Let me be the 500,000th person now to say: I never thought this day would actually come. I wrote some bullshit last Tuesday about LeBron James taking till January to sign with a team because I thought it would be funny and why not. I didn’t think that was a terribly likely outcome, but I thought it was much more likely than the news dropping 72 hours later that LeBron would be signing to the Philadelphia 76ers — our Philadelphia 76ers, the same franchise that did all that crazy nonsense Mike talked about on Friday’s podcast, in roughly the same era — for two years and $8 million. “I wonder what these words will sound like coming out of my mouth,” I thought to myself as I walked into the other room of my apartment to tell my appropriately incredulous girlfriend Lisa about the news on Friday morning. They didn’t sound right, I’ll tell you that much.

For many years, Sixers fans have debated whether or not we are still in the Process Era, whether The Process ended with Sam Hinkie’s ousting or whether The Process is still ongoing as long as Joel Embiid is on the team. What the signing of LeBron makes clear to me — LeBron James, that is, signed by the Philadelphia 76ers — is that we are done with the Process (Noun) era and have now moved into the Process (Verb) era. The Process is no longer something that is happening to us, but something that we are going to have to be doing ourselves, continuously, all the time, possibly forever. It might take that long to accept, believe and truly understand that LeBron James is on this team, chose to be on this team, chose being on this team over being on literally any of the other teams. There aren’t enough Augusts in the world for us to wrap our heads around that. Not for me anyway.

It’s been 48 hours and two grafs now, so at this point I guess I should probably say for the record: I didn’t want this. It’s how I started my last article, so not like I’ve been particularly coy about it, but I don’t expect anyone to remember that or really anything else that happened before Friday morning. But yeah, despite the LeBron-to-Philly mania of the last couple days, despite Jason and Mike both thinking a couple messages from them had a chance to snap me out of an existential quandary nearly 20 years in the making, this is still something I’m having a pretty tough time with. Considering the reception Spike is currently getting for his own skepticism, I expect this will not be received warmly by the Ricky faithful. There’ll probably be at least one r/RightsToRickySanchez thread trying to get me fired. It’s fair. I considered skipping writing about the topic altogether, not wanting to harsh anyone’s good time or make myself any kind of online main character. But ducking this forever would be cowardly, even for me. So I waited two days, and now here I am. I didn’t want LeBron James to sign with the Sixers.

Why not? It barely even feels worth writing about, to be honest. Many years ago, when I was really getting back into basketball in the mid-late ‘00s after not watching for a long time, I found some stuff he did on and off the court annoying or unrelatable, and I started rooting against him. At the time, it was fun for me. It gave me a reason to care more about various games and playoff series that the Sixers weren’t involved in (and some that they were). It made me a more passionate, more invested NBA fan. I wrote about it a lot. It had nothing to do with him as a player or as a person; he was easily the best player I’d ever watched (not really remembering Jordan’s heyday) and he seemed like a generally OK human being. But he wasn’t my guy. I would have rather had the other guy win. That’s dumb, maybe, but it’s also sports. Sports are dumb. We take interests that are largely arbitrary over events that are basically without objective consequence and build emotions and personal stakes around them that make their outcomes feel something like life or death. That’s the whole thing.

Over the years I’ve become a little less irritated with LeBron, mostly because the entire league doesn’t quite revolve around him like it used to, and because it’s hard not to get at least a tiny bit sentimental about star players when they get closer to the end of things than to the beginning. I have to appreciate that he’s (still!) even older than I am, not many players I can say that about these days. I may have even rooted for him in a couple games of that Lakers-Rockets series last year, just because he felt like a semi-legitimate underdog in a way I finally found somewhat charming. I’m also just not as life-or-death about the larger NBA in general these days; I feel things a lot less explosively than I did when I was going through my version of NBA fandom puberty 15-20 years ago. There are plenty of teams LeBron could have signed with this offseason where I probably would’ve ended up wishing him well-ish.

And even now, I can objectively acknowledge that him coming to the Sixers is a cool and certainly a hilarious thing. It’s a massive get for the city of Philadelphia to now be the center of the NBA universe, and a huge get for Sixers fans to have one offseason where the buzz around the team may actually, finally be nearly as loud as it is for the Birds. Local indie rock paragons reporting Sixers-related announcements being made over the loudspeaker at ACME? I love that shit. It’s fantastic. And we’re gonna get a whole offseason of this, of Philadelphia at its absolute Philadelphia-est, tilting the entire axis of the NBA world in the meantime. Brian Windhorst is probably gonna be unleashing his cheesesteak power rankings within a couple months. It’s gonna be garish and stupid and hysterical and absolutely beautiful. As dozens of folks on my timeline the last couple days have pointed out, it’s the kind of shit you wish Dan McQuade was around for, which is just about the biggest compliment you can give a Philly sports happening.

For me? It’s definitely not the end of the world, or of my Sixers fandom, but it’s a little bit of a bummer, yeah. I don’t really sports-hate LeBron the same way anymore, but I just never wanted his thing to be our thing. I never felt like our thing needed him. Our thing was already epic enough, with enough massive personalities and totemic league figures and dramatic swings and occasionally traumatizing results. I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t have changed anything about it over the last decade, but I at least always felt good that win or lose or total collapse, it was entirely ours. As many other players and coaches and execs passed through over the years, from James Harden to J.J. Redick to Doc Rivers to Ben Simmons to the Colangelos, at the end of the day, The Process was first and foremost the story of Sam Hinkie, and of Joel Embiid, and of us, all of us who’d been there since the Andrew Bynum trade, if not far earlier. But the story with LeBron is always LeBron — it has been for the last 23 years, anyway, so I assume it probably will be here too. He’s the first guy we’ve had who’s bigger than The Process. It hurts me a little to have to give that up.

Don’t worry, I can hear you all at home — those of you who haven’t already closed this out to start typing angrily, anyway — Yeah, but what about winning? You remember WINNING? Isn’t that supposed to be what it’s actually about? Don’t you want that to be included in the Sixers’ story somewhere? Sure. I like winning. Winning feels good; better than losing, I’d tend to agree. And our chances at winning are undoubtedly better with LeBron on the court than with those minutes going to Justin Edwards or Johni Broome. I don’t know if it makes us title or even conference favorites, exactly; that’s not a debate for this week regardless. But being good at basketball and helping his team be good at basketball is a field in which LeBron has done quite extensive work over the past 23 years. I do not for a second doubt his ability to do so here.

