They Do Actually Have to Win Now

AU is locked in, and not with the feel-goods this postseason.

I’ll admit that I’ve basically been sleepwalking through the Sixers’ playoff run to this point. Past Sixers runs have taken over my every waking moment, forced me to reorient my entire schedule, basically made me a different (and almost certainly worse) person altogether. But this year, I’ve been emotionally backburnering the team as I’ve never really been able to before. I got home from a work trip basically five minutes before their play-in game started and barely gave the matchup a second ‘s thought while traveling. I watched Game One against the Celtics with my girlfriend Lisa at a bar where no one else cared, and after they got creamed we went out to see You, Me & Tuscany. When Game Five seemed to be getting out of hand in the first half and the C’s scored the first six points of what was looking to be a very typically Sixers third quarter, I thought to myself OK, I’m about ready for this to be over anyway.

Even when they somehow came back to win that Game Five, I was still able to keep it snoozey. The next night, a Knicks fan friend of mine who’d been surprisingly scared of the Sixers basically all season asked me what it would take for me to view the Sixers as seriously as he did. I said if they won Game Six I would admit that it’s a real series. But I was pretty sure we wouldn’t get that far; the Sixers’ better-than-expected results to that point still felt fluky, the result of shooting variance and some general Weird Shit we were unlikely to see repeated a third time. It all felt like a twist-the-knife prelude to the Celtics snapping to life and putting the hammer down on us in our building, again, of course. So the night of Game Six, I went out with Lisa to karaoke and an Afghan Whigs concert, got drunk as hell, and didn’t think much about the Sixers until it was time for me to pull up the game after. And the Sixers not only beat the Celtics, they dominated, looking every bit the better, steadier, swaggier team. 3-3, series even — and maybe, like, really even. My Knicks fan friend vindicated. Real series confirmed.

I was asleep. But now I’m awake. And I need the Sixers to win in Game 7.

Before Game Six, I think we’d all been participation-trophying the Sixers, as Mike and Spike put it on Thursday night’s all-time Ricky. Hey it’s cool that we got out of the play-in in one game, even without Joel. Nice, we actually took one from Boston. Sick that we got a VJ game too — he looks like he belongs, he’s getting some great experience, that’ll be really valuable down the line. Hah, we almost got that Game Three at home too, how crazy would that have been. And Paul George has been pretty good so far this series! Maybe that’ll help with his trade value in the offseason. Awesome that Joel battled back to somehow actually play in this series, even if the rest of this all is getting pretty fucking sad. And wow, we actually took another game in Boston! That’ll give us some good momentum going into the offseason at least. It was all very pat on the head, good-job-for-a-team-that’s-certainly-gonna-lose-anyway emotional handicapping.

But now here we are. The sheer elation of a Game Six win to tie the series gives way to the panic that the team still has to play a Game Seven to potentially win the series. In Boston. Like in 2023. Y’all remember 2023? I certainly remember 2023. I remember my Sixers fandom turning a different color that day. I probably wouldn’t call it the worst Sixers loss of my lifetime — just because Game 7 against the Hawks two years earlier was so much more inexcusable — but I would certainly call it the most disgusting, the most why are we even doing this Sixers loss of my lifetime. And now we maybe get to do it all over again, to close out a series none of us thought we were going to have to really care about the outcome of in the first place, since it felt so predetermined from the beginning.

And that’s the most frightening part: The outcome is not predetermined anymore. The Sixers really could win this series. Not in an oh well if this happens then maybe that happens, chain-of-increasingly-unlikely-dominos-to-fall sort of sense. They’re right there. They’ve not only won three games in this series already, they’ve won each of those by double digits. They’re on a two-game winning streak. They have a winning record in Boston. They can no longer be written off as overmatched, just happy to be here, just happy to not be embarrassed. They are in this thing, in every way. The Sixers really could win this series.

Which means, that, well, that’s actually what they have to do now. No more feel-good losses, no more moral victories. Participation trophies revoked. Now it’s just either they win or they lose. If they win it’s validation for everyone, abject misery for our enemies, great times forever and ever. If they lose, it’s fraudulence confirmed, gut-wrenching misery all summer, maybe a brand new and even uglier color for our fandom, good times never again. That’s it. Sorry.

The Sixers: How?

Some good folks on Bluesky have tried to sell me on us still being in the it’s-all-gravy-from-here honeymoon phase, that we’ve taken enough good stuff from getting this far in this series that we can still feel good about it even if they lose. Moral victory still in play. Team Is Different This Year still in play. Emotional hedging season in full effect. I admire them. I envy them.

I cannot join them. Not this time. I remember 2023 too well. I remember how different it felt when the Sixers went up 3-2 in Boston that year, winning on the road to take the series lead with everyone playing well, They Never Win That Game etc. etc. But what I remember better much than that is how it felt in Game Six when the Sixers missed a couple potential dagger threes in the fourth quarter that would’ve likely put the Celtics away, and then Jayson Tatum woke up like The Mountain in Game of Thrones to punish our arrogance in not finishing the kill when we had the chance. And then what I remember even better than that is how it felt when the Sixers phoned in Game 7 in historically losery fashion, basically having a sub wheel out the JVC and pop in a VHS for the Celtics to watch while they fucked off to do God knows what, rather than actually showing up for the most important game of most of their careers. Did any of us come away from that series going ah yeah but that Game Five win, we really had them there for a second didn’t we?

