Nobody Knows Who's Actually Good in the East Yet

The most meaningless regular season in nBA history hasn’t provided us with much.

[art design by @zrjaved, photo credit: Durant: (Photo by Maddie Meyer/Getty Images), Giannis: (Photo by Stacy Revere/Getty Images), Harden: (Photo by Mitchell Leff/Getty Images, Embiid & Simons: (Photo by Mitchell Leff/Getty Images)]

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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You can always rely on a decent chunk of Sixers Twitter to freak out over a losing streak and declare the season, if not the entire Process project, as good as over. Understandable, certainly, given how crappy last week was -- watching two games of the Sixers getting carved up by Steph Curry and Chris Paul like a couple of dads looking to show off their fancy new electric knife at Thanksgiving, and then another two games of them chasing after Milwaukee in a golf cart while Jrue & Co. were speeding away in a Ferrari. It dropped the Sixers a game back of Brooklyn and just 1.5 ahead of Milwaukee, a gap that suddenly looked like it might be closing at a rate too rapid for us to stop. It was, as some would say, a perfect time to panic.

Then over the next two days, of course, the Bucks lost to an undermanned Hawks squad, and the Sixers trounced the Thunder by 30 in three quarters. And hopefully all were reminded that we don't actually have a clue what's gonna be what in the East when it actually matters this year.

This has been, by nearly all estimations, the most meaningless regular season in modern NBA history. Perhaps two lockout-shortened campaigns in 1999 and 2012 would beg to differ with that, but neither of those had a global pandemic hanging over them that routinely stripped large percentages of available rosters -- nor did they have a modern view of load management that made regular excused absences par for the course for contending and bottom-feeding teams alike, or an ultra-conservative approach to injuries that led rub-some-dirt-on-it tweaks to instead be re-evaluated in three weeks. If you're not a Knick (or Nikola Jokic), chances are you missed at least 10 games over the course of this season for one reason or another. Pity the poor ESPN and TNT folks who do those NBA Jam-style graphics for upcoming games with one representative player head from each side, since a Mavs-Clippers game could end up getting headlined by Josh Richardson and Marcus Morris, Sr. at a moment's notice.

That certainly goes for the Sixers, though not much more or less than most other teams. They've been on both sides of the sowing/reaping tweet this season -- plowing through the Steph-less Warriors and Lakers without LeBron or AD, and then paying the price this last week as Golden State got revenge on us without Ben Simmons or Tobias Harris and Milwaukee got us for two sans Simmons, one on the tired end of a back-to-back and one also without Joel Embiid. As many have pointed out by now, Mordecai Brown could count the number of games on one hand that the Sixers have played against top-level opponents this year where both teams were at full strength -- and the truth is, the last four games weren't any more indicative of how Actually Good the Sixers are than the bunch we'd won against short-stacked contenders in the weeks prior.

Freakouts aside, the Sixers will still probably get the 1 seed. They're a game behind Brooklyn, who looked particularly scary against Phoenix on Sunday with Kevin Durant back -- but Philly has the tiebreaker, and Brooklyn plays seven of their next eight on the road, including a two-game stop in Milwaukee. The Nets have demonstrated all season to this point that they're prioritizing wellness over the standings, meaning their top guns will probably get some rest days over the trip. Meanwhile, the Sixers play six of their last 11 at home, and only have three games coming up against teams over .500 -- two at home against the 34-28 Atlanta Hawks, and one on the road against the 32-30 Miami Heat. Philly cares about the 1 seed, has all of their guys back healthy (besides Danny Green, who got the honorary Good Team Player game off against OKC last night), and has demonstrated all year that they can beat lesser opponents when motivated. It might not be as easy as hoped, but I believe the 1 seed remains essentially theirs for the taking.

What does this all mean for the playoffs? Probably not much, except that the Sixers might have to only face one of Brooklyn or Milwaukee. But if you think you know for a fact how good the Sixers will be against either team when the games are officially do-or-die for everyone involved... I do not share your confidence and/or hysteria. We took two out of three from Brooklyn this year, but we never played them with all three of Durant, Kyrie Irving and James Harden. Milwaukee swept us 3-0, but they never played us with both Embiid and Simmons. Even between Milwaukee and Brooklyn, their one matchup so far came with Irving out, and at least Harden if not more will likely still be on the shelf for both of their two upcoming showdowns next week. Trying to predict any of these matchups would be like trying to review an album based on a Spotify stream with three of the tracks greyed out -- we've just never experienced any of them in full yet.

I also don't know if any of these teams have an idea of how good they'll be in the playoffs themselves. The Nets have gotten a total of 186 minutes on the court together with all of Durant, Irving and Harden, and even though they've played like a title contender as long as they've had any two of those three available, there's still questions to be answered about how their band works with three lead guitarists. The Bucks have learned the hard way that regular season proficiency is not necessarily a predictor of postseason success, and while they'd like to believe that the presence of Jrue Holiday -- one of the NBA's finest two-way players, though hardly Damian Lillard as a late-game difference-maker or proven playoff performer -- can be the difference-maker for them this year, they won't know until they know. And a couple of coin-flip wins for the Sixers against Utah and a healthy Lakers aren't necessarily enough to prove to themselves that they can close out games late against the highest competition without a single conventional late-game perimeter scorer on their roster.

And frankly, I don't know if we know how good most of the teams below the East's big three are, either. I feel pretty confident we saw the Knicks' best with their nine-game win streak -- which I still don't see as being good enough to really challenge the Sixers -- but the Celtics, Hawks, Heat and (to a much lesser extent) the Raptors all remain threats to get healthy and figure their shit out just in time to become a major nuisance for Philly. Given how many times these teams have disappointed just when they seemed to finally have it figured out, you want to the dismiss them as What Their Record Says They Are -- but Miami's out-of-nowhere postseason run last year looms large, and I just can't trust that nearly any team actually is what they've shown over this busted-ass regular season that's felt more like an Endless Vegas Summer than an actual 72-game quest to sort the league's proper hierarchy.

This is all to advise: Don't give up hope for the Sixers based on last week's four-game skid, but don't get too pumped when they go 9-2 or better over these next 11, either. We know how good this team is against middling and subpar teams, but we don't really know anything about how they are against the league's elite when both teams are at full strength -- and neither does anyone else about their own team, really. This regular season has been a mere trailer for the playoffs, where teams will (hopefully) finally have their rosters mostly healthy and (hopefully) decide to actually play them all at once. Then and only then will we figure out who's actually good, and whose most panicked fan contingent was right all along.