That said, there’s still context to all of this, right? There’s a reason why the Sixers’ first-round series win against Boston last season and their first-round series win against the Nets three years earlier didn’t feel the same, even though they ultimately brought us equally close to actually winning a championship? There’s a reason why we look back fondly at some Sixers regular-season campaigns where they won under 20 games and shudder at the memory of some where they won 50-plus? There’s a reason why even if some of us know in our heads it might be the best thing long-term for the team to get off Joel Embiid’s contract, we still believe in our hearts that we should do whatever it takes to ride it out with him until the very very end? Not all wins, even the biggest wins, are created equal. If our long-overdue winning comes primarily as the closing chapter of the LeBron James story... it’s just not gonna be the same thing.

But look: I’m not going to insist I know how I’m going to feel if and when we do start winning with LeBron. Maybe winning with him feels good enough that the rest of it just sorta disintegrates into the ether for me. I expect that after writing this, if I express positive feelings about the LeBron-led Sixers in the months to come, I’ll get a flood of comments from folks about how I was wrong and they were right and told you so. But I’m not saying anything about what this will be. It could be great, both on the court and for me personally. I hope it will be.

And there are parts of it that are already making me gooey inside to think about. LeBron grabbing a rebound in traffic and then outletting to a streaking VJ for a massive thunderdunk. Joel drawing a double in the post and then throwing some showy, Jokic-ish high-low pass over his shoulder to LeBron at the basket for an easy two. LeBron feeding Maxey in the two-man game for an open movement three and then tousling his hair as Maxey’s smile stretches from Broad Street to Sacramento and the roof blows off the not-Wells Fargo Center and Kate and Alaa strangle each other out of excitement. There’ll probably be some not-so-giddy moments too, hurt egos and uncomfortable compromises and losses that really feel like they should have been wins. But there will be moments of absolute basketball nirvana to be had, no doubt, for us and for the guys on the court who’ve suffered the most for us. I promise I am not so hard-hearted as to not get joy out of the prospect.

What’s more, the part of me that is having the easiest time coming to terms with this is the part of me that has already accepted that the way I did want this story to end — with Joel Embiid unequivocally leading the Sixers to a championship — was not going to happen. We won one playoff series last year and it seemed to take absolutely every last drop of energy, character and determination that Joel and the rest of the team had to do it; the idea of them being able to do that and then do it again three more times during the same postseason felt far-fetched at a minimum. Jaylen Brown would’ve helped, but who knows how much; I certainly hadn’t penciled the Sixers in even as Eastern Conference Finalists at any point. So it stings a little less to close the book on that possibility knowing it was already about 96% shut anyway.

Maybe this actually sounds like me coming around to the signing, like Mike and Jason and everyone else are winning me over already. If so, that’s fine. There’s a reason this article is titled “Working My Way Through the LeBron Signing” and not “Condemning the LeBron Signing From Beyond the Grave.” I’m still figuring out my own feelings here, and it’s going to take a real long time for me to get through the whole thing; maybe longer than LeBron even has left in his NBA career. It’s obviously a no-brainer move for the Sixers and a humongous win for all of Philadelphia sports, nobody could credibly argue otherwise. It’s just not something I can drop all my emotional baggage over and be fucking pumped about right away.

My Nets fan co-worker told me on Friday, “If you can’t get excited about the greatest player in the sport’s history playing for your team in any stage of his career, I don’t know what to tell you.” I told him I wasn’t asking for him or anyone else to tell me anything. I’m not looking for sympathy or commiseration. I’m not looking to be convinced or to convince anyone about anything LeBron-related. I’m just trying to wrap my arms around the craziest, wackiest, most emotionally confusing thing that has ever happened to my team or to me as a sports fan and figure out what the hell it means for them and for me — mostly for me — moving forward. For nearly 20 years I rooted against LeBron James; now his (sports) success and my (sports) happiness are inextricably entwined. I’ll figure it out, but it’s going to take an adjustment a whole lot bigger than I can make in 48 hours or 48 days or maybe 48 months. If you can’t allow me that, I guess I don’t know what to tell you either.

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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 don’t want LeBron James to come to the Sixers. I honestly can’t remember if this is something I’ve ever talked about before on the Ricky or something I’ve talked about so much over the years that people are sick to death of hearing me go on about it — I think the last time LeBron-to-Philly was a quasi-plausible thing I had either just started at RTRS or was wrapping up my time at The 700 Level (shoutout Enrico Campitelli). But I’ve never been a LeBron guy and would very much like to never know what it’s like to have him on the Sixers. Probably not quite willing to go Spike-far and say that I don’t think I could root for the Sixers with him on them; I’m guessing I could find a way. But all things being equal it’s a firm No Thanks from me. Not a basketball decision at all; peak LeBron is undoubtedly the greatest player I’ve ever watched and he’s still very good in 2026. Having him on my team just isn’t an experience I’ve ever been interested in.

And like Spike, I don’t think it’s too likely it’ll happen. Don’t want to get too deep into that here; suffice to say I think LeBron is ultimately more interested in comfort than winning at this point in his career — as he probably should be, at least as I probably would be — and I don’t see the Philly situation as particularly comfortable for him. But who knows, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he loves the situation here, maybe Tyrese Maxey is his Klutch soulmate and VJ Edgecombe is like a third son to him and he’s already learning to two-finger-tap guitar solo from Nick Nurse. At this point I think what everyone wants more than anything is just for him to make a decision already, to go to Philly or Miami or Cleveland or Golden State or to none of those places, to stop dragging this thing out and just put his name to a contract so the rest of the league can move on with their business.

Well, everyone except me, anyway. I think he should drag this thing out even further, probably until January or so. I think it’s funnier that way.

I guess this is where Spike and I start to diverge on the matter. Spike appears to be getting driven slowly — probably not really that slowly — insane by all the LeBron Watch stuff, and seems desperate for the situation to reach resolution. I sympathize; if I were the co-host of a twice-a-week Sixers podcast that demanded I break down every clumsily dropped breadcrumb or awkwardly planted easter egg left by LeBron or his various associates over weeks of interviews and podcasts and seemingly unnecessary media appearances, I would also want this shit to be done with but quick. But, well, I’m not. All I really have to put up with is the well-meaning folks over at Sixers Bluesky who are deadset on convincing themselves that this is a real thing that could happen. I can basically handle them. Hell, they could be right.

But it is funny to me to watch everyone, including both my fellow haters and the supporters of LeBron to Philly 2026, be brought to madness by his indecision. It’s funny to watch the other teams who might otherwise still be wheeling and dealing this summer caught frozen in inaction by waiting for this one smugly smiling final domino to fall. It’s funny to watch the Shams Charanias and Brian Windhorsts of the world flail as they attempt to continue to break news on relevant developments of LeBron’s free agency, when there’s only really one relevant development about it still left to break, which none of them yet have. And it’s incredibly funny to have Dave Silver himself complain about how long LeBron’s taking, because he can’t figure out how to stack the Christmas schedule without yet knowing what team this guy is going to play for. It’s just fantastic stuff all around.

