The Sky Is Falling for The Sixers — How Much Does It Actually Matter to Anyone?
AU embraces the existential crisis portion of this Sixers season.
For the first four months of this Sixers season, we had the luxury of looking at playoff seeding and prospective first-round matchups as our biggest concern. We got over .500 immediately to start the year, and despite some dips that felt serious in the moment, have stayed pretty comfortably in the black for the season record-wise, even with some humiliating losses on the court and some highly unforced losses to our personnel off it. None of the teams below us in the standings looked particularly threatening; maintaining our slightly-above-average level of play seemed more than good enough to keep them at bay. Up until now, making the postseason was still a matter of “when,” not “if.”
Well now is here, and “when” is looking a whole lot more like “if,” or maybe even “in the unlikely event that.” The Sixers have lost games and available bodies at an alarming rate over the past week. A laughably unconvincing last-minute win over the tanking Utah Jazz is all that’s keeping them from currently being on a four-game losing streak, while Joel Embiid missed all four (with at least three more DNPs still to go) with an oblique strain, VJ Edgecombe has been shelved for the last two and a half with a lumbar contusion, Kelly Oubre Jr missed one with illness and Paul George still isn’t a thing again for another nine games. Most disturbingly, our golden boy Tyrese Maxey collided with Adem Bona at the end of yet another dispiriting finish Saturday night against the Atlanta Hawks and now may be due for an unscheduled spring break of his own. And just to make things extra spicy, every team directly below the Sixers in the standings has suddenly gotten red hot — including the Hawks, whose escape job against us on Saturday marked their sixth straight win — and as a result, two of those teams are no longer below the Sixers at all, as the Heat and Magic have both moved a half-game up on them, dropping the Sixers firmly into play-in territory.
Yes, everything is currently going wrong for these Sixers, and it might be some time before they can even start to go right again. Now the most pressing question with this team might not be whether or not they can avoid going totally off the rails, but how much motivation anyone even has to really ensure that they don’t.
Missing the playoffs this season would seem like an absolute disaster for the Sixers. Given that they have two max players well into their 30s, that they’ve gotten better-than-expected productivity from most of their players, that they’ve spent the first three-quarters of the season over .500 and that they don’t have their first-round pick this year unless it falls in the top four again — not technically impossible, but with 34 wins already in the bank, certainly improbable even in a best-worst-case scenario — to not even make it out of the play-in would feel pretty damning for this team and everyone involved.
But would it actually be? Is it actually that important to this team and the people that run it if they make the playoffs? Is it even really that important to us?
Certainly, very little about the way the front office and/or ownership has operated this season has suggested a ton of urgency when it comes to maximizing the team’s regular-season performance. The Sixers started this year with a big ol’ question mark at power forward — one which our couple converted two-way guys have done a decently impressive job of answering, but which still leaves the starting lineup out of balance a lot of the time. They’ve taken the long view with Joel’s health, ruling him out in advance when in doubt and determinedly not over-promising on his eventual return, and never even attempting to play him in back-to-backs. And of course, regardless of their larger intentions, they let the trade deadline pass not only without bringing any extra help in, but with actually sending a couple guys out, at least one of whom would certainly be playing big minutes for this undermanned team right now. Nick Nurse might be playing Tyrese Maxey an ungodly number of minutes — or “might have been,” depending on the injury news — but otherwise you couldn’t say this team is tilted to give themselves every opportunity to win games.
And even at its best this season, it’s not like this team ever really looked like a credible contender. They’ve stayed above .500, but never more than eight games over, and since the first couple of weeks, their scoring differential has never been much more than a couple points into the positives (and indeed has since fallen all the way back to the negatives). When everyone’s healthy and playing, they’ve looked pretty good but never quite great. At best, we could’ve talked ourselves into them being the team no one wants to face in the first round — national media have even suggested as much on occasion — but probably not even the most delusional Sixers fan really ticketed them for multiple series wins this postseason.
So if we don’t really believe in the team this season, and the team doesn’t necessarily even believe in itself, is it really even worth scrapping for playoff positioning down the stretch? At the very least, the team is still decently safe to secure a play-in spot — they’re 6.5 games up on the Milwaukee Bucks in 11th, who can’t be totally discounted with Giannis back, but who haven’t shown much life all season — so maybe they play it conservative with so many of their guys out, hope they get a couple strong weeks of play to end the season and round back into form, and then pray they can pull off some play-in magic and back into the postseason that way. And if not, well, nobody really expected that much more from this team anyway.
I’m sure Joel has some thoughts, though. Up until this past month, this had been his healthiest season in a few years, and a more productive one than we ever thought we’d see again from the big man. If we can’t even get him in any kind of position for a real postseason run this year — and there’s no reason to assume we’ll be in better position for one next year — we might officially be out of chances together. I’ve wondered since the trade deadline if this team wasn’t headed for an inevitable breakup with its longtime franchise player this summer, and if Joel’s watching the first round of the playoffs from his comically oversized couch, that certainly might expedite things there.
And both Nick Nurse and Daryl Morey could probably use a strong finish to bolster their job security. Certainly Sixers fans are increasingly out for blood with the two of them — with most of the guys on the court seemingly overperforming individually, the blame tends to fall on Nick and Daryl for the team not being in a better position to weather these brutal last few weeks. Whether that’s fair or not about this season (and personally I could kinda go either way there), neither guy has the consistent record of undeniable success during their tenure here that another disappointing finish can be easily overlooked. Perhaps the front office has grand designs on how to revamp the team this summer, but they’ve got to get there intact first.
But as Spike wrote about earlier in the week, this is just sorta life in the middle. It’s a very confusing place to be, where you’re not sure what matters or how much or to who. You get swept up in the many small triumphs and failures of this year until you zoom out and realize that maybe nothing actually matters for the next five years anyway. The difference between being sixth and being tenth feels both like the end of the world and also ultimately not really that big a deal, as you watch your last chance of true relevance slip away and release eh, that last chance wasn’t really that great anyway. You look for someone to blame, but you know the middlingness runs deeper than any one dude on the court or on the sidelines or in the front office. There’s a lot of questions and not many convincing answers. And how much you care about any of it is entirely, terrifyingly up to you.
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.