Hey This Is a Fun Way to End a Season

AU is full sicko and feeling good.

Sorry to disappoint the surprising number of people who tweeted at me about it after the game on Saturday night, but I have no strong take about whether or not the Hornets win was the best of the season. It was definitely awesome, though — over an I-still-can’t-totally-believe-how-frisky-this-team-is-level-frisky Hornets squad, in Charlotte, where it felt like they were exposing all our weakness and getting all the whistles. To see the Sixers dig in like they did in the final quarter and a half, and not only keep the Hornets from pulling away but to battle back and steal the win, in most of our guys’ first or second game back from weeks-long injuries, was a real heart-sweller. Everyone played a big part in it, even Rock and Roll Coach. Great win.

The funny thing about playing the better part of a month with nearly all your good players out is that when they’re all finally, suddenly back, it feels like you’re trotting out a full-fledged All-Star team every night. Of course it helps with that when you actually do have three multi-time All-Stars in your starting lineup — but even that feels kinda surreal with this team, especially when they’re all playing at that level like they were in Charlotte. Three? We have three star-level players on this team? At once? I mean that’s cool. And then you remember we still have VJ Edgecombe — who definitely reached another level towards the end of his one-man-show run in mid-late March — and Kelly Oubre Jr.’s back too, and Quentin Grimes is still chilling, and hey maybe Justin Edwards is a thing again, and holy shit are we even allowed to have this many dudes on one team? Do we need to worry about Adam Silver intervening again?

And of course, this is when the real sicko part of me kicks in, because we also have a standings race to invest in. There’s three or four games a night beyond our own that really, really matter to our playoff seeding — and another couple more that matter to us more indirectly, like the Pistons maintaining enough of a standings lead over the Celtics (or the Thunder over the Spurs) that hopefully neither Detroit or San Antonio has all that much to play for when we face them with five and four games to go in the season, respectively. Sometimes a couple of these teams play one another, and basically any outcome ends up benefiting the Sixers in some way; sometimes one of them loses a game they really have no excuse not to win (like Miami dropping one to Indiana on Sunday) and it’s delightful enough to make your entire night.

Then, for those of us who are really intent on getting nuts, it bears mention that we also have a first-round pick that doesn’t belong to us (how’d we get it? who’s to say??), so we’re in a stealth late-round tanking race too. Which means that every night, there’s five or six games that matter to us for one reason or another. Maybe not exactly appointment viewing to make sure that the Timberwolves take care of business against the Pelicans or whoever — thus maintaining their standings lead over the Rockets, and keeping the latter’s pick at No. 20 — but also maybe at least worth flipping over to it after the Phillies or Sixers and catching the end of the fourth quarter. It’s fun to have so much stuff to care about again, no matter how ultimately trivial.

It’s also just cool to be relevant again, to not know exactly what this team’s ceiling is, to have The Other O’Connor tweeting about them being a potential Conference Finals contender. A few weeks ago, some Sixers fans were wondering whether we could pile up enough late-season losses to fall to the very bottom of the playoff race and maybe sneak back into the lottery one more time; now it feels a lot more practical to wonder whether we could find our way out of the play-in altogether. We may not be all the way back in Could This Be The Year??? territory yet, but we’re willing to think about the team as a real team again, not just a time-killing distraction for running out the clock on some bad contracts. Mike and Spike didn’t even talk about Jared McCain on the last podcast. It’s a wild reversal of vibes.

Who Benefits Most From Joel and PG Being Back?

And at the risk of defending one of the least popular of my many unpopular recent takes, I will say that this is why I did consider the Portland win such a huge one. Them surviving the VJ-only stretch of the season — going 5-3 just as a light gust of wind could’ve sent the team tumbling towards total collapse — kept the team just viable enough to still have things to really fight for once Joel, PG and Tyrese all got back. And while four of those wins came against the tanking faithful, the Portland victory was over against a still-trying team that they had every excuse to lose to. Scraping together that W with basically the Summer League version of the team represented a huge swing for how bad things could’ve gotten vs. how good they suddenly feel again now. It allowed us to get back here.

Now here we are. The fun may not last; eight games is still plenty of time for someone else to get injured, or for an easy win to slip out of our fingers at great cost, or for us to do everything right but still fall short in the standings; like when we went 8-0 to end the season after Joel’s return in 2024 and still couldn’t escape the play-in or an eventual first-round series with the Knicks. And even if everything does go according to plan, the most likely outcome for this team is still a first-round playoff exit, and this portion of the season being rememberable primarily as “The Tease,” as Mike put it in this weekend’s pod. But we might not have a lot of memories of any kind left with this version of the team, and for a while there it seemed like they were due to all be some combination of frustrating and miserable. To have some legitimately positive, fun ones as we close the season — with the possibility of more still to come — is a joy I don’t take for granted.

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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.