I strongly doubt this was LeBron’s main intent, or even one of his side intents, but this whole thing is kinda functioning as a biting satire of the NBA machine in general, that the entire thing can be nearly ground to a halt by one soon-to-be-42-year-old’s undying love of being courted at the Free Agency ball. Not that this isn’t a real thing — a guy who averaged 21-6-7 last year on decent efficiency potentially signing with an NBA team for the veteran’s minimum is obviously a story, and a big one. But the fact that it’s taking up quite so much of the oxygen shows just how much LeBron has dominated all aspects of basketball discourse over the past two decades and change, and how poorly the league has done in cultivating newer, younger stars to drive anywhere near equivalent levels of interest in the meantime. In reality, I don’t think any of these teams being discussed (including ours) are going to win the championship or not based on whether or not LeBron goes there. But just going by the league frenzy around it, you’d think this was still MVP LeBron in 2010 revealing his The Decision for the first time. Father Time: perhaps not undefeated after all.

A handful of folks — maybe even Spike and Mike? — have raised the possibility of LeBron not only dragging this out the rest of the summer, but actually waiting a couple months into the season to make his free agency call. And to that I say: Sure, why not? Makes sense. LeBron certainly seems to love this part of his league centrality as much as he loves actually playing star-level basketball at this point, and the longer he waits to start with the latter, the easier it’ll be for him to do it anyway. If money’s not a major issue for him here — #NoMr305 — why not wait to see what these teams are actually gonna be like next year? If Philly’s really in consideration, why not wait to see if Joel Embiid stays healthy, if VJ Edgecombe is ready to take the leap, if Jaylen Brown isn’t actually an enemy plant? Are Giannis and Bam gonna gel in Miami? Is Jimmy Butler still gonna be an elite basketball player and/or trade chip for Golden State? Will James Harden.... well, James Harden is always gonna be James Harden, but I’m sure there’s some other shit for him to figure out for Cleveland. Why not take as long as possible with it?

I think he should. Partly because it makes sense for him, but mostly because I think it’ll be funny for the rest of us. Those of us who aren’t really that invested in this at the end of the day, anyway. I don’t want LeBron to come here, but I do have to again agree with Spike that perhaps the only funnier thing in the world than him spending weeks burying Sixers references in his interviews like he’s Taylor Swift sending fans on a liner-notes scavenger hunt only to not sign with the Sixers, would be for LeBron to actually sign with the Sixers, at any point, for any reason. The idea of LeBron holding up a Sixers jersey with JAMES 76 on the back (of course he’d choose No. 76) while standing next to a constipatedly smiling Josh Harris... it’s almost too funny to contemplate. LeBron James, on the Sixers. The Philadelphia 76ers. Sam Hinkie’s and Joel Embiid’s Philadelphia 76ers. Straight-up ROFLCOPTER.

And if he does it in January or February? Even better. I’d still probably rather he go elsewhere, but the idea of us spending half a season with the best, most attention-hungry player of the 21st century on the team at the end of his career is almost too hilarious to pass up. By then maybe we could use the infusion of energy, interest and/or content anyway. The Sixers are 18-14 to start the season, with Tyrese in a bit of a funk, Jaylen’s efficiency dropping and Joel only playing one out of every three games? Oh, well, at least the best player since MJ is now somehow suddenly on the team. It seems like the ideal situation for all involved, honestly. So don’t listen to the fans, the media pundits, and particularly not the fucking NBA commissioner trying to tell you to just put an end to this already, LeBron. You just wait until you’re good and ready, and the rest of the league will have to wallow in the mess it’s made over the course of your entire career in the interim. After all, you’ve earned this. We all have.

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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 remember there being some tweet that went semi-viral on NBA Twitter, probably around 2019, that pictured a Sixers fan being at a future championship parade and saying to themselves: “I wonder what Robert Covington is up to.” You can tell it’s from 2019, both by Cov still being The One That Got Away and by the idea that a Sixers march down Broad Street was still a future that we were inexorably headed towards. But the implication, of course, was that us Process-era Sixers fans were so obsessed both with Our Guys and with flaming the front office for letting them go, that we would rather stew in anger and bitterness over what was no longer than to enjoy what actually was.

Well, that’s basically me this summer. Under the new fearless leadership of Mike GANSEYYYYYYY this offseason, the Sixers have pulled off the most shocking heist of perhaps the entire NBA decade — on the heister’s side, not the heistee, if you can believe it — scored a couple long-coveted, well-fitting free agents, and drafted a fun first-round guard who might be leading the Sixers to the first winning Summer League record of my lifetime. They’re even still in the hunt to host the greatest basketball player of the 21st century’s farewell tour. But all I can really think about is: I wonder what Kelly Oubre Jr.’s up to.

I mean, I sorta know: He’s in (or at least slowly headed towards) Indiana, where he signed a two-year, $17-million contract earlier this month, a deal first announced before the Sixers’ flurry of mega-activity. The news of him leaving was upsetting but not shocking; the Sixers long appeared to be headed in a different direction, one in which we had too many other guys to prioritize and/or guys who weren’t going anywhere regardless to likely make Oubre happy. I wished the final numbers had been a little bigger, just to make it a little less of a debate — if the question was whether we’d rather have Dean Wade for four years, $39 million or Oubre for two and $17, I certainly know what my answer would be — but it was fine, sort of. He was gone. Oh I. Oh I.

It set in gradually but unmistakably just how much I was already starting to miss Kelly. It’s hard to go three seasons on the Sixers and leave without having any particularly bad memories associated with you. Even some of our franchise legends — indeed, even our much-beloved two-timer Robert Covington — have big moments of marked underperformance on their resume, and/or things we always wanted them to learn to start doing but never did, and/or things they said or did or wanted that clearly meant it was never gonna happen for them here long-term. And the three years that Oubre was here for were by no means golden ones for the Sixers; had we not pulled off the upset of upsets in the first round last season, it would’ve inarguably been the most ignominious period in franchise history since before this whole thing started.

Still, it’s tough to think of Kelly and not only think of good times. Him hitting a three from the corner and blowing a kiss to the opposite bench. Him drawing an offensive foul and giving a big ol’ “FIRST DOWWWWN!” hand-chop in the other direction to the roaring home crowd. Him getting called for a defensive foul and rolling his eyes and doing the “flop” motion at an uninterested ref. Him swinging on the rim for a half-second too long while mean-mugging at the photographers for prosperity. Him learning how to pass just in time to give Mike a glimmer of last-second hope for his five-assist games pre-season prediction. Him putting up 30 and 12 at home against the Grizzlies the same night Cam Payne posted 32 and 10, to save the Sixers’ regular season and give Spike his biggest Sixersgasm of the year. Him turning all of Philadelphia into a vigilant neighborhood watch by getting hit by a car, then... maybe not who knows. And of course — of course of course — him forever dubbing the entire refereeing industry as bitch-made, going back multiple generations. It’s just amazing he was able to get so much personality, so much singularity, so many eternal moments into just three otherwise largely unremarkable seasons of Sixers basketball.

