook? Of course not. Except also possibly? It’s a lot easier to talk about the team moving on from Joel Embiid when he’s out of sight, out of mind. It’s not difficult to imagine a future without him when he’s not a majorly consequential part of the present; even when he’s playing but shooting so poorly or running out of gas so quickly, letting cold logic overrule emotion is still pretty doable. But when he’s out there, doing Joel shit, with the potential promise of even more Joel shit to come? How can you look at that guy and say “we will do whatever it takes to get rid of you”? How can you see him dominate a game on both ends and think that that’s less valuable than preserving team vibes? How can you possibly watch Joel Embiid play basketball and see him as more problem than solution?

Because in all likelihood, he still is. We re-learned this the hard way once already this season, when Joel played his best ball of the season to down the Toronto Raptors in early November, and it certainly looked like after an up-and-down start to the year, he was rounding back into full form, and the Sixers as a team along with him. And then the next day his knee hurt and he didn’t take the court again until after Thanksgiving. I’m not saying that’ll happen again before Sunday’s game in Atlanta; he said after the Indiana game that he felt great and hopefully he still does today. But it might. And if not before the next game, then maybe before the game after that. Or after that. Every game on the schedule is a potential trapdoor for Joel Embiid, a potential back-to-zero reset. And the more wear he puts on his body, the higher the chances get that the next game is the one. We can never feel safe, and neither can Joel.

And that’s the thing that should really keep us from ever getting too far ahead of ourselves with Jo. When I watch him endure tough shooting nights, I still reflexively think to myself, “He just needs to find his rhythm again with those shots.” Nick Nurse basically said the same to SixersAdam the other day, that Joel’s form and decision-making are sound, he just needs the reps to get back in form. But what both NN and I are ignoring there is that Joel will be perpetually in search of that rhythm for the rest of this season, and most likely the rest of his career. Rhythm demands consistency, and whether it’s through minutes restrictions, weird scheduling, DNPs or his own perpetually ailing body, consistency will be the absolute hardest thing for Joel to come by this season. Even in a best-case scenario, he’ll never totally round back into form. It’s always going to be a question of percentages with Joel. And the rest of the team, Tyrese in particular, will never know going into any particular game what that percent is going to be, except on the nights when it’s zero. How do you build around a player like that? How do you ask the rest of your team to accomodate you building around a player like that?

Because he’s Joel fucking Embiid, that’s how. Because he’s your franchise, and has been since you drafted him 12 summers ago. Because he won an MVP and finished twice in the voting two years before that and was on his way to winning a second before Shit Happened — and all of that was in the past five years. Because he lived and died for this and gave his body and his heart and his name on the dotted line to this team and to this city, and never gave us real cause to think he ever intended on doing any differently. Because on a given night, he can still look like one of the 10 best players in the world. Because on a given night, he can still actually be one of the 10 best players in the world. Because he’s the reason for all this shit, the reason I’m writing this article right now and the reason you’re reading it. Because of Sam Hinkie. Because of Arthur. Because of Arthur Jr. Because he’s Joel fucking Embiid.

Is he, though, still? Is he really? Is that actually him out there? Is that Joel Embiid, and not a limping manifestation of 35% of the salary cap? Is that Joel Embiid, and not the guy who’s making Tyrese Maxey throw his hands up in frustration because he just doesn’t know anymore, guys. Is that Joel Embiid, and not the player who Nick Nurse and Daryl Morey are looking at and constantly thinking to themselves this is the dude who’s going to get me fired? Is that Joel Embiid, and not the one thing standing in the way of all of us having a whale of a time watching this young, fun Sixers team scrap their way to a better-than-expected season of low-stakes, high-ceiling, future-forward basketball? Is that Joel Embiid, or is it just a memory of a player who’s already long gone? Is that Joel Embiid, or do we just wish it still was?

I dunno, y’all. I dunno about any of this. I don’t know what to do with Joel, or if there’s anything to do with Joel. I don’t know if I can commit to feeling the same way for more than a game at a time, or even for that long. I don’t know about this season at all. All I know is that The Phantom of the Process is there, inside my mind.

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Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the ‘If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders’ section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.

One of the true cruelties of this Sixers season is that we finally have close to the perfect team around Joel Embiid, only to not really have Joel anymore. Obviously Tyrese Maxey has grown into the perfect co-star, and when he’s been around, Paul George has been a fairly ideal two-way third banana (as has Kelly Oubre, Jr. for that matter). There’s plenty of secondary ball-handling and shooting with Quentin Grimes and an increasingly healthy Jared McCain, and between Adem Bona, Andre Drummond and Jabari Walker, we have the most intriguing and versatile rotation of backup bigs to offer behind Embiid that we’ve ever had. Put 2022 Joel on this team and I dunno if we’re really making the Thunder sweat, but I’ll certainly take my chances against the fucking Pistons or Raptors or whoever else in the East is supposedly actually good this year.

