So Sad About Us

AU should probably be angry about that Sixers-Celtics game, but all he can feel is bummed about the inevitability of it all.

One of my truly cherished memories of the Joel Embiid era — one that maybe has gotten lost to time a little — was Game Three against the Heat in 2022. He’d gotten elbowed in the eye by Pascal Siakam at the end of a Sixers blowout victory to close out the Raptors in the first round, and reports said that it fucked him up so bad he could barely even look at his phone in the days to follow. His return was without a timetable, and with DeAndre Jordan starting in his stead, the first two games of our second-round series in Miami were both absolute laughers, as we wondered if the series would be over before we could even have a serious conversation about Joel’s return.

But against all odds, Embiid made it back for Game Three in Philly. His numbers in the game were pretty meh by his standards — 18 and 11, four turnovers to one assist — but the lift he gave the Sixers, particularly on defense, was enough to power a 99-79 victory. It really seemed like he had saved the season, and after a superlative James Harden performance in Game Four knotted the series at 2-2, it felt like a potential turning point in the Big Man’s entire career arc. Then Miami steamrolled Philly in the next two games, and it was immediately back to Same Old Sixers. But still, the emotional wallop of watching a masked Embiid gut out that Game Three victory, pushing his body to the absolute limit just to be there for his team and for us, is a feeling I’ll never forget.

Sunday night against Boston could have felt like that too. Maybe it did for a few minutes. But instead of saving the Sixers from oblivion in Game Four, this time Embiid’s return game brought them back to its edge, halting the momentum of a series that had gone better than expected and raising the usual barrage of questions both practical and existential about what the hell we’re even doing here. And I can’t even get mad at any of it anymore — at Joel, at his teammates, at management, even at the Celtics. All I am now is sad.

I’m certainly not surprised. Though after his availability for Game Four was officially announced, my timeline was filled with Sixers fans predicting Joel’s return could very easily bring the series even with Boston — perhaps even give them the edge moving forward — all I could really think about was the ways it could go wrong.

Certainly, I had visions of Jo taking an elbow to the midsection from a Sam Hauser type and walking gingerly to the locker room as a million Philadelphians Googled “How easy is it for stitches to get torn out after an appendectomy?” But more practically, I thought of Embiid predictably struggling in his first game action in nearly three weeks, of the shot not going down and the ball going the other way as he tried to force shit that just wasn’t there. And more importantly, I thought of him knocking the rest of the team out of the groove they’d developed in three games in this series, of Tyrese Maxey and VJ Edgecombe being overly deferential as the team tried to get him going early, and then being unable to quickly microwave themselves once it came time to provide offense of their own.

In truth, Joel’s own performance went a little better than I expected. Yes, he was out of rhythm — only three for his first 12, missing the kind of open mid-rangers that he can usually hit in a Shirley Temple-induced coma when he’s really rolling — but he never forced anything, generally taking the shots that were available for him, and actually moving the ball quite well to try to get his teammates going at the same time. And after hitting his groove in the third quarter, his final stat line was totally reasonable for a first game back against a good defense, and far superior to that night four years ago against Miami: 26 points on 21 shots, with 10 boards and six assists to just three turnovers.

But it didn’t matter. The rest of the team couldn’t figure out anything on offense: Embiid grinded his way to 10 points in the first quarter, but his teammates could only combine for eight total, as Payton Pritchard started shooting holy hellfire from his fingertips and the C’s sped out to a 16-point lead. The Sixers clanged away any hopes at a comeback effort from there: Neither Joel nor anyone else could hit in the second quarter, and when Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown got hot in the third as Pritchard refused to cool down, that was pretty much it. I spent most of the fourth quarter reading Keith Richards’ autobiography Life while the Sixers ran out the clock on a game — and in all likelihood a series — that had long slipped away from them.

Four years ago, I probably would have been angry about this game — about the offense crumpling around Joel, about the defense making it too easy for Boston, about Nick Nurse’s rotations and challenges raising a lot of process questions that last night’s results absolutely did not answer, about Payton fucking Pritchard. I haven’t heard last night’s Ricky yet, but I’m confident Mike was able to bring the fury of a Southern Baptist minister incensed that his congregation seemed to be losing the battle to Satan. I’m sure a lot of Sixers fans feel the same way. Maybe I should too.

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Unfortunately, I can’t get past the level of it is what it is. Because it really is: None of this should have been hard to see coming, either from this year’s Sixers and Celtics or the respective histories of the two teams the past decade. The last two games in this series — a shocker Sixers win in Boston and then a to-the-wire C’s victory in Philly — gave us hope that the gap between these teams wasn’t as big as we’d believed at the beginning of the series, and particularly after the Celtics’ Game One blowout, and I do still think that it probably isn’t. But however big that gap truly is, if we thought it was going to get immediately bridged in this series by a sooner-than-expected Embiid return from injury, we really just haven’t been paying close enough attention the last year, or the last 10.