Was there Bad Kelly stuff in between all of those? I guess? I mean there must’ve been, right — otherwise he’d probably still be here? His three-point percentage was always a little low. His positional awkwardness as a 3/4 tweener could make him a tough fit in certain lineups. He never helped us a ton on the glass or as a secondary playmaker. When he wasn’t locked in, he could sometimes be really not locked in. But man... it is so easy for me to get frustrated with the Sixers on both a team and individual level. Joel Embiid is very easily my favorite basketball player of all time and if you asked me for a top 10 list of things he does that drives me nuts, I’d probably try to sneak in an 11th and 12th as honorable mentions. But Kelly... I don’t really feel any of it. It’s there, I guess, but I have to really struggle to think of any of it, and I can only kinda pretend to actually be mad about most of it. I mean look at that face. Who could stay mad at Kelly Oubre Jr.?

Maybe I wouldn’t be spending so much emotional energy this summer pining after Kelly if I hadn’t spent the last decade rooting against Jaylen Brown — and most of the last two decades rooting against LeBron James. I can recognize the great things they will or would do for the Sixers and acknowledge on an objective level that it’s fucking batshit crazy insane that we actually got the former and have even the slimmest of chances to land the latter, but does that mean I’m actively excited at the prospect of rooting for either on the Sixers? Not particularly. Labaron Philon Jr. will almost certainly be an easier sell on me once I totally lock into Summer League mode, but with the Phillies suddenly finding themselves in a real division race (and about to host All-Star festivities) and the World Cup hanging over everything, it’s been a little slower-going for me to get there this year. Then maybe Anfernee Simons in the preseason? Or maybe Jaylen will offer enough Boston subtweets over his livestreams that he’ll actually endear himself to me? Maybe Covington out of retirement for round three??

We’ll see, I suppose. In the meantime, I’m scouting Indiana as a League Pass second squad this year. They’re fun, right? They’re the one team Knicks fans hate as much as we now hate the Knicks? They haven’t beaten the Sixers in the playoffs since the Iverson era? They’ve still got T.J.? If Kelly’s there, I’m there. If the Sixers do end up having a championship parade, I’ll give him a lift. We don’t wanna risk him riding his bike around the parade route 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.

I turned 40 last week. Generally speaking, it’s something I’m pretty OK with — and I always get annoyed by people who make too big a deal hyping up their own washedness. But it has gotten me thinking a lot about the things I like and don’t like about getting older, and the phase of life that I’m in as I officially enter middle age — a whole lot more than I’m thinking about anything Sixers-related at the moment, anyway. (And that New York Times thing interviewing famous people about being 80+ was pretty cool, though obviously doing this as a 40-year-old is a lot lower-stakes. I had this idea well before I saw that anyway.)

So here are 20 negatives and 20 positives that I’m feeling right now, alternating between them. Negatives first so I don’t have to end on a bum note. Happy birthday to me, thanks for (unwittingly) allowing me this self-indulgence and I’ll try to figure out my thoughts on Labaron Philon, Jr. by this time next week.

1a. Just to start on something basketball-related — I don’t like how I largely lost interest in the larger NBA over the course of my thirties. I’ve written about this before, and it’s kinda only gotten more true since then. Bunch of reasons why: less free time, more petty grievances, fewer players I connect to, a league that doesn’t always care about maximizing its watchability or likability, etc. etc. etc.

But the end result is that I just don’t know or care that much about the wider league anymore. I see games halfway through the season and I have to remember (or realize for the first time) what guys are on new teams. Coaches on bad teams get fired before I even know who they are. The draft happened last week and I barely knew five of the guys taken in the pre-Sixers part of the first round. I used to be The Basketball Guy in my group of friends; now I feel like a fraud trying to make any kind of pronouncements or predictions to them about what’s going on in the Association.

In a certain sense it’s fine; I probably won’t be a worse person or writer for only being able to name six guys on the Washington Wizards. But it’s still a little disconcerting to me, and the older I get, the less likely it feels like I’ll be ever be able to turn it around.

1b. I do like that I still love and care about the Sixers as much as I ever did. Or at least, I have the capability to — maybe some games I’m able to brush off a little easier than I used to be, which doesn’t feel like the worst thing in the long run anyway. But I’m still tuning in every night, I’m still watching every Summer League game till the end and caring about preseason wins and losses. And during (and after) that Game Seven against the Celtics, it was the most emotional I’ve ever been over a sporting event.

I’m not as obsessive over the minutiae as I was when the Sixers were able to take up a larger percentage of my time and mental capacity, which I think is ultimately OK. But I’d be pretty bummed if I wasn’t able to feel the team the way I used to, for better and worse. I hope I’m able to maintain that sicko level for decades to come still.

2a. I don’t like how many of my memories of my own life I’m starting to lose. Not in a medical way that’s truly concerning, but just in a way where I’ve been at mental capacity for a very long time and every new thing I learn shoves out something else, usually about myself. (Bad news for me in particular as a trivia guy, and as a regular Sporcler constantly quizzing himself on Jack Nicholson’s 12 Oscar nominations and the starting lineup for the World Series-winning 2002 Los Angeles Angels of Aneheim.)

I don’t think anything I’m forgetting is ultimately that important, otherwise I’d have thought about it recently enough to remember it now. But things are definitely going — names of old roommates and co-workers, classes I once took, running jokes with old friends, things like that. I feel like I remember about a dozen things total that I did in college, and not for fun reasons. Just that the longer you live, the more impossible it is to keep hold of everything up there, and the more you have to make peace with some stuff just being gone forever. Not a fan of that.

2b. I do like getting to watch great TV shows or movies for the first time in a decade or two and feel like I’ve forgotten them enough that I’m almost watching them again for the first time. TV in particular, I’ve come to actually prefer my second time through — or my first time in a long while, whichever time that ends up being — to the first time.

There’s something special about not only getting to relive the show — usually remembering all the big moments but not necessarily how they were connected — but about reliving who you were the first time you watched all the episodes, and the people you watched it with and the conversations you had about it afterwards and all that. It just becomes a richer experience. I like it a lot.

3a. I don’t like losing touch with people for no real reason. As I get older there are just too many people who are or have been in my life in a meaningful way — which is a blessing in one sense, of course, but also something of a curse in how it’s just not particularly possible to make consistent time and space for all of them.

