AU Anti-Tank Mode ACTIVATED

Here we go again.

The news of Adem Bona being upgraded from questionable to available for the Philadelphia 76ers’ afternoon game against the Brooklyn was not met with much fist-pumping excitement from the Sixers faithful this Saturday. After all, it came after news of the Sixers going down two more rotation players — Jabari Walker with illness, Andre Drummond with back spasms — to go with the four significantly more consequential starters we knew they were already down: Tyrese Maxey, Paul George, Kelly Oubre Jr. and Joel Embiid. And of course, it was already a game against the woeful Brooklyn Nets, a game to be watched by some combination of gambling sickos, stoned undergrads and families on a very strict live-event budget and essentially no one else. There was no reason for anybody besides Adem Bona being listed on the active roster for this game besides Adem Bona, and even he was probably pretty 50/50 about it.

And yet: Not only did I check my Bluesky feed multiple times for updates on Bona’s playing status, when he was announced as a healthy go for this game, I said to myself, OK, we got this.

Yes, friends, that’s me in the corner losing my rationality about the 2025-26 Philadelphia 76ers. As the rest of the fanbase is dusting off their ping-pong-ball-counting glasses for another late-arriving tankathon season, I am checking the upcoming schedule and doing the mental math of what the Sixers need to do to at least stay competitive for the 7-8 play-in slots. Despite the Sixers’ prospects currently looking bleak in the short, medium and long terms, I am living and/or dying with mid-March matchups against not-even-that-glorified NBA Summer League squads. I am firmly back in anti-tank mode, and frankly it feels like I never left.

Devoted followers of the Ricky blog will likely recall my losing campaign last year for the Sixers to Just Go For It, to throw caution to the wind in the midst of an injury-racked campaign and try to build whatever kind of competitive squad they could around Embiid, Maxey and George, even if the odds of it actually putting it together for any kind of meaningful run were slim. My logic was that, tank as we might, we still might end up getting screwed in the lottery — and in the meantime, we were running out of high-level Joel seasons to burn through, and had no guarantee (or even strong reason to believe) that things with this team would be significantly better the next season. Hardly a foolproof argument, granted — and while I never regretted making it, it obviously was harder to defend once the Sixers bottomed out injury-wise landed VJ Edgecombe in the draft, and then actually did improve drastically to begin the 2025-26 season.

Imagine my surprise over the past couple weeks, then, to find the fanbase right back where it started. Despite the Sixers being a winning team all season — since winning Game One again t Boston, they’ve literally never dipped back to .500 record-wise — and despite there only being a month left before the playoffs, the whispers have recommenced: Is it too late for the Sixers to tank? At first it felt mostly like a joke, a coping mechanism for doomery Sixers fans to deal with the team’s seemingly inevitable collapse. But from there, the temptation to fall into old patterns was too strong for many Process Trusters, who crunched the numbers and decided that losing out in pursuit of a <10% chance of jumping into the top four of this summer’s draft — and keeping our protected pick for a second-straight year — was the most reasonable way to spend the final month of the season.

I can’t act like there’s no logic to the argument. If you’re in championship-or-bust mode with these Sixers — hell, if you’re even conference finals-or-bust — a less-than-10% chance still sounds like a pretty good bet compared to the odds of a legit Sixers playoff run. They are firmly in the play-in section of the standings now and unlikely to find their way out, which means they need a little luck even to get into the proper playoff bracket, and then even at their healthiest would still be a heavy underdog in any of their prospective first-round matchups. Plus, there’s extra motivation to chase the pick again this year: Not only is 2026 supposedly a very strong draft class in its top tier, but due to some fine print likely only understood by SixersAdam and the Real GM dudes, the Sixers’ pick not conveying to OKC would mean they also get to keep their 2028 first-rounder currently owed to the Nets, with that pick instead turning into a second-rounder if we out-tank our coverage again this year.

Still.... no. Not even with all that we stand to gain with the pick not conveying, not even with the Sixers failing to compile convincing wins against the absolute dregs of the league right now, not even with the peace of mind that would likely come with tuning out the actual games and coolly responding to the many inevitable L’s with a Seinfeldian “Well that’s a shame.” I couldn’t do it last year, and I really, really can’t do it this year.

