Goddamn Is It Hard to Get Excited for This Sixers Season

Please don't put it in the newspaper that AU was back.

“It’s gonna be a good team this year, and it’s gonna be a fun team.”

That was me writing about the Sixers on October 20th of last year, about a week before the season’s start. I can’t say I remember feeling all that optimistic about that Sixers season, following a first-round exist that saw a hobbled Joel unable to grimace his way past the Knicks, and an offseason in which he’d looked creakier than ever in the Olympics and had failed to ramp back up in time to be active for opening night. But truly, it’s all relative: The Sixers were a perennial playoff disappointment, but they’d loaded back up for the regular season — and even if Joel had to miss some time, they had a minted second All-Star in Tyrese Maxey, they had a new future Hall-of-Famer in Paul George, they had an exciting rookie in Jared McCain and they had a history of baseline 82-game competence to lean on. And besides, it was preseason; I’ve always managed to work my way back to being some version of pumped about the Sixers by the end of the preseason. We’d have to adjust to a constantly shuffling lineup, I wrote about in my 2024-’25 preview — but for the regular season at least, we’d have fun and we’d be fine.

Neither, of course, could’ve been farther from the truth. We certainly weren’t fine: The regular season was an unmitigated disaster of injuries, underperformance, bad vibes, injuries, dispiriting Nick Nurse press conferences, locker-room exchanges leaked to the press, injuries, missed threes, missed rebounds, losing streaks and injuries. And aside from one Jared McCain heater, one turn-the-corner Tyrese Maxey stretch, a couple Quentin Grimes Games and a Joel Embiid-led Christmas win in Boston — which he nearly missed after re-injuring himself during pregame warmups, why not — there was absolutely zero fun to be had. Now, we look back, and it’s hard to remember a time when we ever could’ve been so blindly optimistic as to think: “Well at least we’ll have some good times before they inevitably let us down in the playoffs.”

Well, good news everyone: Blind optimism is not the name of the game for me this Sixers season. I am not back in. I am not assuming anything good for this team. I certainly don’t believe we’ll be fine, and I’m not all that confident that we’ll have fun. Whatever I’ve been able to do in past seasons to get myself re-excited about the Sixers is not doing the trick this October. I remain emotionally limp for this professional basketball team.

Which isn’t to say there’s no potential for good times with the Sixers this upcoming season. On paper, there’s plenty of reason to get excited: We have one of the best, most potent young guard rotations in the league now, with Tyrese Maxey, Quentin Grimes, Jared McCain and V.J. Edgecombe. We have Season Two of Paul George, and his younger doppelganger Justin Edwards who I already declared would be better than him this season. We have the return of the Quiet Tournament for the starting power forward position. And we have Joel Embiid, not playing yet, but alive and moving and feeling good, or at least not being actively doomery. Even at its best it hardly seems like a recipe for title contention, but the possibility for a fun regular season with reduced ambitions certainly seems like it’s on the table.

But nothing that’s happened in the past month has inspired confidence that it’s actually the most likely outcome. Quentin Grimes spite-accepted the qualifying offer. Jared McCain got his thumb torn off. Paul George... I don’t even remember what his injury was and it’s gonna make me too annoyed to look it up. Justin Edwards can’t make a shot or complete a drive to the rim to save his life (or his rotation spot) during the preseason. I haven’t been moved enough about any of the guys in our Quiet Tournament to even know or care who’s currently winning — I assume Trendon Watford by sheer virtue of his also being too hurt to play. Kennedy Chandler popping? If you say so, whatever he’s been doing, he hasn’t been doing it for me.

If there’s three reasons to have any amount of excitement about the Sixers at this exact moment, they’re probably Tyrese Maxey, VJ Edgecombe and Joel Embiid. Tyrese has certainly had his moments in the preseason, with scoring outbursts in each of the last two games, including a 17-point first quarter against Orlando on Friday night. But he’s also shown a lot of what went wrong with him last season: namely his inability to get his shot off from deep without Joel, and the subpar results when he does — I feared for the backboard in Dubai — and his limitations in orchestrating an offense and generating opportunities for others when he has to be the focal point. Last season with Tyrese was really tough; I believe he can do better, but I can’t stake my emotional well-being on him until I actually see him figure it out a little more.

VJ Edgecombe would probably be the No. 1 answer if you asked Sixers fans what they were actually looking forward to about this season. I get that: the highlights have already been phenomenal, and his missed poster attempt in the preseason opener probably still ranks in the five greatest dunks in Process History. But as many things as he has done well, it has not been enough to make me forget that he is still a guard who can’t shoot — a tricky watch on any team, and a potentially re-traumatizing one for this particular franchise. Will he get better eventually? Maybe. Will he make grand strides in that evolution this season? Probably not. Around a team that already has plenty of everything, that might not be a huge problem, but on this already injury-ridden team where he might be immediately asked to do a whole lot? It’ll be conspicuous, for sure. (Oh, and he’s also hurt again with a hip injury and missed our last preseason game, TBD on how big a deal that ends up being.)

And then there’s Joel. Historically, the one thing I’ve been able to rely on to get me back into Sixers Mode has been the promise of Joel — however compromised, however sulky, however non-guaranteed. But I just can’t feel confident in us getting any amount of Joel for any stretch of time this season. There’s just too many question marks with him, and while the team refraining from acting overconfident about his progress is probably the right move long-term, in the short-term it’s not exactly getting the juices flowing. Proof of life is a great start, but there’s so many benchmarks to clear between there and actually feeling good about his play and his health and his overall spirit, and he’s clearly not rushing to clear them.

I dunno. An 0-3 preseason hasn’t helped. Orion Kerkering and one run in 11 innings hasn’t helped. A two-game Eagles losing streak and a kvetchy A.J. Brown hasn’t helped (though honestly the Eagles had been hogging the good karma for too long anyway). Another Sixer getting needlessly injured by the time you finish reading this sentence won’t have helped either. The Exocrising the Demons podcast was a worthwhile exercise but still a dispiriting listen — not just to be reminded of seven years’ worth of playoff failures, but to think that said period now maybe already constitutes the Good Old Days for this franchise, where things would now have to break improbably right for us to ever even get high enough to be let down again. It’s tough stuff.

You could say that the main thing to be excited for with this Sixers team is the blessing of lowered expectations. In past years maybe we’d say that we were going in with no real hopes, not permitting ourselves to get hurt again. But if we ever really meant it, we didn’t mean it totally, and rarely for long. As long as we had Joel, we could never totally shed the hope that finally this would be the season that his body held up and he put it all together in the playoffs — and if that happened, it almost wouldn’t matter what else was going on with the team’s coaching situation or supporting cast or locker-room vibes. This is the first season where that happening barely even feels like a remote possibility — where it’s not even a matter of accepting the reality of the situation for us, because the reality has made itself too unignorable for us to even have a choice. Maybe there’ll be some freedom in that, some sense of release in letting go of actual contention aspirations and just taking this season as it comes.

Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe the drips and drabs of workout footage featuring our injured vets, the flashes of preseason excellence from our rising stars, and the longest summer vacation we’ve had from this team in a decade has been enough to work more of the fanbase up into a lather over this team than I currently realize. Maybe I’m just getting old, or maybe a 1-0 start to the regular season is all I need to be foaming at the mouth again. But the way this summer and preseason has consistently managed to let the air out of any ballooning interest in this team feels like a sign, a warning to not feel confident in this team being anything this year, least of all fine or fun. All I can do is take heed, and at least feel confident that I’ll finally have one Sixers preview column at the Ricky where I won’t have to look back and laugh at myself for being way too excited.

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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.