I have dear friends, longtime friends, who I haven’t talked to in half a decade, simply because neither one of us has had specific reason to make the effort. I have friends I care about deeply who I am confident at this point I will never see socially again, just because the shit they’ve got going on and the shit I’ve got going on is no longer the same shit. And the longer the gap becomes, the harder it is to overcome it, because you start to wonder if there was a reason you stopped talking to them in the first place. You wonder if maybe there’s something they’ve been mad at you about forever without you realizing it. The silence multiplies.

And then if and when you do reconnect, you usually realize you were both being stupid and lazy and that there’s no reason to ever go that long without talking again. But then the clock restarts and the cycle repeats. It’s dumb and I fucking hate it.

3b. I do like having some active friendships that span multiple decades at this point and still feel really meaningful. I had a trio of high school friends surprise me at my 40^th birthday party last weekend and it was an absolute emotional wallop. Being able to spend time with people who have known you in nearly every version you’ve ever been and still want to be part of your life is incredibly validating of both your past and your present, and makes you feel like you’ve maintained some critical part of your younger self all these years. There’s really nothing else quite like it.

4a. I don’t like how there are certain things I’d hoped I would organically get better at as I got older that I never did. There’s dozens of them, but the biggest is probably being able to convincingly dress like an adult, something I’ve never been good at and have shown precious little improvement upon in 22 years of technical adulthood.

I thought maybe it would come to me through the natural order of things as I grew up, or that maybe someone in my life — a significant other or an employer — would sorta force it onto me until it just became part of my life. But none of that ever happened and I still dress like an overgrown late-’90s 13-year-old 90% of the time, and an overambitious late-’90s 13-year-old unconvincingly trying to be taken seriously the other 10%.

I certainly don’t expect or deserve any sympathy for this, because I’m extremely fortunate to have a life that allows me to function ably even while I dress like I’m auditioning to be the younger brother of one of the teen witches in The Craft. And if I ever put a concerted effort into it, maybe I could dress more convincingly like a grown-up — wouldn’t be confident, but it’s not impossible. But the fact that I haven’t ever cared enough to figure it out, and that adult life hasn’t just naturally granted me the capabilities, is sort of a bummer. Again, just one of many such examples.

4b. I do like that there are things I care about now that I never would’ve expected to when I was younger. The biggest one is probably travel. Not that I’m Carmen Sandiego or anything as an adult, but when I was a teenager, I couldn’t anticipate there ever being a free-time destination for me more appealing than my own TV room. Now I go on trips out of the country basically every year and it’s fun and I love it.

Part of it is realizing the things my family prioritized on trips (museums, historical landmarks, guided tours) and the things I prioritize (eating, drinking, wandering) are very different, and part of it is that I now have a travel partner who I enjoy going places with and is significantly better at trip-planning than I am. But my brother and I used to give my dad such shit for his love of scenic overlooks, and his insistence on stopping at one at any given opportunity. Now I enjoy a good scenic overlook as much as anybody. It’s cool to be able to change in those small ways.

5a. I don’t like losing my hair. I fucking hate it really. It’s the one physical thing about myself I have great difficulty accepting. In my head I still have the hair that I had when I was in my early 20s, and if I catch myself in the mirror at the right time at the right angle I can still convince myself that it’s close enough to actually being the case. Then I see a picture of myself from the side or I catch a glimpse of myself after the wind has blown my hair back or something and I realize the game is long over. It knocks the breath out of me every time.

It could be worse; by the time my brother was my age he’d been almost totally bald for years. But maybe that would be preferable at this point, so I could completely give up the ghost and just embrace a lifetime of going fully Matt Pinfield (and/or committing to being a regular hat-wearer). I dunno. I wish I could just go back. I always will.

5b. I do like how generally, my body has held up pretty well. Not that it’s a perfect or even good body; I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to any of my friends or anything. But it more or less feels like the same body I’ve had for the last decade or two. The things about it that have gotten worse don’t change my life or the way I live it that much. The things that it’s particularly bad at are things that it’s always been particularly bad at. There isn’t much that I want to do that I used to be able to do that my body just won’t let me do anymore.

I really don’t take that for granted. I know plenty of people around my age who can’t eat the way they used to, can’t drink the way they used to, can’t get around the way they used to. I know people who are missing basic functions they used to have. To have a body that still allows myself a basic baseline of livability — without even doing most of the things I probably should be doing to ensure that it stays that way — is a true blessing.

6a. I don’t like how much I hate the winter now. The cold in general just kinda fucks me up. It was never my jam in the first place, but I used to be relatively tolerant about it. I went all through college in New York without wearing a jacket, for reasons that currently escape me. But I did it, and I don’t remember it being a particularly big deal.

But now I just can’t handle it. I get to January and it’s like OH MY GOD ENOUGH WITH THIS ALREADY. I get mad. I get sick. I take it personally. I’ll rant to anyone who’s willing to listen (and probably some who aren’t) about how fucking done I am with winter and how much I hate it and think it’s dumb and wish it would just stop just stop just STOP COME ON NOW. Every winter it’s worse. Every winter I get more irritable. Every winter I get more aggravated by that fake first warm part of spring when it then gets cold again for a little while. I don’t know how much worse I can get but I don’t see me getting much better, at least until I’m a retiree living in Arizona or something.

6b. I do like how much I love the summer now. I was always a summer guy, but now I really cherish the season, feel honored by its presence in my life. Everything is happier for me in summer. I would rather do absolutely nothing in the summer than do just about anything in the winter. Starting in mid-June, I tell Lisa every day how much I love the summer and how sad I am that it’s almost over. I love it almost as much as I hate the winter.

7a. I don’t like how scary going to the doctor is now. I’m beyond overdue for my most recent visit; it’s been a good long time since I went for non-urgent reasons. But I am at the point where I’m afraid every time that the next time I go is going to be the end of the good times. It’s going to be the time where I get informed about the Secret Thing Wrong With Me that means I have to totally stop doing everything I like doing and start living a totally different life just to maintain that baseline. Or that it’s already too late and that it’s just a matter before my body totally betrays me no matter what I do now.

So I put off going as long as possible. Which is the dumbest thing of all, because it actively increases the chances that the next time I go, the vague thing I’m fearing will actually end up being the reality. I’ll have to figure out a way to force myself to go sometime in the next few months. But it’s hard. And it’s only ever going to get harder.

7b. I do like that I’ve gotten smarter about day-to-day maintenance things that allow me to generally feel better in the small ways that I control. Now when I drink too much, I take Advil before I go to bed so I don’t wake up with a splitting headache. When I’m gonna have a lot of dairy, I take antacids first to minimize the heartburn. When I’m gonna eat an unbalanced diet, I take fiber pills to make sure I still shit OK. Sorry for the oversharing there, but I also like that I’m generally less embarrassed about the kind of daily upkeep stuff that it’s worth admitting does make me a generally happier, healthier person. It’s really not the worst thing.