And I haven’t even mentioned the guy who I’ve fallen for hardest this season: Our new two-way frontcourt dynamo Dominick Barlow, who’s opening up all sorts of shit for this team I barely thought possible.

I don’t remember the Sixers — or many other teams — ever having a player quite like Barlow before. On paper there should be a dozen dudes like him available on the league’s scrap heap at any point in time: long, athletic, but kinda positionless and rawer than Fergie’s “Glamorous” drive-thru. But though the profile is eminently recognizable with Dominick, the specifics are really pretty far from what I expected.

First off, there’s long and then there’s lengthy. Barlow is only 6’9, but with a 7’3” wingspan and Inspector Gadget springs; when he’s patrolling the paint he basically looks like Victor Wembanyama to me. Part of it is undoubtedly the comparison to watching Joel these past couple years, where he seems like he’s wearing the Face/Off prison boots whenever he tries to jump or make quick movements around the basket. But when Barlow is our last line of defense at the hoop, I’m absolutely terrified on the other team’s behalf. He’s only averaging about a block a game, but I still trust him a little more as a rim-protector than the much swattier Bona; like prime Jo, the shots that Barlow alters or dissuades in the first place are probably close to incalculable.

And the positionlessness part seems to mostly be a good thing for him, especially in a universe where Joel still routinely exists. He’s not the kind of player I’d ever have envisioned as a starting four for this team — for so long in This Modern NBA, a four was supposed to basically just be a three who you can pretend is kinda big and tall if you squint a certain way; the priorities were shooting and spacing, especially around a centrifugal force like Prime Embiid. That’s obviously not Barlow, but in an NBA increasingly friendly to two-big lineups, he’s still kind of an ideal frontcourt partner for Joel. He’s fast enough to get around the court in a blink, and he’s long and hoppy enough to offer last-minute relief at the rim on a moment’s notice. He’s quick to loose balls and rebounds, and he just gets in the way a lot when the other team is trying to do stuff.

Basically, he can do all the things that Joel can’t really anymore. Jo is still a deterrent of some sort at the rim, and if he has time to establish position and react to plays as they develop rather than having to play catchup, he can still provide fairly stout defense. But when things go awry and he’s gotta think and move on his feet — with second-jump rebounding, running out to suddenly open shooters or last-second shot-erasing — he’s pretty goddamn compromised. And at that point, it’s great to have Barlow and his young bones ready to bound around and plug all the leaks as they start springing up. In the few minutes they’ve played together this season, he’s basically been Joel’s intern, doing all the annoying, tedious junior-position stuff that Jo probably feels he should have long graduated from having to do. It’s been nice to see him get that kind of relief for the first time.

Offense, obviously, is more of the struggle area for Barlow as a fit. If you want to see him as a stretch four, you have to do whatever the opposite of squinting is — he’s had some OK games as a shooter, but he’s 5-19 from three for the season, and all five makes have felt like tiny miracles; when he shoots, you can feel him loading and calibrating like a kicker in Madden. The lineups he’s played in alongside Adem Bona in particular have often felt like playing 3-on-5; our guards are skilled and versatile to make up for a lot in the half-court, but playing at a two-man deficit is gonna strangle any offense eventually.

That said, there is something to be said for a guy on offense who’s cool just kinda staying out of the way. One of the first things I noticed and really liked about Barlow was that he was OK playing absolutely zero role in the half-court offense. He doesn’t need touches or shots, and he is more than chill to just stand in the corner providing some semblance of a three-point threat, then zoom in for an offensive rebound or a loose ball or to set a late pick to spring Tyrese Maxey or Quentin Grimes for a shot-clock-beating look if needed. He’s like P.J. Tucker if P.J. Tucker actually did stuff ever.

And in truth... Barlow’s really not quite as raw as he seems like he should be. There have been possessions, more in recent games, where everything breaks down and the ball swings to him, and he’s gotta make something out of nothing with a last-second post-up. And when he’s been called on to do so, the results have been... fine? He’s a pretty good driver, he’s got some OK moves, and he’s even got a little touch. Compare him to Drummond, who 14 years in will just try a pump-fake or spin or two and then kinda toss the ball in the rim’s general direction, and he already seems way more developed. He’ll probably never be a focus of the offense, but he’s found his way to double-digit scoring in each of the Sixers’ last four games, which is really quite impressive for a half-court janitor.

Is he the permanent solution at the four for the Sixers? I dunno just yet, but he’s definitely my favorite of our options so far, and he’s just the guy I’ve been the most overjoyed with on the team in general. I can’t imagine how we got him bargain-bin shopping like this; don’t other teams generally like dudes with 7’3” wingspans and some semblance of real skills? Dunno, but he’s ours now, and I have to imagine he will be for a pretty long time. Credit to Daryl Morey; when you’re spending over $100 mil annually on two guys, you better be able to find some real advantages on the margins, and that’s exactly what he did with Dominick. Now if those $100 mil worth of guys could ever find their way to the lineup on a semi-regular basis, we might actually have something with this team.

