It’s getting a little hard to know where my own feelings stand on these finals. I went in rooting for the Knicks, to confirm we lost to a true Team of Destiny — and really more to the point, rooting against the Spurs, just ‘coz I still think it’s way too soon for them — but that last win of theirs certainly annoyed the shit out of me. They were getting beat so bad that my Knick fan friends had already given up and pivoted to complaining about the refs and concluding that the league had fixed the series in the Spurs’ favor and so on, when the Knicks just decided oh why not let’s fuck around and get this one too. Then it was just like gravity: by the end of the fourth quarter, there was no mistake they could make that wouldn’t lead to the Spurs just making a worse one and still ultimately giving them the W. I understand every ToD gets one win like that over the course of their run, but the Knicks already got theirs in the last round against Cleveland in Game One. I enjoyed that one. Them getting a second one like this just feels showy, arrogant, unsportsmanlike.

But they got it. Now they’re up 3-1 with all the momentum and every famous person who’s ever lived on their side. They’re going to win the Finals. And if they don’t, I’m fine with jinxing them here, because it would be undeniably hilarious after a win like that to for them to then go on and blow the series in semi-historic fashion. But that’s probably not going to happen. Sometime in the next week, we’ll have to deal with the Knicks being NBA champions for the first time in most of our lifetimes. I’m not sure whether that’s preferable for me to the Spurs and Wemby winning a chip so ahead of schedule — can’t say he or they have endeared themselves any more to me over this stretch either — but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be some degree of annoying.

I am happy for Landry, though.

For all the former Sixers who we feared would end up playing major roles torturing us for one reason or another in these finals — James Harden, Tobias Harris, Jared McCain — I don’t think any of us ever really contemplated Landry Shamet being the Last Relevant Former Sixer Standing. (Not counting Julian Champagnie on the Spurs who I have no real memory of even being a Sixer in the first place.) Hell, it’s still sorta surprising that Landry is currently playing a major role period, anywhere: For most of his near-decade now of bouncing around the NBA, he’s been stuck on the rotational fringes, sporadically earning regular minutes due to injuries or shooting heat but often ceding them back before season’s end. He hadn’t played 1500 minutes in a season since he was rookie, and before this season, hadn’t cracked 1000 since 2022. It seemed like his days of being a real factor were over, if they’d ever totally begun.

But I always believed in sweet Landry. I don’t even totally remember when or why I first fell for him; I probably just saw him hit a three for us once as a rookie and was overcome by how right it felt and decided he would never miss again. I loved him dearly in that first season and was both heartbroken and outraged when he was included in the Tobias Harris trade at the deadline and have mentioned my feelings on the matter at every given opportunity — and some not-really-that-given opportunities — over the past seven years. (And for the record, sentimentality aside, including Landry in that trade still goes down as one of the dumbest and least forgivable moves of the Colangelo years — you’re already trading two first rounders for a dude who’s never even been an all-star, why the fuck do you need to include a prospect in that deal too? I got mad a bunch during Daryl Morey’s tenure about him being so steadfast in not overpaying in trades that we usually ended up just never trading for anyone real; I have to remind myself sometimes that this is what overpaying often looks like.)

I still rooted for Landry as he bounced from team to team, still believed that with the right context and opportunity he could prove himself a real guy. But after a couple seasons of him shooting under 40% in Phoenix — on a team that could’ve desperately used some fringe guys stepping up — and then a year spent lost in the Washington wilderness, it did seem like he might be running out of time. It was great to see him get real minutes on the Knicks last year in their conference finals series against the Pacers, but even that felt more out of desperation than anything, Tom Thibodeau paying the price for running his starters into the ground all regular season and playoffs and finally needing to find out who the hell was left on the end of their bench lest Josh Hart dissolve into a pillar of salt.

But this season under Mike Brown, Shamet is not only a real part of what the Knicks are doing, he’s legitimately one of the reasons they’re doing it. Not so much the last couple games, of course; he went scoreless in that Game Four comeback and was 1-7 the game before it. But that two-game cold stretch drops him down to a frosty 49% from three for the entire postseason, after going 7-12 from deep against us in the second round (unfortunate but we would’ve gotten blasted regardless) and an unthinkable 11-12 against the Cavs in the ECFs. There simply isn’t enough playoffs left for him to crash all the way back to Earth at this point; no matter what happens, he’s still gonna end this season somewhere above the clouds.

Maybe that should make me angry, the way the entire fanbase has a meltdown any time Jared McCain hits a three even when she’s shooting on his own backyard hoop. If it happened at the beginning of the decade it probably would. But now I just feel gratified to have been right (or at least right-ish) about him all along. Plus, Landry took enough years and enough teams to finally find his place that it’s hard to act at this point like there’s any world in which he’s currently doing this on the Sixers. It’s like when Carlos Carrasco finally started pitching like an All-Star about eight years after being included in the Cliff Lee trade; after all that time you might consider doing all the second-guessing work but really you’d rather just go ehhh good for him.

Of course, Tobias Harris was no Cliff Lee, and that trade still makes me furious. But I think that ehhh good for him is generally how I’ll feel for Landry when he wins the title on the Knicks. The validation for him (and for me and my decade of Not Letting This Go) feels satisfying and deserved. We’ve been doing this thing for long enough that just about every relevant NBA team has some guy we let get away for one reason or another, most of whom I feel much less magnanimous about in 2026. For Landry to be that guy on the Knicks feels like a mercy that Sixers fans are rarely granted at this time of year.