8a. I don’t like how there are certain anxieties that it seems like at this point I’m probably just never going to lose. Any time I text someone who doesn’t text me back, any time I’m afraid I’ve done or said something insensitive, any time I think I’ve made a considerable professional gaffe, my brain will fixate on the worst possible reality that could result from any of it until my entire being is taken over with it as if it has already actually happened. Never mind that the last 49 times something like that happened it turned out to not really be much; that just makes it like I’m facing a hitter that’s had a long 0-fer streak and convincing myself that only means he’s that much more due this time around.

It’s terrible. It’s one of my worst, most self-destructive qualities. It forces me into seemingly endless spirals that consume days, weeks, sometimes even months of my life. Moments that should have been joyous or prideful turn sour. And it hasn’t gotten better with age; I still always feel like the next one is gonna be the big one, the one that belatedly validates every insecurity I’ve ever had and proves I was always right to be so paranoid all along.

8b. I do like that, even though I haven’t gotten any better at not having these spirals, or not spiraling so hard when I have them, I do have a better sense that when I do spiral, chances are I’m eventually going to come out of it. It doesn’t make them any better in the moment, but it does make them a little less destructive in the long term, because I’m at least better at not making any rash decisions based on them that actually will affect my larger life. I’ve gone through enough of these at this point to know I’ve just got to kind of give myself over to the spiral for a little bit, get to the other side of what I’m worried about, and life will probably go on at the end of it. It’s something, anyway.

9a. I don’t like how things feel like they’re actively getting worse in the world and in society — but particularly how it’s hard to tell how much of that is reality and how much of it is just getting older.

There are so many things it feels like I could point to about this being an exceptionally bad time in human (and particularly American) history, things that seem like proof of societal devolution, of cultural regression, of the erosion of basic common morality and decency. But, like… doesn’t every generation eventually come to think that? Isn’t it a typical middle-age cliché to start to feel that way? Am I just surrounding myself with other people entering a similar stage of life who are also starting to think this way and unable to separate their own perspectives from the larger truths of the matter? Or is it actually ignorant of me to face everything wrong with the world and think my aging viewpoint could outweigh all the superficially obvious actual fucking bullshit?

Hard to tell sometimes.

9b. I do like how I’ve lived long enough to see that the way things always have been aren’t the way things always have to be. Attitudes about LGBTQ rights, about sexual harassment and discrimination, about cultural awareness, about what can and can’t be accepted into the American mainstream — all of that has evolved over 40 years (or really the 30 years or so that I’ve been in any way socially conscious) to a point that I never would have guessed when I first started paying attention.

Even as some of that is seemingly starting to go back in the wrong direction, there are undeniable strides that have been made and are still being made that will probably continue to change the world in ways I can’t possibly predict right now. It’s cool to know that that’s the case, because you’ve actually been around enough to see the proof of it.

10a. I don’t like how it’s harder to be exceptional for your age at something when you’re 40. I was a fairly precocious motherfucker when I was younger, and knowing stuff about older movies and music and thing was something I could rely on — in my head, anyway — to make me seem impressive to people. Now that kind of knowledge is all just Old People Stuff anyway, and I’d be wise to downplay it in most public situations. (Not that I can usually resist.)

And it’s just kinda true in general. By the time you’re 40 you’re supposed to be good at some stuff. It’s more depressing if you’re not than impressive if you are. You don’t get to coast on being ahead of the curve anymore.

10b. I do like how I can be a little more confident professionally that the things I’m good at are actually things that I’m good at. I don’t always feel like the best writer or editor in the world, and yeah I get the Impostor Syndrome thing from time to time like anyone. But for the last 16 years now, I’ve been paid pretty comfortably and pretty consistently to write and edit — so shit, someone out there must think I’m pretty good at it. It’s fortunate to have that kind of hard, objective validation for the main thing that you do.

11a. I don’t like how it’s harder to start on totally new things the older you get. Sometimes I get ideas for new projects or new skills to learn or whatever and I have to ask myself — am I too old to start doing this for the first time?

Not that that should ever be the only consideration, and I certainly don’t want to punk myself out of real opportunities with my own premature ageism. But I just feel like it would be impractical not to consider it with certain things. If I was going to try to start a video series discussing the Billboard charts, isn’t it worth asking myself first if I’ll be able to pick up the nuances of the format as well as someone half my age who’s been doing video their entire life? Or if I’ll even be able to handle the technological parts of it without needing to outsource so much of it that it becomes financially and practically unfeasible? Of if anyone is actually going to want to watch a balding, overweight 40-year-old they’ve never seen before talk about contemporary pop music once a week? Maybe, but maybe not.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t want to still push myself into new ventures and continue to try new things and so on. But it’s just a little harder to be excited about yourself being at the center of those things once you’ve moved into middle age.

11b. I do like how it’s easier to know my capabilities for the kind of things I have done before. I can get an idea to do something in my wheelhouse — a list, a podcast series, a staff-wide something or other — and no matter how ambitious it is, I know if I give myself a certain amount of time to do it (and I tell enough people that I’m going to do it), one way or the other, I’ll get it done.

Sometimes I go a little too far or too hard with it, and getting the project done to my satisfaction in the allotted timeframe comes at a certain cost to my health, my sanity and/or my relationships. But I do get it done. And I know that I will, because I’ve done it so many times before. It’s really nice to be able to have that kind of faith in yourself and your abilities.

12a. I don’t like how the evolution of media has cut most of the pop cultural institutions of my youth from the current timeline. I find it very upsetting that the fact that still being a devoted viewer of cable television — along with my tendency to watch a movie I only sort of like for the seventh time just because it’s on — basically makes me an 8-track enthusiast to most of my peers. I don’t like having to explain to younger co-workers that the Video Music Awards (not only the show, but also the awards themselves) were something that used to carry real cultural weight. Radio countdowns, ESPN Classic retrospectives, special trivia issues of Entertainment Weekly… I’m confident I sound like Grandpa Simpson talking to anyone under the age of 30 (35?) about any of ‘em.

And I’m sure there are TikTok- and YouTubeified versions of all of these things, and the young folks who really want to learn about this stuff will certainly find a way. And I’m confident my parents went through the same thing with my brother and me when they were my age. But it’s just a weird feeling to know that the great majority of ways you figured out about pop culture as a kid are no longer really available or of interest in the same way to future generations.

12b. I do like seeing canons shift as I get older. Sometimes it can be frustrating, of course — I’ll never understand why Pearl Jam has been totally left behind to history. But my favorite band growing up was New Order, a band who at the time was more commercially successful but far less critically celebrated than its first incarnation, Joy Division. Now the two are basically on equal cultural standing; you’ll find T-shirts for Power, Corruption & Lies besides the ones for Unknown Pleasures at Urban Outfitters. I’m happy to see that.

