How Can This Sixers Season Already Be Over When There's Still So Much Goddamn Season Left?

AU is feeling great about being a Watch the Games Guy.

It's the 10-3 stretch that really kills me. Not the 3-14 start and all the associated injuries and drama, not the recent 2-7 skid and how everything seems to just be getting worse, not the fact that there are no obvious answers and a million more questions for the Sixers even beyond this season. It's the fact that for nearly one calendar month of Sixers basketball, this team looked like a real team. They were mostly healthy, mostly whole, and mostly getting their shit together. They'd gotten back to 13-17. They were percentage points out of the play-in picture. They beat the fucking Celtics on fucking Christmas. They looked like they were getting back to normal, or whatever "normal" could possibly hope to mean this deep into The Process. They convinced me this was going to be a real season.

And now it's over. Not the season, of course, and not even the Sixers' playoff chances, which are still a lot higher than zero than folks currently seem to believe. But any hope of normalcy, of simplicity, of legitimacy -- forget title contention, that's long out the window -- is gone. The Sixers are 15-24, seemingly unable to win a single game without Joel Embiid, even against the most lackluster and/or compromised of opponents. And not only are those opponents about to get a lot more fuller and lusterier -- the Sixers don't play another obvious lottery team until mid-February -- but there's no telling when or if Joel will be back, as the foot sprain that kept him out the last six games has given way to more knee swelling, and now he is once again out until question mark. It is now sadly undeniable: This is not going to be a real season.

That in itself is bummer enough, given the expectations this season started with and given how much we've all suffered already with this team -- to have to deal with the big picture of a lost season this late into the Process, with this little financial flexibility and so little promise of things getting better in the future, is fairly devastating (though perhaps slightly less so when there's so much actual devastation going on in the country right now). But what really sucks about this Sixers season isn't that it's already over -- it's that there's actually still so fucking much of it left.

There are 43 games that remain for the Sixers to play in the 2024-2025 season. More than half of their yearly schedule. Perhaps even more if they do manage to slip into the play-in -- which they are still technically just 1.5 games out of -- though y'know, probably not like a lot more. That's still a lot of basketball games to watch when there's really not a lot left to watch for.

Joel remains must-watch for me every second he's on the court -- he could join up with Michael Rappaport's three-on-three New York rec league and I'd still be scouring social media for janky streams of it to watch -- but who knows how much of the season he'll be back for, if any. Calls for the team to shut him down for the season are loud and getting louder, and while I dunno if that really will accomplish that much -- by all indications "more rest" is not the thing that will get Embiid's body back to where it needs to be, if such a thing even exists -- at a certain point, maybe you just pull the plug on his campaign to save him the mental and physical stress of desperately attempting to salvage an unsalvageable team situation. He's less likely to accrue additional injuries just by staying at home and beating Arthur's ass in Connect Four, anyway.

Beyond him, perhaps the single most surprising thing about this Sixers season has been how (relatively) joyless watching Tyrese Maxey has become. He's still Tyrese, still capable of moments of blinding brilliance (and even more-blinding smiles) -- but we've seen progressively fewer of both this season, as he has struggled badly with both his shot and playmaking and has embraced becoming a Complains About the Refs Guy a little too wholeheartedly. He and Paul George have had some nice moments together of late but generally have not amplified one another's strengths; somehow having two All-Stars who both averaged over 20 points a game last year has not saved the Sixers' offense from being reminiscent of the Tony Wroten and Hollis Thompson days for most of this season. I'm not giving up on him being more than this -- he's still under 25 and perhaps this season was a wash for him even earlier than we expected -- but certainly getting to watch him on a night-to-night basis has not been the consolation prize it would have been in past years.

And there's just not a lot else really worth investing in emotionally with this team right now. I wasn't heartbroken when Jared McCain went down for the year back in December, since he'd been struggling a little after his scorching start, the team was starting to get right around him, and it was clear he probably wasn't going to be playing a ton moving forward anyway -- but boy does it suck not to have him now, when any hint of a better tomorrow for this squad would go a long fucking way. Some fans might prioritize treasuring our days with Guerschon Yabusele, and I have greatly enjoyed the Yabu experience, but it feels ill-advised to pin our emotional investment on a player unlikely to be here beyond the offseason -- and one who, honestly, Daryl would probably be smart to trade at the deadline at this point. Beyond those guys... do we really wanna latch onto Justin Edwards as the new Shake Milton? Get overly excited about KJ Martin's eventual return? Hope for more Kelly Oubre Jr. ref fights? I dunno, it all feels a little thin to hinge an entire season's drama around.

Going to the Movies With Nick Nurse

So then, of course the question turns to: Is the best thing for us to get emotionally invested in the Sixers starting to lose as much as possible? If your early-Process-era reflexes are still sharp enough that you can make that kind of pivot this late in the season and this late into.... everything..... then God Bless. I personally am not fit for it; I wasn't even great at rooting for losses when we all agreed that that was the thing. To root for a team with three max-level All-Stars to chase the Blazers and Hornets in the tanking rankings is not something I plan on spending my winter nights doing. I don't even know if there's that much of a point to it, with the odds the Sixers are facing and the embarrassment they'd endure for having to go through with it -- though MOC does, and he's usually right about things. If it happens, it happens.

But I can't spend over half a season hoping on it; rooting for ping-pong balls is a young man's game and I'm increasingly Danny Glover with this shit. If I was the Sixers management at this point, I would probably just treat this roster the way I used to treat my old Discmen when they started malfunctioning -- leave them alone for a while and hope whatever problems they had magically fixed themselves. Not exactly a high-percentage play, but I don't personally see the math in them trying hard to either get a whole lot better or a whole lot worse at this point; more dignified to just wait out the season and passively hope for a miracle or two in the meantime.

I'm not really here to advocate for any team strategy though; I'm mostly just here to say this sucks. We wanted a title, sure, but whether we admitted it or not, most of us probably would've settled for a season of legitimately competitive basketball. Say what you will about this team's cavalcade of premature postseason exits; those seasons might've ended early, but at least they weren't over until they were over. This year, we've got three months of games left, and no real remaining reasons to watch -- except to torture ourselves with memories of that 10-3 stretch, and of what might have been if the Sixers were not fundamentally the Sixers.

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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.

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