I'm Not Worrying About the Sixers This Regular Season

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

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So much for cover. The Phillies were supposed to cruise into the World Series, then scrap it out with the Astros Rangers while the 76ers very slowly lumbered to life, like a drunk uncle you know better than to call before 11:00 on a Sunday morning. Or maybe the drunk uncle was gonna be us, very slowly acclimating to having the Sixers playing basketball again on the second screen while the Phillies continued to demand our primary emotional energy. Regardless, not gonna happen: The Phillies are out, the Sixers are in, and Sunday doesn't come around nearly often enough for the Eagles to provide sufficient help. We're going to have to get used to the Sixers, the baggage from their six straight years of disheartening playoff exits and assorted in-between catastrophes, their messy-ass present and their extremely uncertain future, all being back in full effect right away. 

For months, I dreaded this. Not like this is the first turbulent return the Sixers have had, but in previous seasons I've always returned to the fold well in advance of the regular season's return. This season, I really wondered if I'd make it back in time -- if I'd make it back at all. I struggled through this column pretty much every week, sometimes feeling like I was essentially just gritting my teeth, closing my eyes and plowing through. And yet, finally, around the time of preseason, a calm came over me. Now, I'm looking forward to tonight's opener again. I'm looking forward to this regular season. I'm not even that worried about what's going to happen with James Harden, or what it'll eventually mean for Joel Embiid. I'm glad that the Sixers are back. 

What happened? Well, I kind of decided not to worry about the Sixers this regular season. I'm just going to enjoy it. Because this is the easy part. And the hard part's probably coming. 

For most of the summer, I viewed this regular season as a pointless slog to an inevitable conclusion. I'm not sure that my reading before opening night is really all that different. But now I feel kinda liberated by it. We spent so much of last year trying to convince ourselves that this was the year things were going to be different. We looked for meaningful regular-season victories, key developments in Embiid's game, signs that the supporting cast could be depended on when it mattered most. I certainly wasted a lot of time and energy on all of that. But I don't plan on doing any of that this year. I don't want to talk myself into anything this season. I just want to watch a team of dudes I still mostly likely play some pretty good basketball for 82 games and not worry about what any of it means in the big-picture sense. It might very well be the last chance I get to do so. 

This will not, I'm sure, be what most of y'all want to hear. Last year, I wrote my season preview-ish column about how little the upcoming Sixers regular-season mattered, and how none of it was going to mean anything until the playoffs. For a good percentage of Sixers fans (perhaps the great majority), I imagine this will be even truer for the upcoming season, if anything. After getting closer last postseason than we've ever gotten in the Process era to the conference finals, to getting past Boston -- a 3-2 series lead, a fourth-quarter lead at home in Game 6 with all the momentum in the world -- and then still letting the series and season slip away in Grandpa Simpson can't-you-go-five-seconds-without-humiliating-yourself fashion, there's no way anyone could expect us to find faith in the Sixers again this year. We'd need to see it in the playoffs -- see it the whole way -- to believe things could possibly end any differently for them this time. 

And all signs are pointing to us not getting to see it. The Sixers mostly made a mess of the offseason, losing some key bench pieces, adding some questionable new ones, and if not outright fumbling the James Harden situation, at least misjudging and misplaying it so that on opening he's still here as a distressed asset only getting distressed-er. Meanwhile, the Celtics added two former All-Stars, one of whom the Bucks had previously traded to give Giannis his first career All-NBA-caliber teammate in Damian Lillard. We still have Joel Embiid, but the reigning MVP's new Rolex is ticking louder and louder. If you had to bet between this being the season where the Sixers finally break through in the postseason or the one where they finally fall all the way apart in the regular season, there's no way you'd wager the latter. 

But there will be a lot to enjoy about this Sixers team in the regular season. There's Embiid, of course, still one of the handful of best players in basketball and one who's added new things to his game every year he's been in the league (Horf season excepted), who should undoubtedly still have new tricks to display this upcoming season. There's Tyrese Maxey, poised as hell to take yet another leap this year and guaranteed to still be the golden boy in the hearts for parents and would-be parents up and down the Delaware Valley. There's BBall Paul, jacking threes and playing alongside Joel Embiid, and Nick Nurse, the right-brained new coach who's going to hopefully let him loose in ways that would give Doc Rivers numerous panic attacks. There's Rotation Jaden Springer. There's Expiring Tobias Harris. There's Still-Here Furkan Korkmaz. There's those three new guys who will at least be totally new variants of strange and ultimately underwhelming. The Sixers were 2-2 in the preseason but it was a fun 2-2. It's a precedent I'd expect to continue. 