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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 the Sixers have a new GM. I don’t love that his last name already sounds like a nickname — you can just picture the frat bros hollering “GANSEYYYYYY!!!!” as he shows up at the dorm with a case of Miller High Life — and I don’t like that we’re always gonna have to deliberate which moves to attribute to him and which to Team Sorta President Overseer Guy Bob Meyers. But otherwise I don’t have a strong take on his hiring. In four years of Mike Gansey being the Cavs’ GM under Koby Altman, the team made some good moves, some OK moves, and some not-so-good moves. He didn’t do anything particularly spectacular or dumbfounding that I can recall, and they stayed at a very-good-but-not-quite-good-enough level the whole time he was there. I had never given him a second’s thought before his Sixers hiring, and had he not come over, he could’ve been Cleveland’s GM for another decade and I doubt I ever would have. He just sorta seems like a guy.

Most GMs are just sorta guys. It’s hard to remember that as a Sixers fan sometimes, considering there have been like five GMs this century in the NBA who have been notable figures, and the Sixers happen to have employed two of them in the past 15 years. (Three, I guess, if you count Collar Guy.) With Daryl Morey, we not only had a GM (technically team president, I know, I’m still gonna call him the GM) who had played a relatively key part in changing league-wide strategy and discourse for decades, we actually had a guy who was interesting, weird, personable and really kinda funny, for reasons both intentional and less so. And that’s the thing about him that I might find kinda tough to move on from.

I have pretty mixed feelings about the legacy Daryl leaves as our GM and about his dismissal in general. Were it up to me, I probably would’ve kept him on, just because I think GMs are mostly fungible and Daryl’s more smart and good than he isn’t and I’d rather just kinda ride with his strengths and weaknesses, The Devil I Know, etc. The Jared McCain trade still infuriates me for a half-dozen different reasons — and those aren’t even the only reasons available to get infuriated about the Jared McCain trade — but I wasn’t out for blood with Daryl. I still respect him being willing to make a long-view trade that he had to know would make him enormously unpopular in the short term, even though I think his current post-trade unpopularity is pretty well deserved.

Regardless, I also had no problem with him being fired. Strip all the other stuff away, and I look at it like this: He got six seasons to get this team over the hump — a relatively small hump too, considering all we were really asking for was one conference finals appearance — and he didn’t do it. That’s not entirely on him, obviously, and a lot of the stuff that went wrong for this team was out of his control. But some of it was in his control, and he did put himself in the hole both with some of the moves he made and some of the moves he didn’t (or wasn’t able to) make. In some ways, the team is in a better place than where we were we he came on six years ago, and in some ways, it’s in a worse place. After six years, that kind of stasis usually results in you getting fired.

So I was fine with the franchise trying things out with a new GM. But I sorta forgot that getting a new GM means actually getting a new GM. It means letting a new guy into your daily life — one who might be annoying or unpleasant or just kinda eh. I dunno if our boy GANSEYYYYYY is any of those things yet, but regardless, he’s definitely not gonna be like Daryl. No one is like Daryl.

Not that being like Daryl was always a great thing for Daryl. He could be arrogant and dismissive. He could be odd in ways more unnerving than winning. He could be strangely susceptible to AI slop. But he could also be insightful, humorous, even charming in his own way. And his failings were pretty distinctly human, the kind that anyone with genuine personality tends to have to some degree. He was, at all times, a richly drawn character.

And his podcasts with the Ricky were just all-time legendary shit. There will never be an equal for them in any sport or on any media platform. You just won’t have another GM going on a team-affiliated (but not team-run) podcast and feeling much more like a third guy in the booth than an actual team official being interviewed, answering questions with some inevitable degree of spin and truth-massaging but always like a real person, just another Sixers fan who also happened to be the single most important person in shaping the team’s present and future. Mike would yell at Daryl about something like he was responding to a Liberty Ballers blogger trying to write about Arnett Moultrie being the face of the franchise, and then the three of them would move on to the next topic. Like it was normal. It wasn’t. But Daryl being Daryl, it didn’t feel that strange. Which was the strangest thing of all.

Most Philly sports figures try to put their One of Usness over by palling around with the Phanatic and making big deals out of their cheesesteak or Wawa orders or whatever. Daryl did it by genuinely being a super-online sicko who already knew most of the inside jokes and cared way too much about everything. The latter approach is way tougher to sell — and much more likely to get you in trouble — but also just resonates on a much different, much deeper level. There’s a half-decent chance that Daryl is reading this very article at the exact same time that you are, getting furious about some parts of it and silently, begrudgingly nodding at others. That’s not even him being a narcissist, that’s just him doing what any of us would do if someone was writing some bullshit about us on the internet. He wasn’t above it, and he didn’t pretend to be. You had to respect that about him.

Well, I had to respect that, anyway. Maybe you legitimately pined for a more normal, boring GM — one who you didn’t have to have opinions about beyond the trades he made and the contracts he signed. I’d get that. It’ll be a refreshing change of pace to have one of those now, if nothing else. But however GANSEYYYY does in the job, I’m pretty sure I’ll miss Daryl, and I think you probably will too. We’ll never have such an RTRS GM again.

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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.

Well, at least I’m still watching. There have been years this decade where the Sixers’ exit from the playoffs has been so dispiriting, so poisonous and so unshakeable that the idea of consuming anything related to the sport of basketball seems unpalatable for months and months to come. So I guess this year, the Sixers’ bow-out must’ve been one of their less soul-crushing defeats, because I am indeed still tuning in for this next round of NBA playoff basketball — not all, but some, the important parts. And I’m even rooting for the team who beat the Sixers.