It’s not just the changes that tilt in my favor that intrigue me, though. I’m forever annoyed that “Vienna,” a song I view as (at best) the seventh-best song on The Stranger and which I never once heard on the radio growing up, is now considered one of Billy Joel’s signature songs due to its Gen-Z embrace. But I think it’s cool that such canons continue to evolve 50 years after the fact. And the fact that TikTok has made it so that any song from any time can still pop off as one of the biggest songs in the world I think is super dope. It makes music history feel that much more vital to know that at any moment, the past can still so heavily impact (and be so heavily impacted by) the present.

13a. I don’t like how a lot of the media of youth culture has left me totally in the dust. Growing up I thought as long as I stayed current with music, movies, television and sports, I’d be in pretty good shape with contemporary pop culture. It didn’t occur to me that totally new core elements of pop culture would develop — probably should have, but certainly didn’t — with influencer and streamer culture, internet fandom splintering, TikTok becoming the new MTV, and so on. It’s all so wildly alien to my experience that I had to admit defeat with it almost immediately; to try to catch up now would be a full-time job.

Not that it’s a particular tragedy to not be well-versed in IShowSpeed’s work as a 40-year-old; to a certain extent that’s none of my business anyway. But at one point, I did consider myself something of a pop culture expert — and come on, I did winning a fucking nationally televised television trivia competition to that effect, dammit — and for there now to be several major streams of pop culture that I have close to zero frame of reference for… it’s not shocking, it’s maybe even inevitable, but it is distinctly sobering.

13b. I do like how I still love and feel deeply connected to contemporary pop music. It’d certainly be good for my job at Billboard for me to be better versed in TikTok and YouTube, but it’d be a much more considerable fucking problem if I was faking the funk as far as the actual music we were covering goes. And I did always worry that there might be a point with me and modern music where I could follow it on an intellectual level but not really a visceral one, where the music stopped saying anything of real relevance or importance to me. Certainly that happened with my parents; it’s already happened with a lot of my friends. Hell, it’s even happened to some of my older co-workers.

I’m very happy that it hasn’t happened to me yet. I’m not necessarily looking for new artists to tell me something about my life the way I might have when I was a teen, but I still just fucking love pop music. I still get so excited by a great pop song doing well on the charts, by a great new pop artist becoming a superstar. I saw Olivia Rodrigo and Bad Bunny in concert in Spain a few days apart earlier this month and both experiences were absolutely electric and impossibly joyous. And I still feel like I just get it. And I enjoy following it all so much, watching the ups and downs, the microtrends shifting one way and then back, the unexpected developments popping out of nowhere. It still feels like an honor to get to cover all of it. I’d be so sad if I ever lost that, and I’m very glad that at this point I really don’t think I will.

14a. I don’t like how much easier it is to accidentally come off as creepy or just kinda unwelcome as a 40-year-old — and how much I now need to consider that possibility in everything that I do. Particularly in the workplace, I like to be social and I enjoy the company of a lot of my younger co-workers, but I also have to constantly be checking myself: Am I overstaying my welcome? Am I injecting myself into a conversation that I categorically do not belong in? How much is my presence actually desired at this function, or how much is it junior staffers not wanting to seem rude to a more senior one?

Even in a purely professional capacity, it also stinks to constantly be worrying about becoming the office blowhard. I’m often reticent to talk to my younger co-workers even about something purely work-related, because I’ve worked with the guy who was constantly sending notes and making comments just to hear the sound of his own voice and just to make himself feel useful and important, and I very much do not want to be that guy. But I don’t know if anyone ever tells you when you become that guy. Maybe everyone just assumes you’ve always been him. Maybe you really always have been.

14b. I do like that being 40 kinda leaves me in the middle of my co-workers agewise, so that I don’t feel totally disconnected generationally from either upper management or our staff writers. It’s particularly crazy that FOTB Jason Lipshutz, my former IRL roommate, is not only my boss now, but one of the big bosses of the entire editorial staff — it’s cool to not just have a buddy in that position, but someone so close to my age and my experience. When I go to talk to him I don’t have to feel like a kid visiting the principal’s office.

And I’m very comfortable being middle-management while being middle-aged. I have no real desire to be one of the big bosses, but I also wouldn’t feel great about still grinding away at a junior position at 40. I feel like I’m generally where I should be level-wise professionally, which is certainly a privilege to get to say.

15a. I don’t like that I still read the comments, still let them bother me sometimes. I don’t like that I still want more for myself in terms of visibility, recognition from my peers, acknowledgment of who I am and what I do. I don’t like that I get jealous of my peers who have real followings, who’ve written books, who have way more social media presence (and/or real life presence) than I do. I don’t like that I still get those moments of wondering if any of it is really worth it, if I should just keep my head down and do what I have to do and not really try that hard with anything beyond what is specifically asked of me. You hope when you’re younger that you eventually grow beyond all of that; I certainly haven’t, and it doesn’t seem like many people I know have either.

15b. I do like that I mostly still end up doing what I do anyway. Sometimes it’s just for a couple hundred listeners or readers, sometimes it’s just for a handful of my friends, sometimes it’s just for me and me only. But more often than not, I get through those moments of panic and doubt and insecurity and I just do my shit. And I usually end up feeling pretty good about it. Not always, and not always forever, but enough that I’ll probably end up doing it again the next time, too. And I’ve done it enough by now to feel confident that that’ll be the case.

16a. I don’t like that I am absolutely terrified of having to start over at this point in my professional life. I’m sure everyone with a job lives with that fear, but it feels particularly pronounced in my line of work, where there’s sort of an industry-wide understanding that if you lose your full-time job, you’re not getting another one. The island of folks who get to do this for a living shrinks every year, and once the waves swallow you there’s no swimming back to shore.

If I lose my job at Billboard, the options for me are either to start my own newsletter, attempt to cobble together enough freelance work to roughly add up to one full-time job, or to leave music writing altogether. All three options are very frightening for different reasons. I know people who have made each of them work, and no one will or should cry for me if I’m next to have to figure out which one is best for me. But to have done this for as long as I have now — nearly 10 years at this job, about 15 years total as a full-time music writer — and not get to do it anymore will be an exceptionally difficult adjustment for me, and one that I live in constant fear of having to make. Because chances are I will at some point.

And it’s not just work, either. Any major life reboot at this point is one that would be tremendously tough for me to recover from. In a sense that’s a gift, because it means I’m comfortable where I am now, and it’s not like I’ve ever been particularly excited at the prospect of uprooting myself. But the idea of having to start over at 40 — with my job, with my relationship, even with my apartment — is exponentially scarier than it would’ve been 10 years ago, and most likely exponentially less scary than it will be 10 years from now. Good to have stuff to not want to lose, but hard to hold onto all of it.

