What Do We Even Do With This Fucking Sixers Team?

They are the feel-good story of the NBA season, and also the feel-bad story of maybe the entire NBA early decade.

Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and is now writing 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. 

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I have never watched a team that's been as many teams at once as this Sixers team. They are at once defending East regular season champions, bitter playoff disappointments in search of redemption, a franchise at war with their second-best player, a scrappy bunch of young overachievers, a Team Zero for the league's resurgent battle with the COVID-19 pandemic, and once again, the team with the best record in the East. They are a defensive-built squad who everyone agrees is in desperate need of a true perimeter scorer, which nonetheless has had a middling D and the best offense in the league for most of the season. Their ongoing internal battle regularly dominates headlines for its messiness and ugliness, even as their on-court product has been as connected and coherent as we've ever seen. They are the feel-good story of the NBA season, and also the feel-bad story of maybe the entire NBA early decade.

More than ever, I don't know what the fuck we're supposed to make of all of it.

This was all confusing enough before Joel Embiid, coming off a rounding-into-MVP-form game where he led the already-undermanned Sixers to their sixth straight victory, entered into COVID health and safety protocols. Yesterday was one long attempt of "Well, maybe he's..." bright-siding that was ultimately buried under an avalanche of bad news updates: Yes, he's officially in protocols, yes he's tested positive, yes he's symptomatic, yes it's the particularly rough kind of symptomatic. (All boxes also checked by Tobias Harris a week earlier, natch.) It's bad enough that Embiid going to miss the Sixers' upcoming run of games, but the big man was already laboring to start the season, and he hardly boasts a long history of bouncing back from health setbacks quickly and seamlessly. It seems likely that this remains A Thing with Joel -- always A Thing with Joel -- for far longer than the 10 days or so he's out.

And there aren't a whole lot of Summer Fridays and three-day weekends coming up for the Sixers as their franchise player attempts to get back in return-to-office shape. Their luck finally ran out last night in a hard-fought loss at home against the Knicks; they won't have long to soak in the moral victory before having to re-enter the fray tonight against the Bucks. Catching the forever-pesky Raptors at home on Thursday should offer little respite, and then it's six straight games on the road, including five out West. It's the kind of schedule that can make an 8-2 start feel quickly like a distant memory, especially with a team full of guys currently taking on bigger roles than they've ever had to before, and reinforcements arriving TBD.

That sounds despairing -- it kind of is -- but all that said, there's no denying that this team has been an absolute joy so far this season. Of the six wins that comprised their recent streak, at least four of them felt like steals, games that by right (and by narrative) the team probably should've coughed up. Beating Atlanta and Portland in that incredibly satisfying back-to-back already felt like more than we should have been able to ask for, then to take both halves of the home-and-home against Chicago just felt greedy. It got to the point where, down 14 to the Knicks last night at the half while missing our three best players from last year and multiple other rotation guys, I still felt decently confident we would come back. And we almost did, even with no one on the team but Andre Drummond playing all that well! It's been a goddamn blast.

And everyone on the team is... well, good. When healthy, we have 10 good players on the team right now -- 11 if you count Isaiah Joe (arguable), 12 if you count Basketball "BBall" Paul (probable?), 13 if you count that guy who's not currently playing for reasons that have nothing to do with COVID or injuries (pass). We can start five players who are good, and then if any one of them sits or is injured, we can sub in another guy at the same position who is also good; it's truly wild shit, really. I've rooted for many different varieties of Sixers team before -- some of them even of pretty high-quality -- but I've definitely never rooted for one whose team identity was this Spursy, where it barely even matters night-to-night who's actually in the lineup. To a point, anyway.

So yeah, it's a team you like to root for. But what are we rooting for them to do, exactly? Regular season wins, fine -- those are fun, and assuming this upcoming stretch doesn't suck out their whole lifeforce (or keep piling up bodies until they're playing Aaron Henry 37 minutes a night), we should be able to rack up a decent number of them this year. But the wins aren’t as much fun when they start to come with expectations for more, and too much of the former tends to lead to too much of the latter. Lest we forget, we won a pretty decent number of games regular season, and when we discuss that team now, those 49 Ws aren't exactly given equal weight to the four Ls we suffered to the Hawks in the playoffs. I was very ready to root for a version of this team that lost an uncomfortable number of games, but I'm not sure how I feel yet about rooting for the version that wins more than we were prepared to deal with.

Could we find a way to pivot back to being all in on the team being a playoff contender again -- for the conference finals, the finals, the championship? Sure, we could find a way -- there's always a fucking way -- but great as this 8-3 start has been, there's still not a lot of real evidence that we wouldn't just be setting ourselves up for more heartbreak. It feels like every year there's a team like these Sixers that sails through the regular season with depth and unity and vibes, only to quickly run aground in the playoffs due to a lack of top-tier talent and shot creation. (Last year's Jazz being the most recent and most gratifying example.) The Sixers have fixed a lot of what ailed last year's roster -- adding more shooting around Embiid, upgrading the Mike Scott spot, replacing Dwight Howard with a guy who actually seems to elevate his game when given bigger minutes -- but haven't addressed the one thing really keeping them from the NBA's top tier: Adding that damned elusive perimeter scorer we need to be competitive at the highest levels.

And the curse of this particular Sixers team is to have the trade chips to get a seat at the table for one of those players -- but to have a GM who keeps checking, folding, or making bets that nobody would possibly want to match. Which isn't to say that Daryl Morey playing hardball with both Ben Simmons and the trade market for him is the wrong move; honestly, I don't even know how much I agree or disagree with his approach at this point. All I know is that expecting this situation to be one that just magically resolves itself in the near future, leaving the Sixers as fully formed contenders and Simmons a thousand miles away -- or even less probably, returning Simmons to the starting lineup with a newfound sense of purpose and drive to improve and succeed -- seems self-destructive even for a Process Truster. (And even if Morey was the kind of GM that responded to public pressure and/or internal panic, being first place in the conference doesn't exactly inspire additional urgency to Just Make the Damn Deal Already.)

So until reports tell us otherwise, we're stuck rooting for this exceedingly fun but health-wrecked and perpetually dramatic team that should capture hearts and headlines both on and off the court -- before bowing out fairly early in the playoffs. There's worse fates to be had in the sports world for sure, but few this singularly strange: a great regular-season team that's one player away from being a true playoff threat, but that player isn't the 25-year-old two-time All-Star who hasn’t played but is technically still on the roster, and if that player's out there and available for trade, it might be years still before we actually deal our star holdout for him. It's a team that's so much better than they have any right to be, and yet still so far away from how good they ultimately need to be. It's a team you love to watch, but live in fear of having to have a conversation about. It's all the reasons you love basketball, and all the reasons it drives you fucking crazy. If you figure out how to live with it every day for the next six-plus months, let me know.