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Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the ‘If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders’ section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.

Even through most of the third quarter on Tuesday night, I still thought the Sixers had a chance to come back. After a cold shooting start, the Paolo Banchero-less Orlando Magic had gotten scorching from the field, on their way to a 51-point second quarter and a 26-point lead over the Sixers that seemed wildly unsustainable to me. The Sixers (and their opponents) had run hot and cold throughout games all year, and things had a tendency to even out by the end. And “unsustainable” was right — the Sixers were never able to keep it that close again, as the Magic rocked them for another 35 in the third. When Tristan da Silva and Franz Wagner hit back-to-back threes to push the 33-point lead to 39, I officially gave up hope for any even-Stevening in the fourth.

After a feel-good 4-0 kickoff to the season, the Sixers have started to lose a bunch — not like a lot, not like last year (yet), but enough to be conspicuous — but they hadn’t really lost like this. The losses had been close, explicable. They’d come shorthanded, on the wrong end of a back-to-back, against good teams, surging teams. Which isn’t to say the Magic are bad at 11-8, but they’re certainly not run-you-off-the-floor-and-into-the-Schuylkill good, especially not without their best player, and especially-especially with another starter getting ejected in the second for tough-guying Andre Drummond. And yes, the Sixers were also shorthanded on Tuesday — and increasingly so — but that was feeling less like a temporary excuse and more like the not-so-new normal.

For the first time this year, the Sixers let go of the rope. And the way things are going, it might be pretty far from the last time.

To this point, the Sixers’ injury situation has been rough but also roughly tenable. Guys had been sidelined, but guys had been matriculating back at the same time, and we’d had enough of a healthy core of playable guys around our in-and-outers that it always felt like we were putting a real, competitive team on the court regardless. But that core has been shrinking, first with the left knee LCL sprain to Kelly Oubre Jr. — somehow the model of two-way professionalism and consistency through the season’s first 12 games — and now with whatever’s going on with V.J. Edgecombe’s calf tightness, which the team has now kept him out of two games for as a “precautionary” measure.

Now, Tyrese Maxey is showing up a lot of nights to find out a lot of people who initially answered “yes” on the Facebook invite have downgraded to a “maybe” or “no.” For Tuesday’s game, Joel Embiid had ramped up from Out to Probable to Questionable but still ultimately ended up back at Out, where he was joined by Paul George, who’d made it all the way to “Probable” before feeling that dreaded soreness in his ankles. Things went from bad to cartoonish in the second quarter when Trendon Watford, one of the team’s precious few non-Embiid frontcourt players who Maxey has developed any real on-court chemistry with, collapsed mid-drive with a non-contact injury (later revealed to be a left adductor strain) and immediately headed right to the locker room. Tyrese probably spent a good few seconds wondering if anyone would notice if he just left to join Trendon there.

I keep referring to Tyrese because he’s been the one thing holding this entire operation together, the reason why the number on the left in our win-loss record is still (very slightly) higher than the one on the right. He’s been a quintessential good soldier, dragging the team over the finish line — and sometimes right up to the finish line before the team just gets too heavy and he collapses — but always carrying that weight, boy. But Tuesday was the first time it felt like he maybe just let go. The shot wasn’t falling, he stopped getting calls, he had a bad turnover to end the second and it felt like he sorta stopped attacking in the third. If there was a game to give your back and shoulders a break, it was definitely this one, but doing so can be habit-forming, even for a player and a human being as solid as Tyrese Maxey. It certainly was last season.

At the risk of sounding like I’m talking through a Bane gas mask, it feels like we’re getting to a point of wondering what will break first, Tyrese’s spirit or his body. The latter certainly seems a strong contender, as his league-high minutes load (even in last night’s laugher, he logged 32, which at least dropped him under a 40 average for the season) and similarly weighty offensive responsibility level looks to be taking its toll. Against Miami, he played through a shoulder sprain, against Orlando, there was definitely some leg-favoring going on in the third. It’s understandable, and Tyrese himself isn’t making excuses, but keep adding straws at this rate and that camel’s back is gonna break.

And if Tyese goes down — for any amount of time, really — the entire season is sure to follow. It’s becoming abundantly clear that help is not really on the way with this team, or of it is, it’s perpetually both on the way in and on the way out. We’ll see Paul and Joel when and for as long as we see them, but they’re special guest stars at this point, not regular cast. Edgecombe and Quentin Grimes are supporting characters. Jared McCain looks on his way to at least providing Tyrese some credible in-episode relief, but he’s still very far from being a replacement lead. It’s Tyrese smiling that big smile for the camera, or it’s back to the 2024-25 season again.

