It Shouldn't Be This Bad
It's not just a 1-6 record for the Sixers, it's a shitty 1-6. AU still isn't totally sure why everything sucks this much.
The Philadelphia 76ers are not interested in being your election escapism this week. That much was clear from Wednesday night's performance against the Los Angeles Clippers, a return trip for our new guy Paul George and a long overdue visit to our old friend James Harden, which followed an increasingly familiar plot for this Sixers season -- neck-and-neck first half, blowout third quarter, garbage time fourth. With the lone exceptions of the OT win in Indiana and the last-minute loss in Phoenix, it's essentially been the script for all seven games this year; it's like the Sixers only have the strength to pretend to be a real basketball team for about 24 minutes, and then once the first crack shows in the facade, the entire damn thing bursts open. It's tough enough on East Coast time, sucking on the West Coast during the work week is adding sleepless insult to injury.
It's getting increasingly hard to just write off this Sixers stretch as just It Is What It Is. Yes it's a team with a lot of new parts, yes we're at a deficit in size and playmaking, yes obviously our best player has been out for the whole season to this point and our top new guy is just getting back to limited-minute action. I still would absolutely not have predicted a 1-6 start; particularly not such a start where the Sixers are routinely losing by comfortable double-digit margins, and particularly not one where the quality of our opponent seems mostly irrelevant to how competently we perform against them. As subpar as the Sixers were last year in the Joel-less games, they were never quite this bad, and this team was supposed be deeper, vet-ier and just all-around better than last year's.
I'm starting to get worried, sure. But more than that I think I'm just confused.
It's hard to know who or what exactly is to blame for the Sixers being quite this bad. The first couple games I was able to partially write off due to cold Tyrese Maxey shooting, but at least until yesterday's icier performance, he's mostly turned that around in the season since. Still, even when Maxey has been scoring efficiently, he has not been nearly dynamic enough as a playmaker to build a coherent offense around him; he has had absolutely no juice in the pick-and-roll (though he found a little pick-and-pop magic with Guerschon Yabusele against Phoenix) and too often he seems to be passing around the perimeter either to punt a possession or to get the ball back seconds later. Maxey has always been undersized, but this is the first time I've ever really felt just how small he is; he always seems to be getting covered by dudes six inches taller than him, with even taller trees laying in wait for him. He's much more stymie-able right now than I ever thought possible.
Most of the other perimeter options seem fine but flat. Paul George has been pretty good but still mostly rates as a TBD. Kelly Oubre Jr. can make stuff happen when called on but the longer the game goes, the more his predictability shines through. Lowry's been shooting the lights out, and he makes his typical 3-4 motherfucker plays a game, but the more often the ball gets swung to him the more you're reminded he can't be the guy to finish more than a couple plays a night. Eric Gordon comes and goes. The only guy who really pops is Jared McCain, who clearly doesn't have the finesse yet to be a 20-minutes-a-night guy, but whose general feistiness and desire to make shit happen is so refreshing late in these games that you wonder if he should be getting them anyway.
And eight games into the season, I might already be done with Caleb Martin. I don't want to judge him too harshly without seeing how he looks next to Embiid, but I just can't stand watching this man shoot. Sixers history has of course been littered with guys who got here and instantly forgot how to shoot, but Caleb Martin is the first I can remember who seems like he never properly learned in the first place -- his form is positively Tony Allen-esque, five out of every six shots he takes I'm going "well that's off" the second it leaves his hands. Maybe he'll look better standing in the corner and catching kickouts from Jo, but every bone in my body says this guy is going to be absolute murder for us when we need him to hit shots for us in the playoffs. (And that we should've known better in the first place trying to poach this guy from Miami; how many more P.J. Tuckers and Josh Richardsons until we finally learn?)
The big-man situation doesn't seem any more sorted. Andre Drummond finally looked playable again last night against the Clippers, but for the three games before, he was an absolute catastrophe on both sides of the ball, defending the pick-and-roll like he was waiting for someone to tap him on the shoulder, gifting turnovers like he was ordering off the Grizzlies' and Suns' registry and executing post moves that made Mo Bamba look like Hakeem Olajuwon. Guerschon Yabusele stepped in for Basketball Andre against Phoenix and nearly shot the Sixers to victory; when he and Maxey or he and Lowry have that going it's actually been the closest the team looks to running a real NBA offense. But he's limited on defense and at the mercy of his stroke on offense; defenses are letting him shoot, and if he misses a couple in a row, he'll stop even trying to punish them for doing so, and then we're back to square one. It feels like we're a big man short on this roster; FOTB Jason Lipshutz keeps (rightly) bringing up that we signed Reggie Jackson for no reason when we could've desperately used another real option down low for nights when Drum is on the fritz and Yabusele doesn't have the sauce.
As is often the case in pro sports when nothing is going well, it's easiest to blame the coach. Nick Nurse came to us with a reputation for both offensive ingenuity and finding ways to win with undermanned rosters; so far this season our offense has looked about as inspired as Lil Uzi Vert's last couple albums and our roster seems like we're missing more guys than we actually are. I don't know how fair it is to blame him for not generating more wins out of a team this messy at the moment, but the way the Sixers seem to let go of the rope every third quarter doesn't speak terribly highly of his ability to get the team he has to really lock in. Maybe the incessant questions about Joel's (and until recently, PG's) availability have just left him a little too exhausted. Maybe that goes for the whole team, us probably included.
Still, even with the lifeless coaching, the pick-your-poison big-man options, the bricky shooting and the compromised Tyrese Maxey, I don't totally get this 1-6 start. There's plenty of other teams out there struggling with ill-fitting rosters, missing guys and no continuity -- we've played a few of them already and we got summarily pantsed each time. Maybe I was overly optimistic thinking they could play .500 ball with Joel and even PG out, maybe I overestimated our role players and got too high too early on Tyrese, maybe I underestimated how much stability guys like Tobias.... no sorry I can't bring myself to finish that sentence just yet, but the fact that I'm even able to start it is wildly concerning. Regardless, none of this justifies or even really explains 1-6 with four double-digit losses to me, and the fact that the team has been this bad without Joel does give me legitimate cause to wonder how much better they'll even be able to be with him. Maybe it's just a slow start, but it's been fucking molasses long enough that we sorta have to ask: Are we already too deep into this early-season hole -- in our souls if not in the standings -- to really dig oureselves out? Have we all just done this for too long by now? Can you save us, Joel Embiid? Can we be saved??
I guess the good news is that we'll start to find out about that last part soon enough, as Joel is due back in three games, supposedly suiting up against the Knicks on Tuesday. His arrival seems unlikely to be a panacea for all that ails the Sixers, but at least if he's on the court, he won't not be on the court, and having that black cloud removed from the bench should brighten things up across the franchise. But even if he comes back and suddenly everything's all Peaches and Herb, then what happens the next time he has to miss a game, a week, a month? If we can't even pretend to be a real team without him for a whole game, how can we really expect to do so across an entire season? How do you load manage a guy when no one else on the team is up to carrying that weight? Will we always need more from Joel Embiid than he is physically capable of giving?
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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The ongoing whack a mole roster addition needs are daunting. Health has been nightmarish as the cherry on top. 2024.
I like Maxey but people talking about him as a future post-Embiid center piece are going a bit too far for an undersized scoring guard. In the meantime does anyone else ever look back and think like me that perhaps Brett Brown wasn't so bad after all? They had an identity when he was the coach.