Like.... Come On

AU on the Sixers being punished for their arrogance of daring to be healthy for three whole weeks of absurdly mediocre basketball.

All we ever hoped for with this team was a chance to watch them at full strength. The story with the Sixers the last few years — for as long as we can remember, really, but particularly the last few years — has been a never-ending relay race of individual mini-tragedies, one player always handing off the injury baton to another, with Joel Embiid always in the anchor leg position. The team seemed to be a real team as constructed, but we’d probably never get to see proof of it one way or the other; there would always be some nagging malady, some latent excuse, some reason why we couldn’t judge this team as The Sixers, but rather some substitute version we’d have to make do with until the real one arrived (or more likely, didn’t).

Well, for three and a half weeks, we finally got The Sixers. And it sucked. And now it’s over.

Paul Geroge, as no doubt dozens of different notifications across your various social media platforms and messaging services have by now informed you, is out for the next 25 games. That in itself is hardly unexpected; by this point in The Process, we get reflexively antsy anytime we go the better part of a month without needing to consult our medical journals over some Shams update or another. The only surprising thing was that this was not an overdue karma bill delivered by the injury gods, but a direct punishment handed out by the league itself: Paul George would be suspended due to his taking of a banned substance, only allowed to return with 10 games left in the season.

I’m not particularly interested in condemning Paul George for his unforced error, or debating what related “P” alliterative nickname we now must dub him with as further sentencing for his crimes. In his statement following the news, George gestured at the illicit substance he’s getting dinged for taking being related to treatment of his mental health, and apologized for not being more careful. Fine. I truly have no idea how unfair, arcane and/or confusing the league’s drug policy is (or how easy it is to mistakenly violate), nor do I care to dig into the particulars of what PG was trying to do that ended up being off-limits. All I care about is that this officially brings an end to the Sixers’ shockingly lengthy period of lineup normalcy, dragging us back to more familiar grounds of calculating timetables and bargaining emotionally while the rest of the league points and laughs at us.

Uh-Oh, Expectations Come to Town

And the worst part of it is: Those three and a half weeks of the Sixers being chill weren’t even that cool. If the Sixers had gone 10-2 over that 12-game period since SixersAdam’s fateful All Clear tweet, blowing out teams left and right while Tyrese Maxey and VJ Edgecombe went viral for doing Kid ‘n Play dances to our victory music, then fine, yes, of course some random shit would be about to befall us. We’re not unreasonable people in the Sixers fandom at this point, we understand that any extended period of unchecked good vibes for this franchise is bound to be immediately rebalanced with some heinous nonsense to keep us all in our place. It’s been 13 years since Sam Hinkie was first hired, we know how the game works by now.

But we didn’t get that, at all. We got 6-6. We got two losses to the Donovan Mitchell Cavs in a row, at home. We got a chokejob against the Raptors when we were up two possessions with under 20 seconds to go. We got a blowout at the hands of the Hornets — the motherfucking Hornets — on Monday, as our distraction from a weekend of some of the worst news headlines imaginable. We got the indignity of riding a two-game winning streak, capped by a comeback from 10 down in the fourth quarter against the Kings, as now marking the peak of our pride before the fall. This was The Sixers, at full strength, at maximum normalcy, and it could not have been more mediocre. And even that was apparently way too good to last.

Who knows, maybe this is just what the Sixers need. Maybe this team has lived inside dysfunction for so long that time spent on the outside of that leaves our guys uncomfortable and frightened, craving the familiarity of chaos. Certainly some X factor has been missing from this season; nearly every player individually seems to be having a better year than expected, and it still adds up to the Sixers treading water, just trying to keep their heads above .500. Paul George had been playing well — though it’s hard to even remember what standards we’re supposed to be holding him to these days — but not so well that his loss will be untenable. Spending 25 games without him will certainly not be a death sentence for this team.

But it still feels cruel. It feels unnecessary. It feels like we’re being punished for something we didn’t even do, like we’re being given detention for thinking too hard about skipping school. And now that this piece has been pulled from the Sixers’ Jenga Tower of Normalcy, it would be zero percent surprising if the rest crumbled from here. And the tower wasn’t even that high. And building it wasn’t that fun. And it didn’t feel like anyone was playing by the rules. And maybe the whole game is stupid anyway.

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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.