It might be back there soon anyway. The Sixers’ tightrope act had still kept them comfortably above .500 for the season to this point, but now they’re just one game over, at 9-8— and fair or not, it feels like once their heads slip underwater, they’re not coming back up for air again. Suddenly, this upcoming three-game stretch against the Nets, the Hawks who just lost to the Wizards, and then the Wizards themselves, feels extremely crucial for the Sixers to get some breathing room, before a much-harder three-game run against the Warriors, Bucks and Lakers threatens to leave them submerged. Can we get some lineup relief, however temporary? Can Daryl make an emergency move? Do Coach Lowry’s legs still work? Whatever the answer is, we better figure it out by Thanksgiving. Ropes are scratchy and uncomfortable, and letting go is easy and freeing.

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Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the ‘If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders’ section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.

It’s been an unbelievable start to the year for Tyrese Maxey. He’s averaging over 30 points and nearly eight assists a game with his typically low turnover rate, he’s getting to the line more than he ever has, he’s defending and leading and smiling and everything you’d want from him. For as many positive mini-stories as there have been with this better-than-expected start to the Sixers season, reason No. 1 that the team currently has a winning record is Tyrese, and there’s a pretty big drop to No. 2. He’s been The Guy, and there ain’t many in the league you’d rather have in that spot.

But his production is slowing. It’s not really his fault: He’s got so much on his shoulders right now that it’d almost be impossible for it not to weigh him down a little. Friday night, he did his absolute damnedest — ah, darnedest, sorry Momma Maxey — to drag the shorthanded Sixers over the finish line against the Pistons, but they hit a couple threes too many that we failed to answer with haywire half-court possessions. It was the first time this season that Tyrese finished a game with as many shot attempts as points (31), and also the first with as many turnovers as assists (3). On one critical fourth-quarter transition possession when V.J. Edgecombe and Quentin Grimes both ran to the same corner — leading to Grimes dribbling to nowhere, then throwing the ball away — we got a full-body eye-roll from Maxey that gave me all the worst kinds of 2024-25 flashbacks. The vibes aren’t totally bad yet, but they’re definitely no longer immaculate.

Again, I don’t really blame Tyrese for any of this. But he’s in a tough spot that might not be getting much easier anytime soon. And I’m getting a little worried about how long he’s gonna be able to hold up.

Maxey may currently be top 10 in both points and assists per game, but the two categories where he’s No. 1 with a bullet are field goals attempted (23.3 per game) and minutes played (40.4). He’s closer to 2005 Allen Iverson in those stats than he is to anyone else in the league right now. That’s, uh, not what you want: Like Iverson, Maxey is a warrior with a ceaseless motor and impressive durability, but it’s hard for any player to stay both productive and efficient bearing that kind of load. The phrase “ran out of gas” has already come up in conjunction with his name far more times this season than I would have liked.

Optimally, he wouldn’t have to be going pedal-to-the-medal quite so hard so often this year. And that was supposed to be part of the whole deal with this guard-flooded Sixers team: When you have three other young, high-ceiling, ball-handling guards on the roster, shouldn’t that mean Tyrese can kick back a little more often? But it hasn’t quite been that simple. After a scorching start to the season, Edgecombe has largely shown the rawness and limitations we fully expected him to have as a rookie; it’s fine for his long-term outlook, but you can’t really count on him for too much offense right now. Grimes has his moments but is still better used as a spot-up shooter and secondary creator than as anything particularly point-guardy — you don’t really want that guy driving into traffic any more than necessary. And Jared McCain is still struggling to find his legs and his rhythm after a year on the sidelines (and is now back in Delaware with the Blue Coats); he should help the most when he’s back in full effect, but it may be closer to Hanukkah than Thanksgiving before he starts to look like that guy again. We basically have to play Tyrese close to 40 minutes a night to have any shot of winning against most half-decent teams in the Association right now.

Meanwhile, the team’s overall health keeps moving in the wrong direction. After an up-and-down but largely tragedy-free first few weeks of the season, Joel Embiid had his first two unscheduled absences of the year this week with knee soreness — a good reminder that his season, and ours by extension, is forever hanging on by a ligament or two. Kelly Oubre Jr., the only guy pushing Tyrese for two-way team MVP this season, left in the second quarter Froday night with a knee something, I guess we’ll see him when we see him. Paul George is forever two games away from being two games away. Dominick Barlow is back, at least, seemingly with both arms whole and attached to the rest of his body, but it’s still pretty slim pickings in the Sixers front court at this point.

Some folks on Sixers Twitter Bluesky bemoaned the L last night against a similarly injury stricken Pistons team, calling it an inexcusable loss, maybe the worst of the season. I guess — it certainly wasn’t a good one — but I also couldn’t get too too mad about it. Yes, the Pistons were stripped to the studs, but we weren’t much fuller: With Embiid, George and Oubre all out, we officially have no frontcourt players who are even the slightest bit of an offensive threat in a half-court set, no one who can run a pick-and-roll with Maxey and be any kind of credible threat as either a roller or a popper. Their guards may be explosive, but it doesn’t matter much without the offense being able to pull off basic actions to get the fuse lit.

