I Can't Quit This Sixers Season

AU is still rooting for wins till the end.

It's so absurd how big the Sixers' game tonight is. Not that anyone in Philadelphia will particularly be paying attention -- most of our own Sixers-related thoughts will be reserved for planning specifically obnoxious and loud chants to greet Josh Harris with when he visits the Linc with the Commanders tomorrow afternoon. But tonight, the Sixers play in Chicago against a 10th-seeded Bulls team that, despite the Sixers' recent seven-game losing streak and overall 11-games-under-.500 record, we are still only two games in back of for the fourth and final East wildcard spot. A win tonight and the Sixers are almost unquestionably still in the playoff hunt in the largely woeful East. A loss tonight and the thunderous echo of the ping-pong balls bouncing increasingly loudly in the distance will reach Jurassic Park levels.

And of course, even among the few Sixers fans willing to spare any non-Kelly Green thoughts this weekend, most will read that and wonder aloud, "Who gives a fuck?" For the majority of the Sixers faithful -- including both of our co-hosts on the Ricky -- the season ended for all intents and purposes with the latest round of Joel Embiid knee-swelling news, and had only gotten deader over the three brutal Sixers losses that immediately followed, capped by a 35-point L to Denver where we would've needed animal control nets and tranquilizer darts to have any hope of competing on defense. On the Wednesday podcast, Spike advised anyone still rooting for the Sixers to turn things around to "seek help." (Or he did in the accompanying web post, anyway; I haven't been able to bring myself to actually listen to the pod yet.) (Ed note: Spike says this was not actually his note and that he is not necessarily rooting for losses either.)

Fair. This season would hardly mark the first time that the particular volume and direction of my Sixers fandom caused those around me to start Googling "cheap psychiatrists NY UES." But I can't write off this team or this season yet. I just can't do it.

Largely that is of course because, as I wrote last week, the remaining season is still so much goddamn season. If you're not a Watch the Games Person, and you can just easily replace the role that watching and following the Sixers would otherwise play in your life with getting really into the Australian Open or the Oscars race or the Drake UMG lawsuit or whatever, then yeah, I can understand it being Good Night and Good Luck on the Liberty Ballers this season. But as a decades-devout Sixers Games-Watcher -- I could just as easily turn off that part of myself at this point as I could convert to Latvian Orthodoxy -- 39 games is simply too many remaining games for me to actively or even ambiently root for losses; that's just an unthinkable amount of Sixers misery for me to willingly hope for.

I also still just want better things for these Sixers. Even with the combined amount of injuries, bad karma, fluky underperformance and general cursedness that the team has been forced to endure this season, I can't shake the feeling that they should be doing better than they have been, that the team is too talented and stocked with real players to be quite this bad. I want to see Tyrese Maxey get his season back on track, in his confidence, joy and offensive production. I want to see Paul George's numbers round back up to "aging All-Star" and firmly out of "what's wrong with Paul George?" territory. I want to see young'ns like Justin Edwards and Adem Bona settle into their roles and prove themselves NBA-level contributors. I want to see Kelly Oubre Jr. remember how to make a pass again.

And all of those things -- except for the last one -- have been quietly happening the past eight or nine games, even as the team has only actually won just one of those. Tyrese is looking like his 2023-24 self again, averaging 30 points and seven assists over his last nine and appearing more purposeful and less aimless in everything he's doing in the halfcourt. PG has posted a 47/45/94% shooting line for the month of January, dragging his numbers for the season up to an acceptable-enough 17/6/5 on 43/37/82% splits. Edwards and Bona now seem locked in as rotation fixtures -- at least while the team's injury situation is what it is -- and have continued to impress in their respective spots. Even as they've slid further and further down the standings, there's been reason for optimism with these Sixers.

You might read that and respond, "OK... so then what's the problem? Losing games without being totally depressing -- isn't that the best of both worlds for us right now? Isn't that what we should all be hoping for?" Another fair point and I wouldn't blame you for arguing it, but I still can't quite get there. Again, it'd be one thing if we reached this place with five weeks to go in the season -- at that point, fine, let's just play out the string and hope the WFC roof doesn't cave in at any point -- but with nearly three months left ,I just don't think it's reasonable to expect any team to sustain a regular schedule of losses-but-with-positives. Eventually, the guys would just let go of the rope and stop giving a fuck about the team or one another; you already saw in that Denver loss, where the effort level was so dispiriting our beat writers were already talking about "Cancun" in January. A whole half-season of games like that and this team might reach a point of no emotional return that I'm not even sure an unusually long and undramatic offseason could fix.

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

And pretend as we might that things have already gone too wrong for these Sixers for them to ever find their way back to the light, 39 games left is also still too many to rule out the possibility of things starting to go right again. It's a long season, and every year, teams who we already feel have had their story written halfway through end up changing everything with the final few chapters. Maybe KJ Martin and Caleb Martin get back on the court, the rotation really clicks into shape, Tyrese and PG get hot and stay hot at the same time, we catch some matchup breaks and end up going 9-6 over our next 15 games. Maybe the big man even rejoins us for some of it. It all feels close to impossible now, but this isn't one of those Process teams where any amount of sustained winning would be them playing over their heads. Even without Embiid, this is a team with legitimate All-Stars and supporting pieces and an ostensibly championship-winning coach; they should go on a streak like that at some point.