Don’t worry, this is not gonna be some nihilistic post about embracing the NBA darkness, or some Stockholm-Syndromed plea for grace for our new tormentors — though you may very well still end up hating it anyway. I am not rooting for the Knicks in the Eastern Conference Playoffs in the sense of me wanting good things to happen to them. Nor am I rooting for the Thunder in the West because it will give me any particular joy to see Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Chet Holmgren belting out “What a Pro Wants” at Oklahoma City’s second straight under-attended championship parade. But as Sixers fans and as NBA fans, I just think they kinda owe us.

If the idea of Josh Hart and his refusal to carry his arms normally when he walks strutting to the NBA finals is unacceptable to you, I certainly can’t say I don’t understand. But to me, there’s nothing more annoying in the NBA than being demolished in the playoffs by a suddenly-juggernaut-looking opponent who then turns around and goes out like a punk in the next round. If the Knicks are just a team of destiny this year — at least as far as the Eastern Conference goes; there’s probably no amount of basketball mysticism that’ll give them a chance against whoever comes out of the West — that’s fair-ish enough, I guess. It happens. But if they went out in five in the conference finals, it’d be like... well what the fuck was that even for then? We got blasted to smithereens by these assholes in our own building and they didn’t even have the decency to make the finals after that? It all feels extra disrespectful. It all feels extra pointless.

Now if this was the Celtics who’d just beat us and were now one series from the finals, I’d still be howling at the moon for them to lose in three. Some teams fill me with so much hate to the very core of my essence that all of my other sports fandom platitudes and truisms just go out the 50th-floor window when we’re talking about them. Actually really just one team: the Celtics. Maybe after two playoff series losses and one total beatdown the Knicks are on that level for you; I can’t get there. Hart is really the only one of them I actively loathe, the rest range from minorly annoying to wish we had him. And I can’t even feel the same as Spike about their fans — most of the Knicks fans I know are actually pretty cool. When I was watching Game Four in a bar next to a couple Knicks fans annoying the shit out of me as I was coming to terms with the inevitable, I ended up just sorta laughing with them by the end of it. They were still locked in with the Knicks up 37 in the fourth, annoyed that Tyler Kolek was missing threes to put them up 40. I couldn’t relate, but I understood.

Most importantly, I need them to embarrass the fucking Cavs. The fact that the Cavs, that Donovan Mitchell, made a conference finals before us has been maybe the toughest part of these whole playoffs for me. And it didn’t even really feel like he or they earned it — they needed seven games to beat a mid Raptors squad missing multiple starters, then they needed another seven games to beat a crumbling-after-wildly-overachieving Pistons team. And they didn’t even win because their main guys finally turned the corner: James Harden no-showed in a Game 7 for the millionth time in his career and it just didn’t matter. Donovan Mitchell was fine. The Pistons took the L a lot more than the Cavs took the W. The Sixers and Joel Embiiid coming back from 3-1 against Boston was far more meaningful than the sum total of the Cavs’ accomplishments in this postseason to date. It is shameful that they are still playing in the playoffs while we are not, and I cannot abide another series victory from them. Hell, I’d rather not abide another single-game victory from them.

I don’t even totally remember where my Donovan Mitchell-specific distaste comes from. It started, of course, with the “ROOKIE?” nonsense as he and Ben Simmons were squaring off for Rookie of the Year back in 2017, but as my friend Jonny pointed out on Bluesky Tuesday night, that doesn’t feel like a great reason for continued beef when our collective hatred of Simmons surely clears by this point. It’s fair, and I don’t have great reasoning beyond that: Mitchell seems like an OK guy and teammate and I generally think he’s a very good player. But somewhere along the line I latched onto him being a fraudulent choker and that’s only crescendoed for me in the near-decade since. Maybe because so many of the Sixers’ (and Embiid’s) primary rivals from that era — Jayson Tatum and the Celtics, Nikola Jokic and the Nuggets, Jimmy Butler and the Heat — have gone on to success so far beyond what we can hope to match that they can’t even really be considered rivals anymore, the fact that this one guy has basically remained in our same orbit has laser-focused all my hater energy on him. Whatever the reasoning it barely matters at this point. I can’t have Donovan Mitchell going any further than this.

So yes, I certainly did get a great deal of joy on Tuesday night from the Cavs’ belated succumbing to the Danhausen curse. Not that I really needed more shots of a delirious Timothée Chalamet hugging Tracy Morgan in my life, but it felt like karmic validation that things were Not As They Should Be for Cleveland to not only be in the conference finals, but leading Game 1 by 20-plus points in the fourth quarter, taking early command of a series they do not deserve to be participating in. For the Knicks to have enjoyed one of the great comebacks in NBA playoff history to secure the victory doesn’t necessarily feel right either, but it definitely doesn’t feel so wrong to me. I hope they do it again in Game Two.

As for the Thunder... I don’t feel quite so strongly, but I’m getting there. And this isn’t even really about Jared McCain, who I still do love and want good things for. But it is getting a little annoying to see my timeline fill up with “OH WELL GUESS WE JUST HAD TO GET RID OF HIM FOR NO REASON” self-immolation about his playoff performance anytime he does anything. During the first half of Game One of Spurs-Thunder I saw so many Process Trusters stabbing themselves with rusty forks over McCain that I assumed he must’ve been on a massive heater, and I checked the box score to find out he was 1-2 for two points with zero assists in four minutes. It’s really any time he hits a shot now. I get it but like also... c’mon.