And I just hate to see Maxey put upon like this. He was so great to start this season, set such a positive tone for how things would be this year after a 2024-25 campaign that was lost before it began. Even with some tough Ls now on their resumé, the Sixers still have three-and-a-half times as many wins as they did to this point in the season last year. But that doesn’t mean we’ve totally escaped the abyss; right now Maxey might be the only thing left keeping us from falling back into it. And not even he can stay fighting the good fight forever: Eventually, the tough shooting nights compound on one another, especially as the frustrating losses mount, and soon enough you’re in Thaddeus Young territory, asking Brett Brown what am I doing here and do I really even have to with all this.

So, get well soon Kelly. Hope next week is better than this week, Joel. Take your time, but hurry up Paul George. We need reinforcements to help out our beautiful boy while the light of this above-.500 start is still shining on him. Once things get too dark there, it’s gonna be pretty tough to still tell the difference between last season and this one.

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Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the ‘If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders’ section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.

It was remarkable how freeing that 4-0 start felt from the ghosts of Sixers past. Racing up and down the court, with athleticism to spare. Shooting from all over the place, with guards on guards on guards on guards. Beating the Celtics in Boston on opening night. Pulling so many comeback wins and clutch wins out of their collective asses that you would think they all had a Kyle Lowry amount of extra room back there. Sure, it’s been a rollercoaster with Joel and the defense has been fashionably late in general, but for those of us who worried about 2025-26 being 2024-25 Deluxe Edition, it had been an extremely satisfying departure.

Well, now we’re back. Not totally of course — hell, we could lose out through November and still start December with more wins than we had at that point last year. But things are starting to feel a little more familiar. We’ve lost three games out of four, including a Cup Game to the C’s and a classic Sixers back to back of one game we should have won and another where we were basically drawing dead from the opening tip. And now we’ve got the curious case of Dominick Barlow and Paul George, with their mysterious injuries and ambiguous return-to-play timetables. Now we’re really getting Sixersy.

Paul George’s injury stuff maybe isn’t as perplexing as it is just frustrating, though I still don’t think we really even know what he originally did during his summertime workout that required him to get arthroscopic knee surgery months before preseason even started. Certainly we thought he’d be back by now — or at least that we’d be able to pencil in an expected return date somewhere on our calendars. But despite PG practicing with the team and engaging in high-stakes shooting contests with Jared McCain, Mike’s continued predictions that every next game will be the game of his imminent return have thusfar gone invalidated.

Indeed, the team has already announced that Paul will be out for both games of this weekend’s back-to-back while doctors meet with him to determine if “the last hurdle” has been cleared in his progress. From there, it will no doubt only be a matter of weeks until we get word that his ramping up will enter Phase Two, and if he still feels good at that point, maybe we’ll even get a vague suggestion of him eyeing a potential return to the lineup before the New Year.

Anyway, as vexing as that tortoise crawl back to active duty may be, it’s got nothing on the Dominick Barlow situation. Barlow played just enough in his one and a half healthy games to start the season to become a new fan favorite — and by that I mean I tweeted one thing about how much I appreciated that he clearly didn’t give a fuck about being totally ignored in the Sixers’ half-court offense — before hitting the locker room early against Charlotte with an “elbow contusion.” Bummer about him missing the rest of the game when he’d been playing well, we all agreed, but “elbow contusion” sounded not particularly tragic; surely he’d be back for the next game against Orlando, or at absolute worst the game after that against Washington.

Fast forward five games and Barlow’s contusion appears to be spreading like greyscale. He still hasn’t played a second, he’s also been ruled out for both games this weekend, and he showed up at practice on Friday with a bandage covering most of his arm, big enough that you wonder if Kelly Oubre Jr. went around bothering Sixers assistant coaches for a marker so he could sign it with a funny message. He’s getting looked at on Monday, but nobody seems to know or want to predict how big a deal this injury actually is at this point. Nick Nurse certainly seems baffled.

I don’t want to give our guys undue shit for being hurt and wanting to be careful with their bodies. I got a mild case of the flu this week and I’m already wondering if I should call my mother and downgrade my status for Thanksgiving to “probable”; I’m certainly the last person to credibly yell at anyone to rub some dirt on it and get back out there already. It’s not them we’re really exasperated with, it’s history — the Sixers culture of the last decade that somehow led George Hill to miss months of post-trade deadline action with a jammed thumb, that held Robert Covington out so long with ailing knees during his Sixers comeback that eventually we just kinda stopped asking about him atlogether, that nearly fucking killed Zhaire Smith as he needed months to rehab a deadly sesame attack. And now apparently McCain is still saddled with a leg brace that he’s “hopeful he won’t have to wear all year”? It’s infuriating how right it all feels.