16b. I do like having been at Billboard long enough that if I was fired tomorrow, I do feel like I would be missed. Certainly not by everyone, and probably not as much as I’d ideally like, but in general my departure would be noticed and felt and to at least some extent, mourned. I’m certainly not irreplaceable — no one is — but I’ve done enough to put my imprint on the office and the staff and the brand that there would be a specifically shaped hole that my absence would leave. I’ve tried hard to, anyway, in a way that earlier in my life I might not have. It makes it all feel a little more meaningful.

17a. I don’t like how the longer you’re around, the more versions of yourself that you could potentially be start to rapidly disappear. A small part of me will likely always believe that I should have spent my life as a session drummer, but considering I’m now 40 and have still never actually learned how to play the drums, it’s probably a little late for that. A lot of things I’ve never done at this point, I’ll never do. “Never” feels tough.

Not that I would necessarily be all that enthusiastic about upending my life to go into full-time drumming territory even if that was a realistic path to professional or personal success. And not that it’s ever really too late to try that or anything else; I know people who have made fairly dramatic life changes in their 40s and are much happier for it. But it’s hard not to feel like some more of those options are falling away every year, and scary to know that even if I wanted to change my life dramatically now — or especially if I did 10 years from now — the number of unlocked doors would be fewer, and even some of those would be pretty hard to open.

17b. I do like that I like the version of myself that I am at 40 probably more than I ever have, or at least for as long as I’ve been an adult. I’ve had moments of being scared about not being the version of myself I would ultimately want to be, but these days I’m much more scared that I won’t get to continue being this version of myself for as long as I want — which, for now at least, is basically indefinitely. My primary emotion when I look at where I am now, where I’ve been and where I could be going isn’t regret or panic but gratitude. That feels super lucky.

18a. I really don’t like how one of my parents is dead and has been for the better part of a decade now. When my dad died in 2018 at age 65, it felt way too soon, but it feels a whole lot younger to me now at 40 than it did to me then at 32. It’s kinda making me angry after the fact in a way I never totally felt at the time. He was barely retirement age. He wasn’t even retired yet himself. He never got to enjoy a pressure-free life. He never got to see Bryce Harper on the Phillies. There’s a lot of life that he missed out on. There’s a lot of life I would be pissed off to not get to experience if I was him. There’s a lot I wish he could have been there for.

I don’t want to be angry about it, and I don’t think he’d want me to be angry about it, and so it’s not something I dwell on often. He had a great life and he left us with everything we could have wanted from him. But looking at 65 being just 25 years away now… it really doesn’t feel like he got a lot of time. He deserved so much more.

18b. I do like how my mom is still living a good and full life, that I still have a great relationship with her, that she’s still an absolute rock for me and my brother, who I also feel closer to than ever. I like that we’ve been given the time we needed to figure out who we are as a family even without my dad around, and still be able to find joy and comfort with one another. I like how our relationships with each other have evolved and deepened over the years. I like knowing how my dad would like to see us how we are together now.

19a. I don’t like not knowing what the future holds. Nobody does, I imagine, and I don’t think I necessarily have particular reason to be more fearful than most. But it’s that feeling of being due at the plate again, and the older I get and the more years I go since the last major tragedy in my life, the more I feel like it’s surely about time for another. A health scare that turns out to be more than just a scare. A professional blow that can’t be recovered from. An action whose consequences will never be undone. I don’t know what it is, it’s just hard to shake the fear that it’s coming.

I hope I’m wrong — but the problem is, grand scheme, I’m definitely not wrong. It’s impossible to live a life where none of that stuff happens ever. It’s just a matter of when, and you hope the answer is a long time from now. But the older you get, the harder it is to act like all that is so far beyond the horizon it’s not even worth thinking about. And once you start thinking about it, it can be pretty hard to stop.

19b. I do like how many such near crises have been averted over the years by me and the people I care about. Both Lisa’s parents and my mom have had major health scares that they’ve basically gotten through. My brother’s brain has been extremely mean to him the past couple years — still is, occasionally — but he’s bounced back in an incredible way, and we just spent a lot of my birthday weekend in New York together with his wife and Lisa feeling like old times. Better than old times, even, considering how grateful we were to all be there. Everything could be so much worse than it is.

It won’t be this way forever, because nothing is. But it is for now, and I’m glad I know to appreciate how special that is.

20a. I don’t like thinking I’m closer to the end than the beginning. Not trying to be dramatic, or to make 40 seem like I’ve already got one foot in the grave. Just a mathematical probability — at least according to the internet, which says men are currently pacing at 76.5 years on average in this country. Seems about right.

I’m terrified of death, of nothingness, of a lack of consciousness. I’m terrified of a slow death and I’m terrified of a quick death. I’m terrified of a death I see coming and I’m terrified of one that takes me completely by surprise. None of it sounds OK to me. None of it sounds manageable. In comparison to death, life seems pretty solid, and I’d like to stay on the latter path for as long as possible. But I’m certainly not gonna live like one of those billionaire extend-o nuts — couldn’t even if I wanted to — and the rest of it is what it is. Can’t say I like that much at all.

And even before that, I really don’t know what the final stage of my life could possibly look like. Lisa and I don’t have kids, neither do my brother and his wife or Lisa’s sister and her husband. There’s no next generation to take care of us. Hopefully we’ll have some retirement money by then — I know, making a call to Anthony Degli Obizzi is definitely on my list for the next year — but it’s not gonna be a fortune, and the bottom could fall out for any of us financially at any moment before then.

It’s hard for me to picture. I’d still rather not even try. But I’ll have to someday, and that day isn’t as long from now as I’d like. Fuck, I’ll be lucky to even get to that day. My dad didn’t.

20b. I do like that I made it this far. When I was 20 I couldn’t imagine my life at 40, couldn’t imagine myself with any amount of professional or personal success, couldn’t imagine myself living an adult life devoted to anything but trying desperately to cling to whatever last scraps of youth were even moderately available to me. To be here at 40 with a job and a partner and a family and friends and a life that I all love — and writing about all this shit on a platform as esteemed as the Ricky — is kinda overwhelming when I think about it. It’s a real accomplishment, and one of my bigger ones.

Not dying would be an even bigger one, and I’ll probably focus on that one more on the off chance that I’m still around and writing on here 40 years from now. But for now, I think I can afford to leave on this one as my primary takeaway. Half my life ago, I never would’ve guessed I’d have so much to still like about my life at this point. Maybe I shouldn’t discount the possibility of my saying the same thing twice my life from now.

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

It’s 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.