But whatever, this isn’t about McCain, it’s about Victor Wembanyama. I don’t have any real hate for Wembanyama (yet) and I’m not as annoyed with the slobbering over him as Spike Is (yet). I don’t totally know what my feelings are about him in general. But... it’s just too early. We haven’t even seen him in the playoffs before. We need him to hit his head on the ceiling a couple times before he breaks through. If he starts winning now, then I guess that’s just it for basketball for the next decade? Longer? Basketball as a 29-team competition for the silver while the eight-foot guy with the 35-foot range remains unchallenged on the championship podium? I dunno. His takeover is probably inevitable and ultimately I guess that’s fine, but we should still get a couple more years first. Year Three is too early. Let’s be reasonable here.

And then in a Knicks-Thunder finals? Eh. I probably won’t be actively rooting for the building to collapse, but I doubt I’ll care enough about either team to actively pull for one of them to win or lose. I’ll probably be overseas for a lot of it anyway, maybe I’ll just let someone fill me in on how the movie ended when I get back. And honestly being able to not really care about the NBA finals will be a luxury I hope to be able to afford. If I have to spend my June still focusing the sum total of my negative energy on Donovan Mitchell or Victor Wembanyama it’s gonna be a fucking drag. Sparing me from that is truly the least the Knicks and Thunder can do.

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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 thought there was absolutely nothing good about the Sixers’ first Mother’s Day Massacre game three years ago, when they got blown out by Boston in Boston in Game 7 and absolutely nobody from the Sixers (except maybe PJ Tucker who would never be a relevant NBA player again) played anywhere near acceptably. It was an embarrassing, shameful, quintessentially losery performance by a team who was on the precipice of turning the corner and instead fell into the street and got run over by a garbage truck. But there was one good thing about it, I guess: There was absolutely no ambiguity in how we should feel about it. We should have felt humiliated, furious and just fucking stoopid to be Sixers fans that year, and we did. Easy enough.

This second time around is trickier. Yes we got blown out on Mother’s Day again, yes we got absolutely pantsed by a division rival and now inarguably superior team, yes we had the extra iodine poisoning this time of it happening at a home that didn’t particularly feel like home, where we are somehow now 3-8 in our last 11 playoff games. (Let the XMA now forever be known as Madison Square Garden East, geographical appropriateness be damned.) Yes we again get to feel particularly good about nobody, yes we again have no idea what the way forward is with this team, yes we again lost again in the fucking second round (again). Seems conclusive, and it would be the final word if any of us had expected to get this far in the first place, if we hadn’t already given up on this team at halftime of Game Five against Boston, and of course if we hadn’t come back from down 3-1 for the best Sixers series victory in over 25 years, by a magnitude of about 100x.

So should we be glad to have gotten this far, or livid about how much further we didn’t get? Should we smile because it happened or cry because it’s over? Will we remember this more as ok yeah but Fuck Boston or ok yeah but FUCK New York? In truth, I don’t know what to tell y’all. I don’t even know what to tell myself.

The good news, I suppose, is that we don’t really have to play the Well If Only game. It was tempting for a minute after Game Two, the only game in this series that the Sixers arguably should have won, to say Well If Only Daryl Morey Wasn’t So Arrogant or Well If Only Josh Harris Wasn’t Such a Cheapskate then maybe we’d still have Jared McCain, maybe we’d have some more playable bench pieces, maybe our starters wouldn’t be so exhausted and maybe we’d actually have a real chance in the rest of the series. Even after Game Three, which started out like the Sixers roaring back and quickly turned into the Sixers being thoroughly tamed, well, maybe it all could’ve been flipped by just having a couple more guys. After Game Four, in which we lost by 40 and spent about four minutes not being down by double digits, you can’t direct your anger at any one person, place or thing being the difference, all you can really say is Fuck Everyone and Everything.

Or maybe you can. I dunno. My main take here is that I don’t feel like I can tell anyone how they should feel about this game or Joel or Daryl or Nick Nurse or really any part of any of this. Just about everyone involved with this team sashayed from inexcusable to vindicated to shrug over the past two weeks. Eight days ago the Sixers were conquering heroes, achieving the impossible. Now they’re losers again, maybe forever. Which one is the real thing? Which one will we remember five years from now? Five months from now?

Ask us five years or five months from now, I guess. For now, I love how Daryl secured us a core coherent enough to finally come alive against Boston, but hate how he punted on making it deep enough to survive beyond them. I love how Nurse figured out how to expose the Celtics’ vulnerabilities but hate how he could only exacerbate our own against the Knicks. I love how Tyrese Maxey closed out the first round but hate how he got completely taken out of the second. I love how Joel Embiid fought to get back on the court, fought to power us past the Celtics, and fought to score 24 points on 8-8 shooting (!!) today — but I hate how I simply have no idea how it’s possible to ever win two playoff rounds with that guy anchoring your defense. All these guys should have nothing to apologize for and all of them should be ashamed to show their face in Philly again this summer. It’s a tough one to read.

There’s really only two parts of this I do feel confident in — at least in how I feel about them, even if I don’t feel 100% comfortable in trying to persuade you to feel the same way. One is that the Celtics series win is still one for the ages. I’m not going to say it’s not diminished by this Knicks series being such a beatdown — of course it is, that’s just reality — but it was still the first Sixers series win of the Process era that inspired true joy, not just relief or catharsis or anticipation for what comes next. It was a truly, unreservedly happy memory, and regardless of whatever it does or doesn’t still say about this Sixers team in any meaningful fashion, you can’t take sports memories like that for granted. You just can’t. Or I can’t anyway. I don’t want to.

