It's Getting Easy to Forget That the Sixers Sucked
AU on how we suddenly got so optimistic about a team that went 24-58 last year.
I've been thinking a lot about a moment from about halfway through Daryl Morey's recent appearance on the Ricky. It came after a good 30-40 minutes of oddly positive-skewing Sixers talk, about the unlikely number of injuries that befell the team last year, about all the the role players and rising stars who still ended up popping, about what a good job Nick Nurse did making use of the lost season, about how still-dominant a healthy Joel Embiid could be, about all the reasons we have to be excited for next year (particularly if we kept the pick -- which, y'know). You could already feel the bad memories of last year getting hazier and hazier, until Spike asked Daryl a question that snapped them back into focus.
"Even given all of the injuries last year, do you think the team should've been better?"
Daryl only needed about a half-second to think. "I would say yes. Yes... I thought we were not as good as we should've been."
I mean... yeah. Like Mike and Spike and everyone else, I'm letting myself start to believe in there being a real future for this Sixers team again. But it's still a little hard for me to have faith in things getting better when I still feel like we don't totally understand why they went so bad in the first place.
Because for all the things that went wrong for the Sixers last year, a truly bizarre number of them also went right. Guerschon Yabusele proved insanely productive for a minimum veteran pickup. Rookies Justin Edwards and Adem Bona both emerged as potential two-way contributors at positions where the team desperately needed the depth. Daryl absolutely fleeced the Dallas Mavericks by sending them a declining Caleb Martin for a much younger and better-fitting role player -- who also started playing at an All-Star level once he became the last man standing in the Sixers' backcourt -- and even got our second-round pick this year back for his troubles. And of course, Jared McCain looked for the couple months that he played to be both the runaway Rookie of the Year favorite and a future franchise ceiling-raiser, despite coming with the 16th pick of a historically weak draft. We won just about every battle on the margins last year that we could have.
And absolutely none of it mattered. Not to our record, anyway: 24-58, a final mark so impossibly bad -- particularly compared to preseason expectations -- that it could have been 20 games better than it was and still qualified as an unmitigated disaster. That's the kind of season you should only have as an ostensibly perennially contending team when you're in a spot like the 2020 Golden State Warriors -- where Klay Thompson's year is lost in the previous year's playoffs, Steph Curry goes down four games into the season, Kevin Durant leaves in free agency. and the oncoming COVID pandemic means the world very well might be coming to an end anyway.
But that wasn't the 2025 Philadelphia 76ers -- not totally, anyway. Yes, everything about the team's ceiling depends on Joel Embiid, and he only played 19 games total in a stop-start season where he was never at (and rarely near) his usual MVP-caliber level of play. But they also had two guys who were All-Stars the past year in Tyrese Maxey and Paul George, who had injury woes of their own but both played at least half the season, and who don't have any particularly convincing excuses at their disposal as to why they weren't able to at least help the team feign competence -- particularly with a decent-enough supporting cast of solid veterans and overachieving rookies flanking them. Simply put, as Spike and Daryl agreed, they should have been better.
And it's getting SO easy and SO tempting to just memory-hole that part of it. After all, things are great again!! Jo will be back healthy, Tyrese will be back pissed off. Paul George's shooting will even out, and once we re-sign Yabusele and Quentin Grimes, we'll have as deep and as young a supporting cast as we've had in ages. Throw in second-year jumps for Edwards, Bona and a returned-from-injury McCain, and an explosive debut from whoever we take at No. 3 -- or hey, maybe we trade that for Kevin Durant or Lauri Markkanen? -- plus an East already decimated by injuries from this postseason, and who knows? Could the Sixers be a top three seed in the East again? Could they finally be one of the conference's final two teams in the playoffs? Could Jared McCain run for president on the influencer ticket? Suddenly nothing feels out of the realm of possibility.
Except: If this team was such a loud and painful belly-flop last year, it's hard to say why exactly a roster with largely the same core would suddenly be making a graceful swan dive into 2025-26. Things went so rotten so quickly this past season that it felt much more like an internal issue than a series of external ones, and I dunno how winning the summer (again!) necessarily cures that. Maybe it all just comes down to Embiid being in good body and sound mind and that setting the tone, but I can't say I feel too confident in us being able to will that into reality: Daryl's cautious optimism on the Ricky pod about Embiid making a healthy return sounded a lot more cautious than optimistic to me, and understandably so. Once the central piece of that Jenga tower is removed, maybe it's only another couple turns from there until things get really tumbly.
But... maybe not? The further we get away from this most recent campaign, the easier it will get to just explain everything away as the Season From Hell: One thing after another went wrong, and before long everyone just threw up their hands and said Better Luck Next Season. Next year, things are just a little less catastrophic out of the gate, our All-Stars play like All-Stars, our young guys step up, and once again our expected outcomes range from finals contender at best to merely pretty good at absolute worse. That's what we'll tell ourselves anyway, and the closer we get to opening night 2025, the more we'll start to sound like we're really making good and logical sense. Don't worry that we never totally diagnosed what the fuck really afflicted us last year; like all medical concerns, we'll just ignore the problem and hopefully it'll go away on its own.
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.
Thanks again for eloquently laying out the long and short of it. Other than the Christmas day game sugar high, the team, and Nurse by extension, looked like they were passively waiting to just magically transmorph into a functional two-way team.
Do like Illinois and show me. Seems to be 50/50 very positive or shockingly similar negative outcomes are possible.