Yep, It's Officially #SixersJanuary

#SixersJanuary is an opportunity for us who have been here since the beginning of this thing to take a moment to pat ourselves on the back for once again making it through the cruelest months of the Sixers 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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They never win that game. It's been a common refrain of the Process-era Sixers -- since they first started actually winning games of any kind, at least -- and the tag certainly applied to last night's fall-from-ahead-to-come-from-behind stomach-fuck of a W against the Pacers. Most teams don't win basketball games where they give up a double-digit lead in the second half of the fourth to go down multiple possessions with less than a minute to go, but particularly not the Sixers, who have been responsible for completing some of the more legendary let-go-of-the-rope chokejobs in recent NBA history. Yet the Sixers hustled together four unanswered to secure an extra five minutes of basketball and got the stops they needed to pull out a very ugly overtime victory, though one that warded off what certainly would have been an exponentially uglier regulation loss. They NEVER win that game. 

Except they do win that game in one month of the year. They win that game in #SixersJanuary -- which, if there was any doubt before, is now clearly underway. 

Yes, that's right, it's officially the Most Wonderful Time of the Year to be a Sixers fan. For those unfamiliar or in need of a refresher of this specific corner of Process lore, #SixersJanuary began six years ago -- long enough ago that expressing cultural ideas via gently ironic hashtags didn't yet feel totally archaic -- when the Sixers rolled into the first month of 2017 an 8-24 squad still feeling more pains than growing in Joel Embiid's rookie season. But for the first time since the opening three games of the entire Hinkie era, the team really started rolling: They went 10-5 for the month, beating several teams like the Raptors and the Clippers that they had spent the previous three years getting absolutely throttled by. Even more importantly, Joel started coming into his own as a force in this league, averaging 23 points, nine boards and three blocks in under 27 minutes a night, cementing himself as the Rookie of the Year frontrunner -- though he ultimately only played in nine games that month, losing the rest of his season (and the ROTY trophy) to a meniscus tear, suffered in a hard-fought loss to James Harden's Houston Rockets. 

No matter: January had been cemented as the signature month for these 76ers, and would forever be thus. The January Sixers went 7-5 in 2018, 11-4 in 2019, 8-5 in 2020, 11-5 in 2021, and 12-3 in 2022 -- a combined winning percentage of 69%, which would make them the best regular-season Sixers team since 1985. (And that's not even counting the 2-0 the Sixers are to start this January, a record that will likely only continue to swell from here.) In fact, the only season since the beginning of #SixersJanuary when the team didn't post a better winning percentage in January than their final record was in 2018, and that took a miracle 16-game winning streak to close the season.

What is it about January for this team? Well there are none but the most anecdotal explanations, but it certainly feels like January always arrives during a creamy middle in their schedule, where there are fewer marquee-type showdowns, less scheduling insanity in terms of back-to-backs or inexplicably long layovers between games, and usually a decent number of home games. Embiid has usually hit his post-offseason-rust, pre-whatever-new-injuries groove by then, and the rest of the team has had time to coalesce around him. Perhaps most importantly, whatever early-season dramas have inevitably plagued the Sixers -- histrionic concerns about rotations, fits, coaching, vibes -- have usually had time to mellow out a little, while other teams are only just beginning to reach their own crisis points. Generally, it just ends up being a good month for the Sixers to reliably fatten up on teams that aren't really on their level to begin with. 

But there's also a little extra something to it, and that's what you saw last night. It's fitting that the win came without Embiid, because as much as #SixersJanuary is his creation, he's also been absent for a lot of it -- and indeed, a key element of #SJ is the emergence of the unlikely hero. Whether it's Shake Milton scoring a breakout 27 against Atlanta in January 2020, or a rookie Tyrese Maxey hanging 39 on Denver in January 2021 (or a sophomore Tyrese Maxey taking it to Ja Morant and the Grizzlies in January 2022), or Nik Stauskas somehow serving as our starting two-guard for the entirety of January 2017, #SixersJanuary is an all-hands situation. So it's no surprise (well, no major surprise) that an embattled figure like Montrezl Harrell would take center stage in a game like last night's, beating the washed allegations for one spectacular night of putback dunks and charges drawn and very key blocked shots. He won't be the only one; before February everyone from Danuel House Jr. to Furkan Korkmaz to perhaps even P.J. Tucker should get their chance to be a folk hero for the month. 

And speaking of February -- that's coming too, and traditionally, it's a much colder month to the Process-era Sixers, with a 55% winning percentage over the last six years. That's one of the reasons why it's so important for us to coast now while we can, to pile up wins in this stretch of the schedule heavy on home games and light on contender-level opponents, and harvest the excitement of being Too Good that we'll need for the droughtier months ahead. The regular season doesn't really matter, but it may matter enough if we end up in the lower half of the East playoff race and have to spend the entire playoffs playing good teams on the road. It's not quite now or never for us to dig ourselves out, especially while the East standings remain so tightly bunched, but it's probably the best now that the Sixers will have this season. 

But the joys of #SixersJanuary don't have to be so big-picture, really. If we can build enough momentum and good feelings to convince ourselves that we are a true contender and things will finally be different this year in the playoffs, that rules, but being able to actually enjoy and appreciate this team enough to actually bring some life back to the long-dormant home crowd at the not-Wells Fargo Center would also certainly suffice. Moreover, #SixersJanuary is an opportunity for us who have been here since the beginning of this thing to take a moment to pat ourselves on the back for once again making it through the cruelest months of the Sixers season, and be rewarded with the most purely satisfying month of Sixers basketball we're likely to get on an annual basis. It'd be a tough life if they never won that game all the time.