The other part is that the Knicks better win the fucking East now. I’m sure this is a controversial take and it’s your right to disagree but I don’t care. All I can say is I will be 1000% fucking FURIOUS if the fucking Knicks don’t win the fucking East at this point. I’ll be madder at them for losing in the next round than I am at the Sixers for losing in this one. And actually I can’t even totally say that because the Knicks losing in the next round will retroactively make me so much madder at the Sixers for losing in this one. If this is New York’s team-of-destiny year, if they’re at least gonna make it to the finals and give the Thunder or Spurs a real go at it, I can live with that; maybe it’s just their turn, whatever. And if they wanna lose to OKC or the Spurs at that point that’s fine. But if they should pound us into protons and electrons and then turn around and go out like some goddamn punks to the fucking Fraud Centaral Pistons or Cavs? Who both came inches away from giving their first-round series away to likely the two worst teams in this whole postseason? I’m gonna blame some of the people in this series. And THAT I do not forgive.

Anyway. The most confusing thing about all of this isn’t how we should feel about this team today, it’s what we should do about this team tomorrow. These Sixers showed their potential, and why you keep a core this talented together for as long as you can, and they also showed why the entire franchise should fall into a sinkhole and never be heard from again. Maybe you look at Games 5-7 of the Boston series, when everything seemed to gel at a level higher than we long thought possible for this Sixers squad, and say OK well run it back and get them help and just hope that next year they don’t get so friggin’ exhausted by the end of the first round that their hands are glued to their knees for the entire second round. Or maybe you look at that second round when the Sixers were basically drawing dead from the first deal and say OK no matter how they got here, it was never going to end any differently from this. Both seem pretty reasonable conclusions to me.

There’s certainly a fair temptation to just go scorched earth at this point. Fire Morey and Nurse, deal Embiid and George even at cost, and move forward with Maxey and VJ Edgecombe knowing that even if things end up worse next year, at least they’ll end differently. I’ll never actively push for them to trade Joel, but I’m not generally unamenable to that line of thinking. It’s been about a decade of this by now. Last year was a disaster. The fact that this year even went as well as it did was a sizable miracle. Next year everyone’s a year older and crankier. Of all the available plans of action, ripping it up and starting again feels like the hardest to truly argue against.

And yet.... man, we really did see something for a minute in that Boston series, huh? We saw the Sixers operating on a higher plane. A championship plane? At the very least a third-round plane. It seemed like for a hot second, all the ghosts and traumas of the past took a breather and the game got kinda simple and easy all of a sudden. We prayed it would last just long enough to see us through that series, through the offensive cold spells, through the ass-clenched fourth quarters and the open Payton Pritchard threes in the corner, just long enough for us to feel it just one time. And we got we ordered. And then the bill came. Fair play there, but you get a taste of a meal that full, that satisfying, that nourishing — it’s just hard to think about it and say tear down the restaurant.

We’ll see. For now, it’s another few weeks of Being Sad Quietly, as the NBA playoffs once again go on without us, a feeling that always hurts at least a little bit more than we expect it will. There are big decisions to be made in the offseason and one of those big decisions is about who’s going to be making all of the other big decisions. Maybe it’s the guy we already have, and maybe it isn’t. Maybe the pieces of the next great Sixers team are already in place, and maybe they’re not. Maybe this’ll all have been worth it in the end and maybe it won’t. We’ll all come to our own conclusions over time. We have to. We have nothing else to do. The Sixers may change their roster or their front office but we’ll still be here. We can fire the GM, we can fire the coach, we can maybe even fire the players, but we can’t fire ourselves. Sorry Mom.

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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 wrote a lot yesterday about how well I remember Sixers-Celtics 2023, so let me start my remembrance of its 2026 mirror reverse with a moment I recall just as vividly as anything from the game itself: Talking to my mom on the phone after. My mom is the person I’ve shared the most Sixers memories with over the past decade — an honor she should share with my dad, but, well — and the person who I can most rely on to be as psychotic about the Sixers as I am; there was no question after a shitshow meltdown like that, the first thing I would have to do was call her and essentially apologize to her on the Sixers’ behalf for her ruined Mothers’ day. We broke down the game and how crushed we were about every part of it and how disappointed my dad would be and how much we hate the fucking Celtics, but how glad we at least were to have one another to split the misery with. I told her I loved her, and I really did.

Last night, of course, the first thing I did after the game was to call my mother. Well, actually, the first thing I did was to break down sobbing in Lisa’s arms, 13 years of built-up emotion being purged from my body seemingly at once — usually during big Sixers games she’ll be doing whatever in our apartment, tuning me out as much as she can until greeting me with a celebration or consolation hug once it’s over, but this time I actually called her over for the emotional support I sensed I would need during the final minutes. But after that, I called Mom, so we could have the conversation we had after 2023, and really after every Sixers playoff run since 2018, but finally from the other side. We broke down the game, and how insane it was that it unfolded how it did, and how proud we were of our guys for once and how happy my Dad was about it somewhere and how much we still hate the fucking Celtics. I told her I loved her, and I really did.

It’s Sunday morning, and the Sixers have still come back from down 3-1 to beat the Boston Celtics in the playoffs. And there’s more basketball still to come. What a world to be waking up to.

I knew there was a chance we would win yesterday, a real one, but if you had given me 10 guesses to how the game generally would go, I doubt I would have predicted this particular script. Maybe just because the Sixers won big in their three Ws in this series to that point, and seemingly have lost every big close game to the Celtics in the last decade — though in truth, there have been some major exceptions there — I assumed a win last night would also have to be a relatively comfortable one. And a couple times, it looked like that was exactly what we would get: After speeding out to a double-digit lead in the first quarter and then ballooning it back to 18 towards the end of the third, a never-in-doubt finale seemed an entirely possible outcome. But both leads got quickly termited into by the Celtics after, and the fourth quarter was close enough to hear yourself breathing throughout its final minutes. “Comfortable” was not the word for it.

