A Sixers Mailbag Before Preseason Finally Stars
Always fun to envision hypotheticals where the Sixers actually make it out of the second round.
At last, the eternal August of the offseason is nearing its conclusion. Sixers media day is on Monday, the first preseason game is on Oct. 7, and there will soon be actual basketball to talk about. It’s been a long, long time coming.
But for now, we still have to discuss theoretical basketball propositions before the real thing is back. I asked on Twitter if anyone had looming Sixers questions they needed me to answer before the season really kicks into gear. Here’s what some of you had to say:
Answer: This is a tricky one because there are inherently a lot of follow-up questions needed to clarify the exact situation.
Is Joel Embiid still recovering from his knee injury in this scenario, or is he in relatively perfect health throughout the duration of the playoff run? Are the Sixers simply facing the Heat, the Cavs, and the Pacers in order while still being the 7-seed, or are they transfixed into the Celtics’ position as the 1-seed in the East? And if the Heat aren’t facing the Sixers in the play-in game, do they still lose Jimmy Butler to injury before they have to play the Sixers-as-Celtics in the first round?
But by-and-large, the Sixers would have probably reached the Finals with that path through the Eastern Conference last season, particularly with the injuries sustained by each of the Celtics’ opponents.
The Sixers probably would have beaten the Jimmy Butler-less Heat in five games, and the Donovan Mitchell-less Cavs in six or seven. A conference finals matchup with last year’s Pacers would be the only toss-up. Despite that team making a deep run in the East, it seems from the outside that most people don’t view them very highly — which is a big mistake. That team is good, not to mention they beat the Sixers in two out of three games during the regular season.
Indiana’s five-out offense mixed with some pretty remarkable depth would have given the Sixers a lot of issues. Just think about how badly the Knicks’ supporting cast outplayed Embiid and Maxey’s in the first round. We’d have been likely to see a repeat of that in a 2024 Sixers vs Pacers matchup.
Water gun to my head, I’d pick last year’s Sixers in seven knowing that Haliburton isn’t playing in each game, but it’s still close. The only series where I wouldn't pick the Sixers straight up is the Finals against the Mavs, who more than proved themselves by rampaging through a much tougher Western Conference slate. With a compromised Embiid, I’m not sure how Philly keeps pace with a Luka Doncic-led scoring attack. Still, it’s probably a six or seven game series, and one that last year’s Sixers would have had a shot to take.
Though there’s also a shot that the Sixers somehow lose to the Cavs in the second round after half the team catches a disease that hasn’t been seen since the Middle Ages, as I am destined to go my whole life without ever watching them play in a Conference Finals.
Dawg is a pretty nebulous basketball term, all things considered. If you had asked people after the 2020 Bubble Playoffs who had more dawg in them between Lu Dort and Derrick White, I have the inkling that most would have said the former, even though the latter has always (and I mean ALWAYS) been the better defender and overall player. Labeling an NBA player’s on-court persona is probably the furthest thing from an exact science.
That said, it’s interesting in the context of this specific Sixers starting lineup. Paul George is the rare NBA star who’s actually gone out of his way to publicly say he needs dawg role players around him to help handle the dirty work. Likewise, every single Sixers fan would agree that they don’t need Embiid to push himself into any unnecessary labor that could jeopardize his health before the postseason.
That leaves Tyrese Maxey and Kelly Oubre, both of whom fit the billing. Oubre might not have been considered much of a dawg prior to the 2023-24 season, but he proved everybody wrong (including myself). Though his attention to detail is not superb, his defensive effort was always there last year, even as he was often given some of the toughest assignments on the floor. Checking speedy, superstar point guards is not a fun task, yet Oubre embraced it as his defensive calling card on the team. He’s not afraid of the moment, he crashes the glass like a maniac, and he does all he can to terrorize opposing stars — Oubre is a dawg.
As for Maxey, I always think back to his defense against Jaylen Brown during that late February game in Boston:
Since Maxey is a) one of the shorter guys in the NBA, and b) a better offensive player than he is a defensive player, it’s not natural to think of him as a dawg on the court. The term is most often reserved for bigger, more defensively slanted players. But Maxey, above all else, is a psychotic competitor and worker. His defensive intensity has never once waned, not even during the dregs of last year’s Embiid-less stretch. Even if the results didn’t show up in the win column, it was rarely ever because Maxey didn’t show up on both ends of the floor.
If the Sixers’ 2024-25 starting lineup is composed of roughly 60% dawgs, while the other 40% is made up of dudes with multiple All-NBA selections, it ultimately feels like a pretty good split.
I believe Paul George will be a Sixer for his entire four-year contract. It might seem risky to say given that in just the last six years, the team went out and traded for both Jimmy Butler and James Harden, neither of whom lasted very long in the city at all, but this situation is pretty different.
The main distinction of course is that PG chose to sign with the Sixers rather than being traded to Philly mid-season. He’s already locked into the team for three years before his player option comes up, and given that he’ll be 37 by then, there’s a decent chance he opts into being paid another $56 million. Even though PG admitted that he initially wanted to stay on the West Coast and play for the Clippers had they matched the Sixers’ offer, it doesn’t matter. He already made his decision, picking the Sixers’ commitment to him over a less lucrative deal that would have kept him in his hometown.
Trying to brainstorm possible outcomes where George is off the team in the next three years or so, there’s really only a couple of possible ways it could happen:
George becomes exponentially washed once he turns 35 and is no longer anywhere close to a superstar player, turning his contract into an albatross the Sixers need to get off their books as soon as possible.
Knock on wood, but a devastating injury to George could also result in the same thing as scenario one.
The Sixers don’t mesh at all as a team, get bounced early from the playoffs in both of George’s first years in Philly, and he demands a life raft out of the city as he tries to find one last team that could help win a title in the twilight of his career.
All three of those are nightmare, worst-case scenarios. Options 1 and 2 are for more likely than option 3, in my opinion (in Option 3, I’m talking a 2020 Sixers-style flameout, not just a team that loses in the second or third round before reaching the Finals). Even then, you can’t let the fear of a Paul George decline either by way of injury or by old age scare you off from the chance to add one of the NBA’s best players.
A more median outcome where George is slightly worse but still near All-Star level, and the Sixers win a few playoff series, but not a title, probably still ends with PG on the team in 2028. Unless he magically turns back into 2014 Paul George during the next three years, he’s not getting another max contract in the NBA. This was his last one, his last chance to win a ring as one of the three best players on the team, and he decided that he had a better shot at that with the Sixers than with the Clippers. Unless the team is an immediate catastrophic failure, he’s not asking out for a long time.
The timeline of the recently extended Embiid also matters here. The consensus reaction to the news was that the big man is all but guaranteed to finish his career in Philly, really putting into perspective how relatively little time might be left in the Embiid Sixers era. He’s already turning 31 this season, and given his extensive injury history, it’s reasonable to think he’s not playing deep into his late 30s. There’s no time left to waste, no other potential superstar acquisition that’s readily apparent. The Sixers have spent all their money, don’t have a single pick in next year’s draft, and really only have a couple of their future firsts + a Clippers’ pick and a Clippers’ swap to throw around. This is pretty much what the team is going to. Any improvements that can be made will have to be on the margins, because the big-picture guys — the big three of Maxey, George, and Embiid — are here to stay.
Daniel Olinger is a writer for the Rights To Ricky Sanchez, and author of “The Danny” column, even though he refuses to be called that in person. He can be followed on X @dan_olinger.
“The Danny” is brought to you by the Official Realtor Of The Process, Adam Ksebe.
Expecting RCIV to rise to a key DAWG in rotation by playoff time.