At least when we started having this discussion last year, it was early enough in the season that the Sixers’ campaign ending up a true wash was still a plausible outcome. Hard to say the same about a year where they’ve already amassed 35 wins — 36 after the hilarious escape job against Brooklyn this weekend — a total that on its own would disqualify it for strong lottery consideration in the overwhelming majority of NBA seasons. To try to flip the switch with under a month to go feels undignified, even by both Sixers and tanking standards. Even in Spike’s wouldn’t-it-be-funny-if, vaguely pro-tanking column on Friday, he admitted that the only defensible way we could actually root for L’s at this point would be subconsciously.

Fair perhaps for some, but I can’t even get that far. (Shocker, I know.) It’s just too late, both in this season and in The Process. This season has hardly been an electric one for the Sixers, but at least it’s one where they brushed off an absolutely miserable 2024-25 campaign, overachieved individually almost across the board, and even let us dream a little bigger for a month or two about what their ceiling might be — which is a month or two more than I expected to spend contemplating such things this year. Things fell apart due to injuries, regression and unforced errors from both our players and front office, but I still mostly like this time. I want better things for them than to have to spend another month playing out the string before having to play from all the way behind in the play-in tournament to even have a shot at a real postseason run.

We Gotta Play It Cool About the Sixers Trying to Keep the Pick This Time

I also just can’t abide any amount playing for losses with Joel still on the Sixers. Not with as hard as he’s had to work to get back to where he’s been this season, not with as well as he’s played when he’s been on the court — not what he once was, of course, but way ahead of what we still expected — and not with what he’s meant to this city and team for the past decade now. Every season with him playing at a high level on an even slightly competitive Sixers squad has to be treated at this point as his last, because chances are pretty high it will be. The next game the Sixers drop even slightly on purpose should be one where they have no plans for Embiid to ever suit up for them again afterwards.

And that’s the thing that really separates this season from last one: There is, at least in theory, still a version of this team to get back to. Basically everyone is out right now, but no one’s down with a season-ender; if our guys stay on track, they could all be back by the end of the regular season. And as stomach-emptying as our three wins against Utah, Memphis and Brooklyn were in the past week, they were also all wins — and we’ve got three more games against committed tankers coming up in our next six. The other three are likely blowouts going the other direction, but if we can play .500 ball over the next two weeks with an average scoring differential of -30, that should still be good enough for us to tread water until we can start trickling some guys back into our lineup. With a strong end to the season, we could at least hold in the 7-8 range, with two chances to win one game and earn a first-round matchup against Detroit, Boston, New York or Cleveland.

Does that sound like a particularly great postseason fate for this team? It emphatically does not! I don’t know what the chances are of even a mostly-healthy Sixers squad pulling off a first-round upset against any of those teams — I’d probably peg it at higher than 10%, but like, not a lot higher. Chances are it ends something like the Knicks series two years ago, with the Sixers playing tough and providing some memorable moments but ultimately going down in six — and that might be a high-end scenario. Maybe we get swept by the Celtics. Maybe it’s demoralizing enough that the front office does what it takes to break up the team in the summer. It’s certainly not off the table, or even particularly close to its edge.

But I still want to see the guys get their best chance to fail or succeed on their own merits. It’s bad enough they had to throw away last year, it’s bad enough that the front office and ownership threw additional unnecessary challenges at them at the trade deadline; they don’t also deserve us rooting against them giving themselves a shot just so we can better bet on a way-outside shot of getting bailed out by the lottery (again). Or maybe what they deserve’s got nothing to do with it and I just want to continue watching the games and caring about the results, even if there’s not much of consequence to root for besides V.J. further discovering his Jimmy Butler mid-range game, Quentin Grimes getting some semblance of his groove back and Justin Edwards making my prediction of him ending this season as a better player than Paul George seem infinitesimally less ridiculous.

Regardless of the why, I can tell you that I will absolutely be leading the Sixers’ anti-tank movement once again this season. I can feel my blood getting hotter with every Sixers lottery simulation I see getting posted, with every attempt to pretend that what’s going on with the players at the top of this year’s draft class is absolutely any of our business. See you on the battlefield once more, Mike: I have once again been activated, and I will be watching breathlessly through every game of extended Marjon Beuchamp and Dalen Terry minutes, of Trendon Watford playing the three and refusing to shoot from three, of Cam Payne searching in vain for a Cam Payne Game sequel, in the hopes that it will somehow lead to something more. And if it ends in disaster and/or pointlenessness again that’s fine. I will go down with this ship. I will not be putting my hands up and surrendering. Look above my door for a fucking white flag and I promise you there will be none. I’m still in love with this injury-stricken, star-crossed, low-ceilinged team, and I always will be.

---

Andrew Unterberger 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.