And yet, I really did think they would pull it out. I wouldn’t be so arrogant as to say I knew; the air was certainly thick with collapse, there was definitely still a world in which the Celtics hit a pair of dagger threes in the final minute as the Sixers crumpled in the half-court and my buckling into Lisa lasted 10 times as long, with 20 times the tears. But... I just thought the Sixers were the better team. Not that that always matters, not that the Sixers haven’t had bigger losses to lesser teams, but despite a couple decisive Boston momentum runs in the second and fourth, for the first time in the history of Sixers-Celtics, I watched most of that game thinking man we got these guys. Would that for sure save us from the random cruelty of the Basketball Gods? Not necessarily, but it did feel like something.

Boston never even took the lead back in that fourth quarter. Lord knows they had chances, good looks, shots so open I had to cover my eyes with my hand and find out what happened from the crowd reaction. But it just wasn’t going to be their night; it was that lid-on-the-lead game that’s tortured us so often throughout the past decade, this time with the Sixers keeping the damn thing shut. We’d just need a couple buckets late, and we got ‘em. Game over. Series over. Sixers somehow not over.

There’s a lot of best parts of all of this, but the one I come to first and foremost is that the end of the day — well, the end of this day, though again, we actually got more days to come now — we really needed both Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey. As he has for the last decade, Joel was the guy to drag us to the finish line, playing brilliantly and giving us everything and alternately reflecting our collective elation and frustration with every make or miss. But as he also has for the last decade, he did need to help to get us over that line, which as you no doubt recall, he hasn’t always gotten in the playoffs. Last night, he got it from Tyrese, his co-anchor, his one true co-star. When Jo’s body finally said no más late in the fourth, Tyrese asked for the clearout and got the two biggest buckets of his career (non-Ben Stiller division). Just a couple of Sixers bros putting up 30-10-5s in an elimination game on the road to make history, seal the 3-1 comeback and then wear dark sunglasses to the post-game press conference, no big deal. The dudes. Our guys. What a relief.

The other best best part is the people who come out of the woodwork to celebrate with us. Like no doubt thousands of Ricky folks, I got hit with a barrage of texts and social media messages after the win last night from people in my orbit, some of whom I’ve talked Sixers shit with for a decade or longer, some of whom I didn’t even realize that I was the main Sixers guy in their orbit. And then just like the 2023 Sixers’ Chernobyl impression allowed all the ghosts from Process past to hit us with a drive-by haunting, who should show up to .gif it up with us in celebration but fucking Sam Hinkie? The architect? The guy who’s gone so Sixers radio silent in the past decade that if he had secretly died during COVID, news about it might not have even gotten to us yet? Those are the moments that make all this hardest to believe, but also the moments that make it feel the most real.

It’s all so much that you do have to stop and remind yourself every so often that it’s still only the first round of the playoffs, that we haven’t even gotten to the Sixers’ most historically infamous save point of the postseason yet. We’ll worry about that tomorrow, or maybe later today, and we’ll be glad to get to stress about it. But the fact that everyone is popping out over this, the fact that r/Bill Simmons has essentially turned into Reddit Mardi Gras, the fact that ESPN used the verb “vanquish” in their headline about the Sixers winning this series, shows that we all sorta get the significance of this series win. Clown on us for going too hard over a narrow first-round victory if you want, and if you’re one of the many many NBA franchises who’s actually put a Conference Finals appearance in the books over the past quarter-century, you certainly have every right to. But we won’t be shamed for this. This is our Pathetic Super Bowl, and we will absolutely celebrate it like it’s the real thing. We deserve to.

And as Spike and I both concluded yesterday, we really, really, really needed that W. I was actually proud of myself that at no point during the game did I start doing the Electric Hedge, trying to boogie-woogie-woogie my way to convincing myself that even if they lost, hey it was a good loss and we should feel nice and maybe next year we can all go live in a cabin together and just hold hands and sing songs and eat berries and talk to the squirrels about how things are gonna feel different with the team this season. Nope: At any point last night, a win would have been 24 Hour Party People and a loss would’ve been Drag Me to Hell and there were no shades of Sixers Grey in between. Maybe that’s what got us through for once: I guess it’s much easier to run all the way past the finish line when you’re really not saving a single ounce of energy for the trip back.

I also mentioned yesterday that the 2023 Celtics loss permanently turned my Sixers fandom a different color. I worried it was one that would get even uglier after last night. I didn’t really consider the possibility that last night would have a similarly indelible effect on my Process Trusting in an actually positive way. But I can already feel that it has: My relationship with this team is cast in an entirely new light after last night, reshading and reshaping not just my perception of them in real time, but all my past memories of them, end-of-Inside Out style. Even 2023 doesn’t seem quite so bad anymore: It was just another stop on the team’s journey to winning, not the final word on its character and worthiness. Maybe it really was just James Harden’s and Doc Rivers’ fault all along. Maybe it was Tobias’.

Honestly, there’s always been a part of me that’s been worried that winning a series like this wouldn’t feel good enough. Most of us true sports sickos hate losing more than we really love winning. In 2023, when the Sixers took the fourth-quarter lead in Game Six and them pulling out the win started to cross the threshold from “not impossible” to “actually sorta likely” — before they ultimately coughed it up, of course — I did a quick temp-check on my own emotions and was a little confused by the reading. I felt a little scared, a little fraudulent. I felt like I wasn’t ready. I felt like it wasn’t going to feel how I wanted it to feel. And if I wasn’t going to enjoy a second-round series win against the Celtics anywhere near as much as I hated a second-round series loss to the Celtics, then what was the point of any of this? Had I really wasted the last decade emotionally investing in something whose upside was nowhere near commensurate to — or as likely a result as — its downside?

