It Was a Good Win
Maxey was a killer, Drummond had a career night, VJ Edgecombe fucked around and got a double-double — we don't want Boston, but we do want wins like this.
It was a really weird feeling last night going into the start of the postseason already feeling pretty hopeless. As bad as things have ever gotten with the Sixers during the seven playoff runs they’ve had during the Joel Embiid era, I don’t think we’ve ever kicked off the second season feeling so mentally defeated. We’ve been underdogs in the first round, but at the very least, we always had Joel — there was the chance he could pull off a miracle practically by his lonesome, or at least do enough cool shit in an eventual losing effort to make us feel good about the future.
But this year, there’s no Joel, and there’s not much hope for this team’s future, at least not one with him still in it. There’s not much dread or despair, even. There just isn’t much of anything. In truth, I barely even thought about the play-in game before last night — if you’d asked me my prediction for it (or even just my general take on it) I probably would’ve just shrugged. The outcome felt pretty low-variance: Losing would’ve been bad, but also kinda whatever, and winning would’ve been good, but not really that good.
Well, the game happened. The Sixers won. And yeah, it wasn’t that good. But it was good. It felt good. I dunno how much there is to say about its larger meaning, but it’s a thing I’m really glad happened — a little more glad than I would have expected.
To get it out of the way, because it’d feel dishonest not to start with it: This felt way more like an Orlando Magic loss than a Philadelphia 76ers win. My main thought as the Sixers started to very sort of take control in the second half was how much I would fucking hate to be an Orlando Magic fan right now, to have this pretty impressive core of young players who just don’t seem to be going in the right direction together at all, who seem to be capping out at the same ceiling as the Oladipo/Gordon/Vucevic teams of yore and who need their veteran hired gun to have one of the best offensive games of his career to even be able to compete in the play-in. And now Paolo Banchero is scared to shoot? Better them than us, for once in this life.
But even if the win was more about the other team falling apart than ours coming together, it did still feel like a growth win for the Sixers. It was one of the most complete games they’ve played all season without Joel — they played hard on both sides of the ball, they crashed the glass surprisingly effectively, they created turnovers when they needed to and they never let a couple bad possessions in a row spiral into a total collapse. They even won the third quarter by one point! More than any individual performance, I was heartened by just how much they fought in this one as a team, down to the bench guys really popping for some of the best moments like a bench mob should. (Shoutout Playoff Cheerleader Kyle Lowry, who’s 100% gonna leave it all on the sideline floor for this upcoming Celtics series.)
And there were a lot of great individual performances too! Tyrese Maxey had that killer fourth-quarter run we desperately needed to keep the Magic at arm’s length, and a huge block in the final minutes to keep them from getting back in it. VJ Edgecombe was up and down but basically had the meet-the-moment plays on both sides of the ball we needed to confirm that Playoff VJ was gonna be even doggier than the regular season version. Paul George hit the shots he had to hit. Kelly Oubre Jr splashed a whole bunch of threes. Adem Bona sent Banchero to a deep, dark place and he had fun doing it. Andre Drummond... maybe played the game of his entire life? Considering we only played eight guys and didn’t get much from Quentin Grimes or Dominick Barlow, it still felt like a surprisingly full team.
The offense was still very, very rough in stretches. Tyrese Maxey had a lot of drives to nowhere, VJ had four turnovers trying to do too much, and as is always the case without Joel out there, the pick-and-roll just doesn’t work as a bread-and-butter play when nobody gives a fuck about accounting for the roll man. (Although now that Andre Drummond has unexpectedly turned into Nikola Jokic with ups, perhaps that won’t be the case much longer.) It’s hard to see this team having enough offensive juice to outscore a team like oh I don’t know let’s just say the Boston Celtics, especially when said team gets a whole bunch of chances to learn the ins and outs of their not-that-sophisticated-or-varied offensive schemes.
So I’m not exactly talking myself into this team having a real chance in the first round just yet. If Maxey stays hot and VJ continues to get stronger, a stolen game isn’t out of the question — maybe even in Boston? — and the more I think about it, the more likely it seems that, for better or worse, Joel will try to hurry himself back for a late-series cameo if it goes long enough. But beating Boston four times? Beating Boston three times, even? It’s tough to see the roadmap there. Good vibes and low expectations are great and all, but a lot of times, those only last until the first timeout in Boston where Payton Pritchard is whooping up the crowd, and Jayson Tatum is doing the This Is My House and Horf is there for some reason and all of a sudden everything feels totally hopeless again.
But if nothing else, it’s nice to see the guys get a signature win without Jo. We don’t know what the future holds for the Sixers or for the big man, but playing big games without him is something the Sixers are going to have to do a decent amount of pretty much regardless, and having the confidence to know they can hold tough in a basically do-or-die scenario without The Process on the floor will undoubtedly be meaningful for them moving forward. The guys need those reps eventually, may as well start getting them now.
And most importantly: The “We Want Boston” chant at the Excema last night? Fucking aces, man. I was a little incredulous about it at first, of course — we emphatically *do not* want Boston and never legitimately have in my lifetime — but it was a great moment of a temporarily sauced-up fanbase piling it on and going back for seconds, because really, why not? We haven’t gotten a lot of feeling-ourselves moments lately, and we might get even fewer of ‘em in the months to come. Let the Cus Crisers throw it back in our faces after their douchebag’s sweep of us; that’s two-weeks-from-now’s problem. We’ll never want Boston, but we do still want basketball moments like last night. It was good to be reminded of that.
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.