Of course, it's easy to be preaching positives after a win as big as the Sixers had last night. Facing down the NBA-best 36-7 Cavs, the team got a huge first half from Tyrese, an enormous second half from PG and some clutch late-game sideline defense from Franklin, and held off Cleveland for both their second truly signature win of the season, and their first win of any kind since "All I Want for Christmas Is You" was still the No. 1 song in the country. Everyone was locked the fuck in, from Oubre to Eric Gordon to Nick Nurse -- who finally stopped screwing around with his lineups and just played the Sixers' eight best available guys as his rotation for the night -- and the Sixers came away with the kind of W that can change a team's outlook for the entire season.

Tank Time? Three Questions About the Sixers' Future

It also took the Sixers shooting 54% from three -- 21 of 39 on the night -- to finish it off, and you'd have to be a fool big enough for Michael McDonald to sing about to believe that that's in any way sustainable for these forever-clanking Ballers. That's why they won the game, of course, but that's not why they were in it the whole way. The effort and focus level was just demonstrably higher the whole way on both sides of the court; you could tell this was going to be different than the Denver game from Tyrese's first few possessions on offense and Guerschon Yabusele's first couple plays on defense. Maxey and PG even had some really nice two-man moments throughout, after a first half of the season where they mostly played like a couple of freelancers working remotely from different cities. More important than the win to me was the fact that the Sixers clearly weren't ready to pull the plug on the season: They really, really fucking wanted this win, and they showed they still had the talent and drive to actually go out and get it.

Again, if you're reading all of this and averaging about an eye roll a sentence, I can't totally blame you. Feel-good wins are nice and all, but when they only bring you up to 16-27 for the season -- and while you're still awaiting word on whether your best player even has much of a chance to play again before October -- if your general reaction to them is still mostly frustration about losing ground in the tanking rankings, I get it. This was always the whole thing with the Process; we didn't want to chase meaningless late-season Ws just to get stuck on the treadmill of mediocrity, we'd much rather lose honestly than win fraudulently. And if this star-crossed season somehow ended with us adding Cooper Flagg to the roster in July, even the most Hinkie-hating beat writers would have to admit that it was worth a few extra 35-point blowout nights to get there.

But the math just doesn't quite work out for me. The Sixers would have to commit to being bad in a way that's just not quite practical this early in the season -- especially with so many veteran, late-career guys who aren't going to be OK with dustbinning half a season of their already-fading primes -- to get anything else but a longshot at one of the top picks, or indeed, keeping their pick at all. And you could argue that even a 26% chance of keeping that pick (and a 6% chance of capturing Flagg) is high enough for the Sixers to go all the way in on doing so; Daryl might even agree, as that sounds like his kind of math. But at that point, the odds are low enough that I'd rather just play the equally low percentages of this season getting back on track enough for the Sixers to make the play-in, or even make some real noise in the playoffs.

Even though MOC is firmly in Team Tank, I keep coming back to something he wrote when considering why I still want this team to go for it: Why should anyone assume that it will get better? Mike was talking about Embiid's knee specifically for next year, but I think you can extend it to the entire team. It's tempting to say, "OK, shit didn't work this season, let's shut it down and hope next year can be closer to what we envisioned this year being." But are we really expecting Embiid's knees to just magically stop being problematic? For PG's decline to reverse trajectory at age 35? For better free agency signings than Guerschon Yabusele at a minimum? For other shit not to unexpectedly go wrong? Unless you're expecting a post-surgery Year Two Jared McCain -- or whoever we get in the draft this summer -- to be that much of a difference-maker, I don't see any reason to assume next year will go much better than this one.

My point there is just to say: I believe we're past the point of just junking seasons with this Sixers team. I think as long as there's a real chance of them making the playoffs, they have to at least try to make a run, because next year will never be guaranteed in the Joel Embiid era again. They could end this season 38-44 and barely sneak into the 10 seed, and that could very easily still be their best team finish for the next three or four years. That sucks, and it means the end of this entire project is probably really gonna suck, but I think that's just where we are at this point: Any remaining chances we have to make the playoffs with Embiid and do any kind of damage once there, we have to seize onto them and get the most we can out of them, because we truly might not ever get a chance that good again.

Or not. I'll admit that however much I try to force an argument that this is what the Sixers objectively should do, much of my reasoning is still based in the fact that I'll be watching the games regardless and still just want to see them do well, do better. The most discouraging shit could happen tonight -- Nick Nurse could rest key guys, the Sixers could lose solidly to Chicago, and we could even get a pre-game Embiid health update that suggests he's nowhere near returning -- and as long as there's a chance they could still make the playoffs with Embiid on the floor, I'll root for that over improving our tanking odds, right up to the moment when it becomes an undeniable impossibility. That's where this team is at, and that's where I'm at with them. It's Go Birds this Sunday, but for the 24 hours before then, it's still Go Sixers.

---

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.

Andrew's writing is brought to you by Kinetic Skateboarding! Not only the Ricky's approved skate shop, but the best place to get Chucks, Vans, any apparel. Use code "DAVESILVER" for 9.1% off your order.