Of course, one part of it might not be so much fun: The guy wearing No. 1, who tearfully watched the Sixers take off from the airport without him yesterday like William saying goodbye to Penny in Almost Famous. He might be around for a while still, might even be playing, and while some folks view that as a good thing for the Sixers -- either in terms of their on-court prospects or simple assets and liabilities management -- I do not. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, I suppose; in the meantime, he's not with the team and I imagine his ramp-up schedule will not be at the steepest incline. Perhaps wishful thinking, but I still think there's a very good chance Harden never plays for the Sixers this season, or plays for only a few games until everyone comes to their senses and realizes him eye-rollingly going through the on-court motions isn't helping the situation on any level. He'll be traded soon enough, for now I'm choosing not to worry about it. 

And really, I'm opting out of Sixers-related worry whatsoever. This is different from blind optimism, as I'm not trying to convince you that there's no need for long-term concern with the Sixers. In fact, quite the opposite: I'm saying there's so much reason for long-term Sixers concern that we should enjoy this regular season together where things will still mostly be simple and good. Because having solid regular seasons is the one thing the Sixers do know how to do: Their last four 82-game seasons all saw win totals in the low 50s, the absolute model of very-good-not-quite-great consistency. Some teams go decades, generations without a 50-win season -- Washington hasn't had one since the '79 Bullets. I doubt this year will be any different; with or without Harden, Embiid + competent role players + decent coaching has always been a recipe for at least modest regular-season success. Not as sexy as consistent postseason success, of course, but not nothing, either. 

This might be the last time, too. Maybe it's overly alarmist to work under the assumption that this is Joel Embiid's Last Stand with the Sixers -- he still has at least two years on his contract after this one, and despite some relatively straightforward reading between the lines of his offseason comments, he's still mostly been a good soldier for us this summer -- but my instinctual read on it is that he's getting to the end of his rope with the Sixers, and that next summer is when that will finally come to a head. If only out of emotional self-preservation, I'm treating this season like it really is Embiid's last under contract, and that if things don't go great for the team in the playoffs, then he's gone next year. And so I want to really try to soak in his greatness this regular season, to enjoy watching him as much as I've ever enjoyed watching him, finally without worrying about his MVP odds or how his game is going to translate to the postseason. He's not gonna win MVP, not again. And he's probably not gonna be a wildly different playoff player. But he'll still be the guy we've loved for nearly a full decade now, and that means enough to me to want to spend this season honoring it by watching him play and compete this regular season, without putting anything more on him than that. 

Maybe this now sounds overly pessimistic. I'm not saying there's zero chance things change for the Sixers in the playoffs this year, or that Embiid definitely disappoints again and then is automatically gone. There's a road to greater long-term success for these Sixers -- one that involves Nurse reinventing the team as a defensive-minded, turnover-forcing unit, one that involves Morey pulling a rabbit out of his hat with the Harden trade and using further dealings (possibly including an improved Jaden Springer) to bolster the roster by the trade deadline, one that involves Tyrese Maxey growing into an All-Star-caliber lead guard and Embiid a get-on-my-back playoffs performer. Is it a particularly wide or obstacle-free road? Certainly not. But I'm not denying that there is a path. 

It's just not one I'm gonna spend all season looking for and pointing to. If the Sixers can break the cycle this postseason, if they can even convince Embiid not to give up on them long-term, then great. But I vow this year that I will not get ahead of myself on either of those things before mid-April. I will not make myself crazy looking for signs of a new and improved Joel Embiid finally being ready for the playoff spotlight. I will not point to big wins against marquee opponents and rival players as a reason to start believing again. I will not try to convince myself or you that this team is different. You have my word that all this team is to me, from now until the end of this regular season, is the 2023-24 Philadelphia 76ers. And for once, I'm just gonna let that be enough.