Can The Sixers Ever Be Fun Again?

The Sixers were good this year, but hardly fun. Can we ever get back to having both?

[photo: Mitchell Leff/Getty Images]

Mike O’Connor is the best O’Connor in basketball writing. Previously of The Athletic, you can find Mike on Twitter @MOConnor_NBA.

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For better or for worse, the NBA’s return via the bubble in Orlando is officially underway. The Sixers arrived in the bubble last Thursday, they’ve had multiple practices already, and their first scrimmage will happen July 24th against the Grizzlies.

The Sixers are coming back. And before they do, allow me to ask you this very simple question: have you missed them during this hiatus? And not just the idea of them -- not just the distraction of having a local basketball team to watch on TV. I mean, have you missed the actual experience of following the 2019-20 Philadelphia 76ers?

Have you missed the Sixers getting up by 18 early on against the Hornets, taking their foot off the gas, getting booed, and eventually holding on to win by 5? Have you missed Al Horford clapping after missing his 4th jump hook of the game? Have you missed Joel Embiid putting up a half-hearted 22 and 10 while never cracking a smile and proceeding to talk after the game about how he’s not having fun anymore? 

From what I can gather, no matter which angle you observed from -- to root for, (from my perspective) to cover, or to be a part of -- the 2019-20 Sixers just were not a fun experience. It was a stressful, frustrating, and often joyless experience that left everyone quite a bit less satisfied than they would be following a normal basketball team.

The obvious question is: why? The Sixers were on pace to win around 50 games despite a slew of injuries. They have two All-Stars under the age of 26 who are under contract for at least a few more years. They have a few young role players who have the potential to be home-grown success stories for years to come. And just about every player on the team is extremely likable!

What exactly was driving this aura of frustration?

It would be easy to write off the continual sense of dread as being a result of the crushing weight of expectations. The reckoning that comes with missing your expected win total by 10 games is nothing to write off. But it’s not the only factor at play; the sense of angst among the fanbase goes deeper than that.

This Sixers team not only disappointed, but did so via a truly arduous and joyless style of play that clearly took its toll on the players themselves. Much like last year’s Boston Celtics team, the Sixers produced a factory’s worth of quotes alluding to the fact that the team is just not enjoying the season. And when the team is openly not having fun, that introduces an entirely new level of disappointment for the fans.

Fans of any team want to feel on a deep level that the team enjoys itself and gets along. For proof of that, one need only look at the excitement that runs through Sixers Twitter any time Embiid and Ben Simmons say something nice about one another. And there’s nothing wrong with that whatsoever -- it’s natural!

I say all this simply because it explains why all of the drama, passive-aggressive quotes, and overall lack of joy contributed in a major way to making this team so frustrating. Most notable, of course, was the stunning lack of fun that Mr. Embiid was having. 

This season, Embiid has hardly looked anything like the player or person that he was back in his rookie season -- that spry, frenetic, overly wound-up ball of fun has evolved into a coy, downtrodden player who might himself be unsure on why he’s not enjoying basketball as much.

There could be many reasons that Embiid has lost his pep (the fact that the team has gotten rid of every single player that he’s ever meshed with on or off the court sure hasn’t helped!), but regardless of the cause, it was a bit of a soul-crushing experience to see Embiid so openly frustrated and not enjoying basketball.

With all the things that have happened in the world since then, it’s easy to forget the severity that this situation reached. He shushed the home fans and told them to be better! He joked about himself being the villain to the fans, and alluded to leaving and teaming back up with Jimmy Butler in Miami! He repeated over and over again that he wasn’t having fun! These things are not normal!

This season was essentially the perfect cocktail for a miserable fan experience. The pain of falling short of expectations combined with the misery of watching joy sapped out of their favorite player made each fan take a deeper dive into frustration. Recognizing that the personnel decisions are likely in large part to blame, their anger quickly spread to management, and the fanbase analyzed and became aware of management’s mistakes -- and the permanence of them -- in a way that perhaps they never had before. And having to confront the fact that management may have successfully sucked the happiness out of The Process himself led to a widespread, top-to-bottom feeling of dread towards the organization. 

By a certain point in the season, the Sixers arrived in a deadly cycle in which each mediocre and aesthetically abhorrent performance was just another reminder of how much the organization has failed Embiid, and how dire the state of affairs is. 

Of course, one would be wrong to put all of the blame on management for how Embiid carried himself this year. You can’t shush the home crowd and tell them to step it up, Joel. Nor can you joke about teaming back up with Butler. It’s not fair to the fans, period.

But the fact that we have even arrived here -- where Embiid jokes about himself being a villain to the fans -- was the cherry on top of the shit sandwich that was this Sixers season. Embiid was long considered the franchise savior -- the Second Coming of Christ, according to some. He is the process. This whole thing was about him, primarily. For him to be so openly dissatisfied this season provided a level of angst for the fans that many never thought possible. And honestly, the Sixers won’t truly be enjoyable until this thing mends; they won’t be fun to follow again until Embiid is having fun again. 

As for whether that can happen in the bubble, there is hope! Maybe Shake Milton comes into the starting lineup as the perfect chess piece and puts everyone into their proper role. At the least, the continued removal of Horford from the starting lineup will help. Maybe the sheer time off has also given Embiid time to mentally reset. 

But again, Embiid’s frustrations are likely a symptom of a larger problem — management’s inability to put its stars in a position to be successful. Long term, that’s the big concern here, and for many, management’s failures create a bit of an existential fandom crisis. 

Spike and Mike have often used the analogy of the Ship of Theseus as a metaphor for wondering if this is really still “The Process” if all of the people involved are different from the ones who started. But the pieces of the ship are not the only thing that has changed here; the entire direction that the ship was headed has changed -- and that was what motivated everyone to jump aboard the ship to begin with!

Back in the early process era, the ship was rickety and the waters were rough, but all process trusters agreed with the direction toward which the ship was headed. Nowadays, the ship is still rickety, and waters are still rough, but now, no one is confident in the direction the ship is headed. 

After striking out on big move after big move these past few seasons, the Sixers have used up just about all of their optionality that they once had. Now, they need to steer the ship on a desperate mission for spare parts to retrofit this roster with players who make their stars better. 

I don’t mean to paint an overly bleak picture of where the Sixers are at. They are likely staring at another three-to-five 50-plus win seasons, minimum. But the Sixers were going to win 50 games this year, and boy did it suck. Everyone was mad, all the time. Embiid was probably mad at the organization for fucking him over, and began to lash out. Fans got mad at Embiid for lashing out. Embiid got mad at the fans for getting mad at him lashing out. And fans then got mad at the organization for botching this team to the point that a stake was driven in between the fans and Embiid. Everyone was mad at everyone.

This season taught us that there is a real combustibility here that the Sixers need to attend to. They need to find ways to make their roster make sense, and satisfy their star players, so that the fun-loving Joel Embiid can return. Because without the fun-loving version of Embiid that we’ve all come to know, what are we really doing here? The unifying ideology that brought process trusters together is gone from this organization; if the number one person -- the so-called crown jewel -- to come from the process has been soiled, too, what was even the point of the past six years?