By the way — I remember 2024, too. That actually was a series that the Sixers did play well to the end, and lost just because Joel still was playing on one leg and because Josh Hart is an asshole and because shit happens, whatever. That series really was a feel-good loss. Until it wasn’t. Because that’s the thing about feel good losses — they’re still losses. They stay losses. You still have to watch the rest of the playoffs go on without you, as the warm feeling you once got from knowing your guys tried hard and did their best gets chillier and chillier and you eventually go wait what the fuck why don’t I feel good about this anymore? It’s because whatever the mitigating circumstances, whatever the context, whatever the “well it was only a five-game series but it really felt more like six” of it all, the goal in the playoffs is to win and you lost. And you’ve never won. You’ve only lost.

This year, the Sixers can win. Win, with a W. None of us thought they could but they can. They can do something that they’ve never done before, and that they might never be able to do again. The next time we’re one win away from vanquishing the Celtics — or any other Actually Good Team, but particularly the motherfucking Celtics — it could be 10 years, three coaches, two GMs and an entirely new roster from now. It could be 20 years. It could be fucking never. This year, they’re here. And they can win. They can redeem the whole damn thing, everything we’ve gone through that’s brought us to this point. They can do it. They have to.

Will they? That’s the question none of us seems to have the answer to yet. Of course that’s generally the way sports are supposed to work, but ask Sixers fans about Game 7 in 2023 and they’ll all tell you everyone knew they were gonna lose that game. Not totally the way I remember it to be honest but fine. There was certainly at least a feeling before that game. We’d blown Game Six at home, we’d seen how Joel and James Harden responded historically to do-or-die situations, it was the Celtics, it was the Sixers, blah blah blah. We had an inclination on how things were gonna go, for sure. This time, there’s no “for sure.”

I remember reading something just before the 2024 presidential election that basically said that whichever way the election turns out, it will seem incredibly obvious after the fact that that was the way the election was going to turn out the entire time. There was enough of a compelling narrative on both sides, and enough legitimate evidence to support it, that with the eventual outcome sliding into place, it would be such a neat and tidy story that in retrospect, it would be hard to believe there was ever any other outcome that was seriously in play. I would say the same about this Sixers-Celtics Game 7.

If the Sixers win, it’ll be Of course. The Sixers can only ever win after we’ve all finally written them off — not just in an overly emotional we’re-so-over-we’re-so-back sense, but in a legitimate there-was-absolutely-no-reason-to-believe sense. But it had to happen this way: against Boston, in Boston, in a series that Boston had all but wrapped up before inexplicably choking it away. With Joel Embiid finally rising to the occasion, and Paul George vanquishing the ghosts of his own 3-1 playoff collapse and Andre Drummond somehow being the “how has this guy never missed a shot against us??” guy. They turned the corner. They shifted the vibes. This is how it happens. This was always how it was going to happen.

And if the Celtics win, it’ll be Of course. The Sixers were never actually going to win this series. What, you thought that just because they were catching up from behind this time instead of losing steam from ahead that the final outcome was going to be different? The Celtics were always going to get it together just in time — that’s what they do against the Sixers. All of this feel-good Sixers bullshit, all of this supposed Celtics choking was just to wake all you Process Trusters from your slumbers, to trick you into caring about wins and losses again even though you were desperately trying not to this time, just so the Celtics could fucking stick it in you one more time, and maybe close out the entire Joel Embiid era in the process. The Sixers never really had a chance. This was always how it was going to happen.

I don’t know which of the two inevitable outcomes is the one we’re actually getting tonight. If I had to bet on it — and in a sense I do, with stakes a lot higher than a $100 DraftKings bet or whatever — I’d still probably say Celtics win. But if I was going to make the case for things actually being different this year, I’d start with Joel. There’s been a calm to him these last three games that I’ve never seen before from him, that I certainly would have seen coming in such a pressurized, high-stakes series as this. He’s reading situations, making adjustments, never getting too high or low. He’s dishing out three times as many assists as turnovers, after spending most of his career struggling just to break even there. He hasn’t even started to hit shots yet and he’s been awesome. As the guys said on the last pod, it’s like the game’s slowed down for him. It feels like he spent the two weeks recovering from his appendectomy in deep meditation, maybe learning there’s things (allegedly) more important than beating the Celtics, It feels like a different Joel. Unless of course it turns out in Game Seven to be the exact same Joel. Could still go either way.

Everything could still go either way tonight. But the thing we better get with before then is that there’s only two ways for it to go: win or lose. Win good, lose bad, end story. If we lose close, with our guys playing well and showing lots of positive signs for the future? I dunno, maybe we can find time to feel good about that in Second August or whatever. It will not mean anything this postseason, and it probably shouldn’t. We’ve done this too many times already. It’s time to burn the emotional hedging ships. No saving anything for the way back. We leave Boston with a win or we don’t leave at all. I don’t know which one it’ll be, but I know that for the first time this postseason, I’ll truly be there and totally locked in for it. Wake up everybody.

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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.