But no. Last night felt like it was supposed to feel. Last night felt fucking beautiful. Whether or not last night alone makes the whole thing worth it isn’t a call I feel prepared to make right now, and it’s one that might still be a little subject to change based on how this next series against the Knicks and potentially everything after goes. But this was great. This was real. This was unruinable. This was the reminder that there are reasons why I put myself through all this — dumb reasons, but not stupid reasons. I got to watch the biggest Sixers series win of my adult life unfold almost exactly how I’d want it to, against the exact team I’d want it to, with maximum joy on our side and maximum pain on theirs. I got to share the experience with the two people in my life who I love the most, and who have seen me through the most times of things going the other way. I got to go to sleep happy and wake up happy. And now I get to find out what happens when you win the Ultimate Game and still get to keep playing next series.

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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’ll admit that I’ve basically been sleepwalking through the Sixers’ playoff run to this point. Past Sixers runs have taken over my every waking moment, forced me to reorient my entire schedule, basically made me a different (and almost certainly worse) person altogether. But this year, I’ve been emotionally backburnering the team as I’ve never really been able to before. I got home from a work trip basically five minutes before their play-in game started and barely gave the matchup a second ‘s thought while traveling. I watched Game One against the Celtics with my girlfriend Lisa at a bar where no one else cared, and after they got creamed we went out to see You, Me & Tuscany. When Game Five seemed to be getting out of hand in the first half and the C’s scored the first six points of what was looking to be a very typically Sixers third quarter, I thought to myself OK, I’m about ready for this to be over anyway.

Even when they somehow came back to win that Game Five, I was still able to keep it snoozey. The next night, a Knicks fan friend of mine who’d been surprisingly scared of the Sixers basically all season asked me what it would take for me to view the Sixers as seriously as he did. I said if they won Game Six I would admit that it’s a real series. But I was pretty sure we wouldn’t get that far; the Sixers’ better-than-expected results to that point still felt fluky, the result of shooting variance and some general Weird Shit we were unlikely to see repeated a third time. It all felt like a twist-the-knife prelude to the Celtics snapping to life and putting the hammer down on us in our building, again, of course. So the night of Game Six, I went out with Lisa to karaoke and an Afghan Whigs concert, got drunk as hell, and didn’t think much about the Sixers until it was time for me to pull up the game after. And the Sixers not only beat the Celtics, they dominated, looking every bit the better, steadier, swaggier team. 3-3, series even — and maybe, like, really even. My Knicks fan friend vindicated. Real series confirmed.

I was asleep. But now I’m awake. And I need the Sixers to win in Game 7.

Before Game Six, I think we’d all been participation-trophying the Sixers, as Mike and Spike put it on Thursday night’s all-time Ricky. Hey it’s cool that we got out of the play-in in one game, even without Joel. Nice, we actually took one from Boston. Sick that we got a VJ game too — he looks like he belongs, he’s getting some great experience, that’ll be really valuable down the line. Hah, we almost got that Game Three at home too, how crazy would that have been. And Paul George has been pretty good so far this series! Maybe that’ll help with his trade value in the offseason. Awesome that Joel battled back to somehow actually play in this series, even if the rest of this all is getting pretty fucking sad. And wow, we actually took another game in Boston! That’ll give us some good momentum going into the offseason at least. It was all very pat on the head, good-job-for-a-team-that’s-certainly-gonna-lose-anyway emotional handicapping.

But now here we are. The sheer elation of a Game Six win to tie the series gives way to the panic that the team still has to play a Game Seven to potentially win the series. In Boston. Like in 2023. Y’all remember 2023? I certainly remember 2023. I remember my Sixers fandom turning a different color that day. I probably wouldn’t call it the worst Sixers loss of my lifetime — just because Game 7 against the Hawks two years earlier was so much more inexcusable — but I would certainly call it the most disgusting, the most why are we even doing this Sixers loss of my lifetime. And now we maybe get to do it all over again, to close out a series none of us thought we were going to have to really care about the outcome of in the first place, since it felt so predetermined from the beginning.

And that’s the most frightening part: The outcome is not predetermined anymore. The Sixers really could win this series. Not in an oh well if this happens then maybe that happens, chain-of-increasingly-unlikely-dominos-to-fall sort of sense. They’re right there. They’ve not only won three games in this series already, they’ve won each of those by double digits. They’re on a two-game winning streak. They have a winning record in Boston. They can no longer be written off as overmatched, just happy to be here, just happy to not be embarrassed. They are in this thing, in every way. The Sixers really could win this series.

Which means, that, well, that’s actually what they have to do now. No more feel-good losses, no more moral victories. Participation trophies revoked. Now it’s just either they win or they lose. If they win it’s validation for everyone, abject misery for our enemies, great times forever and ever. If they lose, it’s fraudulence confirmed, gut-wrenching misery all summer, maybe a brand new and even uglier color for our fandom, good times never again. That’s it. Sorry.

Some good folks on Bluesky have tried to sell me on us still being in the it’s-all-gravy-from-here honeymoon phase, that we’ve taken enough good stuff from getting this far in this series that we can still feel good about it even if they lose. Moral victory still in play. Team Is Different This Year still in play. Emotional hedging season in full effect. I admire them. I envy them.

