Coping With the Sixers' Inevitable 10th Seed
MOC (sorta) comes to terms with the tank likely reversing course on this Sixers season.
If you look at it on the surface, the Sixers ending the year as the 10th seed in the Eastern Conference might seem to be a terrible outcome for the season – a year wasted in mediocrity, where they wind up losing their first-round draft pick to the Thunder just to give themselves an outside chance of making the playoffs.
However, if you look at the situation on a deeper level… you’ll still find that it’s a pretty awful outcome. But if you look even deeper than that – probably somewhere near the earth’s crust, in what could only be described as coping territory – I guess you could make the case that it’s not that bad.
Here’s the basic case that someone with rose-colored glasses could probably make: because of the fact that the Western Conference is so deep, even if the Sixers make the 10th seed, their lottery odds likely would not be worse than the ninth overall slot – behind Chicago, but ahead of .500ish teams like San Antonio and Golden State. At the ninth spot in the lottery, the Sixers would still have a 20.3% chance of keeping their pick.
Honestly, it would be more of a disaster to surpass Atlanta – currently only 2.5 games ahead and just having lost Jalen Johnson for the year – and get the ninth seed; they’d still have to win two games in the play-in to make the playoffs, and their lottery odds would dip down to a 13.9 percent chance of keeping their pick. But, since the 10th seed is still the more likely outcome here, it’s fair to focus on the fact that having a 1-in-5 chance of a top four pick, while still having a shot at making the playoffs, isn’t necessarily an awful outcome.
Just one catch: Lottery slots change depending on what happens in the play-in. So, if the Sixers manage to win back to back play-in games and earn the eighth seed, their pick would move out of the lottery, to 15th overall, and thus automatically convey to OKC.
Still, we can find the positives of either of those two outcomes. If they manage to limp into the play-in and then get crushed by Atlanta, their lottery odds are only six percentage points worse than they would have been if they stayed at the 8th lottery slot. Hell, Atlanta won the draft lottery last year with the 10th-best lottery odds.
If instead, they manage to get healthy, surge into the playoffs, and rip off back-to-back wins to set up a first round matchup with Cleveland, that would lead to a fun, though somewhat daunting playoff series, with a fair amount of excitement behind it. After the absolute hell that this season has been, having a crack at a good team in a playoff series with a presumably healthy big three would at least add some excitement to what has been a maddeningly boring season.
As for whether they could actually push Cleveland in a first round matchup, I’m not quite ready to make that case — but I will say that I think Cleveland is one of the more fraudulent great teams of my lifetime, and that the Sixers (if healthy) would be one of the more competent 8th seeds. If you’re looking to give yourself some hope for this matchup, it’d be fair to point out that the Embiid-less Sixers did beat the Cavs at home last Friday, in what may have been their best offensive performance of the season.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still disgusted by this team, but while the Sixers may have proven that they stink, I must admit that they are the best Sixers team in my lifetime to absolutely stink.
Right now, the team is on pace to win 33 games. Having lived through many a Sixers team that has won somewhere in that range of games, I have no doubt that this one is by far the best that I have watched. That’s not me trying to inspire hope in this team, it’s just an acknowledgment of reality.
I’m old enough to remember what it felt like when the 34-win 2012-13 Sixers won games; watching Damien Wilkins lift them to a bunch of fluky wins in an 8-5 stretch in March and April while all of us were dying for them to tank was absolute torture. It felt as if the basketball gods were intervening to ruin the Sixers’ draft status.
When this team wins, it doesn’t feel like that at all. It feels, well, normal. As they beat the Cavs and Bulls back to back on Friday and Saturday, it felt as though they deserved to win both games; their two max players played like max-level players (before PG exited the Chicago game due to injury, of course), they got good enough contributions from their role players, and they took care of business against two teams who played roughly to their respective track records. Same with their convincing wins against the Lakers on Wednesday and Kings on Thursday – down six rotation players, the Sixers still looked like the better team against two currently playoff-bound teams in the West (even if those squads were also dealing with a mid-game star injury and a recent star trade request, respectively).
It’s for that reason that – while, again, I’d prefer to see a proper tank job – I find myself starting to come to terms with this team ending up as the 10th seed. They are too good to truly bottom out, and if they do manage to fight their way into the playoffs, that’s likely a sign that the team is healthy and peaking at the right time.
So much of the frustration of this season has stemmed from the fact that there is simply no reason to be intrigued by or invested in this team. As AU said, at least in years past, the season wasn’t over until it was over. With a playoff appearance, the Sixers would give us some reason to get sucked into investing in them for a brief period of time this year.
Or, if not, they will still have a non-insignificant chance of jumping up in the lottery. It’s a binary choice in which both options are pretty unappealing, but not totally doom-and-gloom. Would I prefer it if the Sixers would commit to the tank? Absolutely. But in the interest of maintaining sanity, I think it’s fair to find some solace in the fact that the 10th seed is a way to still have an outside chance of keeping their pick – as well as a (smaller) outside chance of them actually making the type of playoff run we all dreamed about heading into the season.
Mike O’Connor is the best O’Connor in basketball writing. Previously of The Athletic, you can find Mike on Twitter @MOConnor_NBA. Mike’s writing is brought to you by Body Bio, supplements based on science, focusing on your gut and brain health.