5-3 is still a great start for this team through eight games. Even with everything that’s gone wrong (or merely declined to start going right), we’re blessed to be where we are with our surfeit of young exciting guards, a Kelly Oubre who damn near deserves to be in the MVP discussion and a Joel Embiid that’s still playing more games than he’s sitting. But these forever-lagging injuries just remind us that as long as we’re following them, we’ll never totally outrun the Sixers being the Sixers. No matter where we go, there they are.

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Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the ‘If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders’ section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.

I won’t lie: Last Friday helped a lot. I had been seriously struggling to find my way back into this team during a summer and preseason that offered nothing but discouragement at every turn. Injuries mounted, returns were delayed, Summer League and Preseason games were lost in resounding, depressing fashion. After a season that ended with a month of playing with only one of our top eight guys actually playing, I looked around at a roster that six months later still featured one totally healthy active real guy — Quentin Grimes then, Tyrese Maxey now — surrounded by a whole bunch of dudes who I hoped to see precious little of when the games actually mattered. If the games ever actually mattered. “This is supposed to be the easy part!” I screamed at Spike on the podcast last week. Easy it emphatically had not been.

And then suddenly, last Friday, it was. Reports that there was Some Chance or that it was On the Table that Joel Embiid would play — ha ha yes sure whatever you say Nick Nurse — turned, as Spike correctly predicted, into a gameday No He’s Actually Gonna Be Out There For Real. And there he was: alive and ambulatory and changing ends and working the two-man game and hitting threes and drawing fouls and oh my god Joel please don’t push it so much in the full court just yet. Rusty, sure, but unmistakably Joel, the kind of Joel outing that would seem neither revelatory nor remarkable under normal circumstances, as if “normal circumstances” were a thing again worth considering as a Joel-related possibility.

And not just him: Quentin Grimes was there, scoring 20-plus in a blink, undeniably On the Team, however temporarily. V.J. Edgecombe was balling, also instinctively pouring in 20-plus even while frequently bedeviling with the seemingly easy opportunities he failed to convert. And Maxey seemed freest and easiest of all, with 20-plus of his own — good god is that three guards scoring 20-plus in the same game on the same team? This team? — that all felt like it developed naturally from having his running mate back on the court with him. There were still important dudes out, there were still eminently fungible dudes in, but suddenly it felt like we were watching something real, not just the faint suggestion of an NBA team, but one with a firm and distinct outline.

I’m not saying I’m back. I’m not back. But I am allowing myself to entertain the notion that this offseason’s shittiness was at least partly by design — or at the very least, incidentally fortuitous — in order for us really to let go of the old idea of the Sixers, so that we can hopefully find our way back to the new version.

It’s hard to remember now just how different things were for the Sixers (and more importantly, for us) just one year ago. Championship contention seemed like a lofty but not totally unrealistic goal, and while there were still doubters that the team could hold it together for an extended playoff run, there was no questioning that they’d at least get the opportunity. Even with everything that had already looked wayward with Joel in the offseason — the up-and-down showing in the Olympics, the unclear return-to-play timeline, the frustrating Nick Nurse non-reports — and even as it became clear he wasn’t going to be ready opening night, we still only ever asked when not if with this team last summer. What will the team look like when it’s whole and healthy? How dangerous will they be when they get it together and start ripping off 12-3 months? How stupid is everyone going to feel for doubting him when Joel starts playing like Joel again?

Of course, someday never came for the 2024-25 Philadelphia 76ers. Joel never got his body right, Paul George never stepped up to the All-Star level we hoped he would, even Tyrese Maxey never quite turned the corner in a way that didn’t ultimately lead him back where he started. Jared McCain was the steal of the draft until he went down for the season. Quentin Grimes was the steal of the trade deadline until the team around him essentially dissolved into the ether. As frustrating as they’d been in spots during previous regular seasons, every Sixers team since 2017 had some degree of safety net in place — one largely provided by the promise of at least 50 games of healthy, high-level Joel Embiid — and without that, it turns out there was no limit to how bad things could get. With preseason expectations being what they were, a 44-38 season would’ve been bitterly disappointing; the ‘24-’25 Sixers ended the season 20 games worse than that.

This year, 44-38 seems about the high end of reasonable expectations for the Sixers. MOC just wrote a predictions column where he expressed uncharacteristic bullishness on the Philadelphia 76ers; he dared to dream that their eventual win total could be “somewhere in the mid-40s.” Championship contention? Forget about it. Joel having his long-fabled Giannis-like run storming through the playoffs? Seems unlikely. Paul George becoming our third All-Star as hoped? Hell, if he just stands in the corner and shoots 38% from three we’ll be happy. Absolutely every one of our presumptions for who these Sixers are and what they can accomplish has been tamped down relative to this time last year.