I cannot join them. Not this time. I remember 2023 too well. I remember how different it felt when the Sixers went up 3-2 in Boston that year, winning on the road to take the series lead with everyone playing well, They Never Win That Game etc. etc. But what I remember better much than that is how it felt in Game Six when the Sixers missed a couple potential dagger threes in the fourth quarter that would’ve likely put the Celtics away, and then Jayson Tatum woke up like The Mountain in Game of Thrones to punish our arrogance in not finishing the kill when we had the chance. And then what I remember even better than that is how it felt when the Sixers phoned in Game 7 in historically losery fashion, basically having a sub wheel out the JVC and pop in a VHS for the Celtics to watch while they fucked off to do God knows what, rather than actually showing up for the most important game of most of their careers. Did any of us come away from that series going ah yeah but that Game Five win, we really had them there for a second didn’t we?

By the way — I remember 2024, too. That actually was a series that the Sixers did play well to the end, and lost just because Joel still was playing on one leg and because Josh Hart is an asshole and because shit happens, whatever. That series really was a feel-good loss. Until it wasn’t. Because that’s the thing about feel good losses — they’re still losses. They stay losses. You still have to watch the rest of the playoffs go on without you, as the warm feeling you once got from knowing your guys tried hard and did their best gets chillier and chillier and you eventually go wait what the fuck why don’t I feel good about this anymore? It’s because whatever the mitigating circumstances, whatever the context, whatever the “well it was only a five-game series but it really felt more like six” of it all, the goal in the playoffs is to win and you lost. And you’ve never won. You’ve only lost.

This year, the Sixers can win. Win, with a W. None of us thought they could but they can. They can do something that they’ve never done before, and that they might never be able to do again. The next time we’re one win away from vanquishing the Celtics — or any other Actually Good Team, but particularly the motherfucking Celtics — it could be 10 years, three coaches, two GMs and an entirely new roster from now. It could be 20 years. It could be fucking never. This year, they’re here. And they can win. They can redeem the whole damn thing, everything we’ve gone through that’s brought us to this point. They can do it. They have to.

Will they? That’s the question none of us seems to have the answer to yet. Of course that’s generally the way sports are supposed to work, but ask Sixers fans about Game 7 in 2023 and they’ll all tell you everyone knew they were gonna lose that game. Not totally the way I remember it to be honest but fine. There was certainly at least a feeling before that game. We’d blown Game Six at home, we’d seen how Joel and James Harden responded historically to do-or-die situations, it was the Celtics, it was the Sixers, blah blah blah. We had an inclination on how things were gonna go, for sure. This time, there’s no “for sure.”

I remember reading something just before the 2024 presidential election that basically said that whichever way the election turns out, it will seem incredibly obvious after the fact that that was the way the election was going to turn out the entire time. There was enough of a compelling narrative on both sides, and enough legitimate evidence to support it, that with the eventual outcome sliding into place, it would be such a neat and tidy story that in retrospect, it would be hard to believe there was ever any other outcome that was seriously in play. I would say the same about this Sixers-Celtics Game 7.

If the Sixers win, it’ll be Of course. The Sixers can only ever win after we’ve all finally written them off — not just in an overly emotional we’re-so-over-we’re-so-back sense, but in a legitimate there-was-absolutely-no-reason-to-believe sense. But it had to happen this way: against Boston, in Boston, in a series that Boston had all but wrapped up before inexplicably choking it away. With Joel Embiid finally rising to the occasion, and Paul George vanquishing the ghosts of his own 3-1 playoff collapse and Andre Drummond somehow being the “how has this guy never missed a shot against us??” guy. They turned the corner. They shifted the vibes. This is how it happens. This was always how it was going to happen.

And if the Celtics win, it’ll be Of course. The Sixers were never actually going to win this series. What, you thought that just because they were catching up from behind this time instead of losing steam from ahead that the final outcome was going to be different? The Celtics were always going to get it together just in time — that’s what they do against the Sixers. All of this feel-good Sixers bullshit, all of this supposed Celtics choking was just to wake all you Process Trusters from your slumbers, to trick you into caring about wins and losses again even though you were desperately trying not to this time, just so the Celtics could fucking stick it in you one more time, and maybe close out the entire Joel Embiid era in the process. The Sixers never really had a chance. This was always how it was going to happen.

I don’t know which of the two inevitable outcomes is the one we’re actually getting tonight. If I had to bet on it — and in a sense I do, with stakes a lot higher than a $100 DraftKings bet or whatever — I’d still probably say Celtics win. But if I was going to make the case for things actually being different this year, I’d start with Joel. There’s been a calm to him these last three games that I’ve never seen before from him, that I certainly would have seen coming in such a pressurized, high-stakes series as this. He’s reading situations, making adjustments, never getting too high or low. He’s dishing out three times as many assists as turnovers, after spending most of his career struggling just to break even there. He hasn’t even started to hit shots yet and he’s been awesome. As the guys said on the last pod, it’s like the game’s slowed down for him. It feels like he spent the two weeks recovering from his appendectomy in deep meditation, maybe learning there’s things (allegedly) more important than beating the Celtics, It feels like a different Joel. Unless of course it turns out in Game Seven to be the exact same Joel. Could still go either way.

Everything could still go either way tonight. But the thing we better get with before then is that there’s only two ways for it to go: win or lose. Win good, lose bad, end story. If we lose close, with our guys playing well and showing lots of positive signs for the future? I dunno, maybe we can find time to feel good about that in Second August or whatever. It will not mean anything this postseason, and it probably shouldn’t. We’ve done this too many times already. It’s time to burn the emotional hedging ships. No saving anything for the way back. We leave Boston with a win or we don’t leave at all. I don’t know which one it’ll be, but I know that for the first time this postseason, I’ll truly be there and totally locked in for it. Wake up everybody.

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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 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.