In our heads, us Sixers fans have this fantasy vision of a late-career Joel who just kinda comes and goes from the lineup unobtrusively: one who’s not the offensive threat he once was, and doesn’t get fed the ball like he is, but who can occasionally bail the Sixers out of late-clock situations, hit a wide-open jumper when passed to, and just be a general upgrade in intelligence and ability on both sides of the ball from whoever the team’s current backup C is. We dream of a version of Embiid who only adds, never subtracts — sort of the big man version of what Paul George is currently giving us, where he’ll never win us a game totally on his own, but he can maybe hold down his part for long enough to at least give the team’s younger guys the chance to do so themselves.

That version of Joel has never come for this team, and at this point I think we should probably accept it’s not going to. He’s still just too fucking good on offense, too fucking valuable, even at some limited percentage of health and capability, to stash him in the corner or dunker’s spot and have him be a bystander to the team’s primary action. Maxey is never going to watch Joel set a pick at the top of the key and either roll to the basket or pop to behind the arc as both defenders wall off his own drive and not think to himself I should get the ball to Joel. Boston seemed to both anticipate and encourage this last night, blitzing Maxey and leaving Joel relatively unattended for jumper after jumper. They knew that even after so many years and so much time missed, even after the past two Sixers-Celtics games went the way they went without him, that the team would still default to Jo Ball — and that most likely, things would unravel for the Sixers from there.

Again, I’m not really blaming anyone for any of this. Not Joel, who’s just doing what’s come naturally to him for a decade now, and who has an MVP, multiple scoring titles, and an eventual ticket to Springfield after he retires to show for it. (And who even in this limited and frustrating season for him, still averaged 27 points a night with a PER around 25.) And not Tyrese, who for sure could’ve stood to be a little more aggressive last night, but who generally got the ball to the Big Man in his spots — which has been the answer to qualify offense for this team for Maxey’s entire career. Not the rest of the team, who (outside of PG) couldn’t hit a shot to save their lives or season— that shit’s frustrating as hell, certainly, but there are gonna be games like that in the playoffs, especially for a team knocked out of their rhythm, and especially from a guy like VJ who’s never been here before. And I certainly don’t blame the franchise itself for bringing Joel back in the first place: However close this series was, Philly absolutely wasn’t winning it without him, so holding him out in the hopes we could bow out in a slightly neater and feel-goodier fashion would’ve been unimaginably losery, even by Sixers standards.

But despite the lack of anyone to truly hold accountable for it, the result is that now, everything feels bad. The Celtics have once again wrested control of the series. The Sixers have once again fallen on their faces in front of a cackling national audience and a pissed-off local one, courting boos from the home fans and sarcastic (and disconcertingly loud) chants from the away fans. Joel Embiid has once again stepped up to be the hero and will have to once again slink away as a failure. The series isn’t technically over yet, but it may as well be: The idea of winning one more game against Boston suddenly seems impossibly daunting again, let alone each of the next three. We’re out of time for this season.

And of course, we may be out of time for this team, period. As we’ve reiterated time and time again, this season went about as good as could reasonably be expected for the Sixers — 45-37, with half a healthy and productive Embiid season, another leap from Maxey and a breakthrough rookie campaign from Edgecombe — and it still couldn’t get us anywhere but here. Joel got one more chance to rewrite his playoff narrative — not a particularly good chance, mind you, but a chance — and failing some miracle end to this series, has instead written one more chapter like all the rest. Maybe this time it’s the last chapter.

But I should say here — and I probably should’ve said it much earlier in this column — that I love, love, love Joel Embiid for the game he played last night. I love him for playing in it at all. I love how hard he fought to get back here, that after spending such an unfair percentage of his career waging battles against his own body, he still had it in him to go back into that breach once more. I love that after all these years, he still wants to be out there, that he still wants the chance to put right what for so many seasons and so many reasons has gone wrong, that he still believes he can and should will us to a different end to the story this time. I love that even though some part of him probably knows at this point it’s all going to end in heartbreak, he’d rather the heartbreak come with him on the floor than him on the sidelines. If he had finished 4-21 for 13 points and given way to Adem Bona for the entire fourth quarter, I still would have loved him for it. At some point down the road, we’ll all look back on Joel’s career and love him just as much for his hard-fought failures like this as we do for any of his achievements.

In the moment, though, it’s just sad. Sad that we’re gonna lose to Boston again, sad that we have no idea what the version of this team that could possibly actually beat Boston might look like. Sad that Joel deserves a warrior’s reception today and will instead be treated like a punchline. Sad that this team is more likely to break up than to make up by this time next season. Sad that it’s been 10 years of this shit. Sad that it’s been an entire lifetime of this shit. So very, very sad about us.

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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.