And that’s absolutely as it should be. For as many pieces seemed to slide into place for this team on Friday night, many more remain missing: McCain still out, George still working his way back to the lineup, our starting power forward spot basically still a broken URL. Joel will miss games, a lot of them. V.J. will miss shots, a lot of them. Adem Bona might currently be in our first five? The issues with rebounding and defending up from last year continue to be glaring. The Sixers looked 100 times better and fuller on Friday night than they had at any other point since March, and they still struggled to close out the second-string Timberwolves on the ass-end of a preseason back-to-back. A winning record for the season should hardly be assumed for these Sixers; this team could still very easily suck big time.

But the way this shit-ass summer has forced us — me, anyway — to confront that not only as an abstract possibility but as an undeniable reality has, arguably, been a blessing. If things had been all good health and good vibes with this offseason, maybe there was a chance we/I could have written off last season as a worst-case aberration as opposed to something closer to the new normal. Maybe I would’ve continued along the “Well, why can’t the Sixers contend in the East?” train of thought proposed by Tom Ziller, roughly 15 minutes before the Sixers’ latest depressing injury setback deaded it for the rest of the summer. Maybe I would’ve refused to learn my lessons from last year. Maybe I’d be a truly irresponsible level of Back with this team.

Instead, I got exactly one game of encouragement, one night’s worth of things going right-ish for the 76ers. I got enough that I’m not actively dreading the season’s return on Wednesday; I’m basically looking forward to it. I got enough to not want to automatically roll my eyes at any suggestion that they could make the playoffs this year (though not so much that I won’t automatically roll my eyes at anyone who believes they definitely will). I got enough to not feel like a dumbass for wanting anything good to happen with this team. Low bar, but one the team (or the universe) seemed to have zero interest in getting cleared before last Friday, and now one that I am firmly over with the 76ers.

Was this the grand design all along? Were the Sixers intentionally miserable for six months specifically so that we wouldn’t ask or expect big things of them again? Have Joel Embiid and Paul George secretly been healthy since May? Is Nick Nurse actually PUMPED to be an NBA coach again? Perhaps not — but regardless of intent, I can’t argue that things haven’t worked out about as well as they could have for the Sixers going into these 82 games. Last year, they won the offseason and lost the regular season. This year, they lost the offseason, and the regular season is a big ol’ question mark. We got no expectations, but we’re here and so mostly are they. Now let’s play some basketball.

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Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the ‘If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders’ section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.

“It’s gonna be a good team this year, and it’s gonna be a fun team.”

That was me writing about the Sixers on October 20th of last year, about a week before the season’s start. I can’t say I remember feeling all that optimistic about that Sixers season, following a first-round exist that saw a hobbled Joel unable to grimace his way past the Knicks, and an offseason in which he’d looked creakier than ever in the Olympics and had failed to ramp back up in time to be active for opening night. But truly, it’s all relative: The Sixers were a perennial playoff disappointment, but they’d loaded back up for the regular season — and even if Joel had to miss some time, they had a minted second All-Star in Tyrese Maxey, they had a new future Hall-of-Famer in Paul George, they had an exciting rookie in Jared McCain and they had a history of baseline 82-game competence to lean on. And besides, it was preseason; I’ve always managed to work my way back to being some version of pumped about the Sixers by the end of the preseason. We’d have to adjust to a constantly shuffling lineup, I wrote about in my 2024-’25 preview — but for the regular season at least, we’d have fun and we’d be fine.

Neither, of course, could’ve been farther from the truth. We certainly weren’t fine: The regular season was an unmitigated disaster of injuries, underperformance, bad vibes, injuries, dispiriting Nick Nurse press conferences, locker-room exchanges leaked to the press, injuries, missed threes, missed rebounds, losing streaks and injuries. And aside from one Jared McCain heater, one turn-the-corner Tyrese Maxey stretch, a couple Quentin Grimes Games and a Joel Embiid-led Christmas win in Boston — which he nearly missed after re-injuring himself during pregame warmups, why not — there was absolutely zero fun to be had. Now, we look back, and it’s hard to remember a time when we ever could’ve been so blindly optimistic as to think: “Well at least we’ll have some good times before they inevitably let us down in the playoffs.”

Well, good news everyone: Blind optimism is not the name of the game for me this Sixers season. I am not back in. I am not assuming anything good for this team. I certainly don’t believe we’ll be fine, and I’m not all that confident that we’ll have fun. Whatever I’ve been able to do in past seasons to get myself re-excited about the Sixers is not doing the trick this October. I remain emotionally limp for this professional basketball team.

Which isn’t to say there’s no potential for good times with the Sixers this upcoming season. On paper, there’s plenty of reason to get excited: We have one of the best, most potent young guard rotations in the league now, with Tyrese Maxey, Quentin Grimes, Jared McCain and V.J. Edgecombe. We have Season Two of Paul George, and his younger doppelganger Justin Edwards who I already declared would be better than him this season. We have the return of the Quiet Tournament for the starting power forward position. And we have Joel Embiid, not playing yet, but alive and moving and feeling good, or at least not being actively doomery. Even at its best it hardly seems like a recipe for title contention, but the possibility for a fun regular season with reduced ambitions certainly seems like it’s on the table.

But nothing that’s happened in the past month has inspired confidence that it’s actually the most likely outcome. Quentin Grimes spite-accepted the qualifying offer. Jared McCain got his thumb torn off. Paul George... I don’t even remember what his injury was and it’s gonna make me too annoyed to look it up. Justin Edwards can’t make a shot or complete a drive to the rim to save his life (or his rotation spot) during the preseason. I haven’t been moved enough about any of the guys in our Quiet Tournament to even know or care who’s currently winning — I assume Trendon Watford by sheer virtue of his also being too hurt to play. Kennedy Chandler popping? If you say so, whatever he’s been doing, he hasn’t been doing it for me.

If there’s three reasons to have any amount of excitement about the Sixers at this exact moment, they’re probably Tyrese Maxey, VJ Edgecombe and Joel Embiid. Tyrese has certainly had his moments in the preseason, with scoring outbursts in each of the last two games, including a 17-point first quarter against Orlando on Friday night. But he’s also shown a lot of what went wrong with him last season: namely his inability to get his shot off from deep without Joel, and the subpar results when he does — I feared for the backboard in Dubai — and his limitations in orchestrating an offense and generating opportunities for others when he has to be the focal point. Last season with Tyrese was really tough; I believe he can do better, but I can’t stake my emotional well-being on him until I actually see him figure it out a little more.

VJ Edgecombe would probably be the No. 1 answer if you asked Sixers fans what they were actually looking forward to about this season. I get that: the highlights have already been phenomenal, and his missed poster attempt in the preseason opener probably still ranks in the five greatest dunks in Process History. But as many things as he has done well, it has not been enough to make me forget that he is still a guard who can’t shoot — a tricky watch on any team, and a potentially re-traumatizing one for this particular franchise. Will he get better eventually? Maybe. Will he make grand strides in that evolution this season? Probably not. Around a team that already has plenty of everything, that might not be a huge problem, but on this already injury-ridden team where he might be immediately asked to do a whole lot? It’ll be conspicuous, for sure. (Oh, and he’s also hurt again with a hip injury and missed our last preseason game, TBD on how big a deal that ends up being.)

And then there’s Joel. Historically, the one thing I’ve been able to rely on to get me back into Sixers Mode has been the promise of Joel — however compromised, however sulky, however non-guaranteed. But I just can’t feel confident in us getting any amount of Joel for any stretch of time this season. There’s just too many question marks with him, and while the team refraining from acting overconfident about his progress is probably the right move long-term, in the short-term it’s not exactly getting the juices flowing. Proof of life is a great start, but there’s so many benchmarks to clear between there and actually feeling good about his play and his health and his overall spirit, and he’s clearly not rushing to clear them.

I dunno. An 0-3 preseason hasn’t helped. Orion Kerkering and one run in 11 innings hasn’t helped. A two-game Eagles losing streak and a kvetchy A.J. Brown hasn’t helped (though honestly the Eagles had been hogging the good karma for too long anyway). Another Sixer getting needlessly injured by the time you finish reading this sentence won’t have helped either. The Exocrising the Demons podcast was a worthwhile exercise but still a dispiriting listen — not just to be reminded of seven years’ worth of playoff failures, but to think that said period now maybe already constitutes the Good Old Days for this franchise, where things would now have to break improbably right for us to ever even get high enough to be let down again. It’s tough stuff.

You could say that the main thing to be excited for with this Sixers team is the blessing of lowered expectations. In past years maybe we’d say that we were going in with no real hopes, not permitting ourselves to get hurt again. But if we ever really meant it, we didn’t mean it totally, and rarely for long. As long as we had Joel, we could never totally shed the hope that finally this would be the season that his body held up and he put it all together in the playoffs — and if that happened, it almost wouldn’t matter what else was going on with the team’s coaching situation or supporting cast or locker-room vibes. This is the first season where that happening barely even feels like a remote possibility — where it’s not even a matter of accepting the reality of the situation for us, because the reality has made itself too unignorable for us to even have a choice. Maybe there’ll be some freedom in that, some sense of release in letting go of actual contention aspirations and just taking this season as it comes.

Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe the drips and drabs of workout footage featuring our injured vets, the flashes of preseason excellence from our rising stars, and the longest summer vacation we’ve had from this team in a decade has been enough to work more of the fanbase up into a lather over this team than I currently realize. Maybe I’m just getting old, or maybe a 1-0 start to the regular season is all I need to be foaming at the mouth again. But the way this summer and preseason has consistently managed to let the air out of any ballooning interest in this team feels like a sign, a warning to not feel confident in this team being anything this year, least of all fine or fun. All I can do is take heed, and at least feel confident that I’ll finally have one Sixers preview column at the Ricky where I won’t have to look back and laugh at myself for being way too excited.

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Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the ‘If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders’ section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.