Uh-Oh, Expectations Come to Town
AU was NOT ready for the Sixers to actually be their fullest, best selves this year — and for it to potentially still not be enough.
We should’ve known when we saw the injury report. It was on January 7, when following weeks of being out of the lineup for a left adductor strain and a sprained LCL, respectively, Trendon Watford and Kelly Oubre Jr. were announced as officially available for the Philadelphia 76ers’ upcoming game against the Washington Wizards. That meant that when you looked up and down the Sixers’ lineup for the inevitable players sitting out with nagging, frustrating, often inexplicable injuries, for the first time all season (and seemingly for the first time ever), there were none. “No Sixers are unavailable for tonight’s game because of injury or personal reasons,” proclaimed an incredulous SixersAdam on Bluesky, as the bells of St. Mary’s rang loud and true across the Philadelphia countryside.
Uh-oh.
We thought we were ready for everything with this Sixers season. Ready for them to stink out loud again, ready for a decrepit Joel to play him himself into a trade demand — either his or ours — ready for VJ to clang his way through a growing-pains rookie season, ready for Tyrese to lose that loving feeling until “Mad Max” finally became an appropriate nickname for him, ready to spend all season playing with four starters and the chalk outline of where a power forward should be, ready to find a new litany of appropriately insulting “P” nouns for Paul George’s latest nickname, ready to call for heads to roll on the bench and in the front office like we’re ordering from an a la carte sushi menu. And most of all, we were ready for injuries — to spend the entire year playing with somewhere between 50-70% of our active roster actually active, getting one guy back only to lose two more, thinking to ourselves “well OK but if....” knowing full well that if would never come.
But if HAS come. Expectations are here. And we’re gonna find out if we’re actually ready for the Sixers to once again be the Sixers.
As you may have heard, the Sixers just dropped two straight home games to the Cleveland Cavaliers. They were two bad losses, and wildly different types thereof: In the first they were outscored by 15 in the first quarter and never got close again, with Jared McCain and Justin Edwards mopping up the final minutes, while in the second they were up seven with three minutes to go, until seemingly all of their good players took turns coming up short and the Cavs seized the game in the closing seconds. The losses dropped us to 22-18, seventh in the East standings, officially back in the play-in part of the playoff bracket. On the Ricky the next morning, Spike and Mike concluded that the Sixers were “ultimately just like... a pretty good team. “
They’re probably right about that. But I don’t think any of us were ready for the Sixers to be this kind of pretty good team. We ready for “pretty good” to be the compromise between what they in theory could be if everything went right and the brutal reality of what would likely happen when everything went wrong. We definitely were not ready for them to potentially max out at pretty good — not with Joel largely playing like Joel, with Tyrese a potential All-Star starter, with PG doing the two-way veteran stability thing we always wanted from him, with VJ a true rookie of the year candidate and even with Dominick Barlow and Jabari Walker both feeling like diamond rings in our boxes of Cracker Jack. And certainly, we weren’t ready for the team to ever be totally healthy, and still have moments where we still feel like a couple guys short.
As annoying as it is to root for an injury-laden team, it does come with the blessing of always having a built-in excuse for any less-than-desirable results. You can tell yourself the team you’re watching isn’t really the team, that the players on the court can’t be held responsible for their underperformance any more than the dudes who should be there but aren’t. But when the team is totally healthy and they still just aren’t quite good enough, all you’re left with is yourself, and the nagging suspicion that this actually is and always has been just a big waste of time. If that sounds dramatic, it is. Welcome back to Sixers fandom.
And the reason it hurts is the same reason it’s basically always hurt with the Embiid-era Sixers: Because it still feels like we’re just so close. The Sixers are 6-4 in their last 10 games; three of those four losses came by a combined four points. They lost by one point to the Nuggets in overtime against an impossibly short-handed team that nevertheless seemed to have gravity on its side, they lost by one point to the Raptors in overtime in a game where they led by four in regulation with under 20 seconds to go, and they lost by two on Friday in the second Cavs game when it felt like one more good play at any point on other side of the ball in the fourth quarter would’ve sealed the W. And outside of the first one, an overtime squeaker in Memphis, the six wins were all easy, all decisive and double-digit. Win one of those three games we shouldn’t have lost and we’re still probably feeling pretty OK. Win two of ‘em. and we’re starting to end every sentence with “The Year.” Win all three and we’re already scoping out parking options near Broad Street for the parade.
Instead, we’re forced to try to talk ourselves back down to No Expectations, to go, “OK, well that’s fine, this was never really supposed to be a contending season in the first place,” to revert to our preseason hopes of simply being in the mix and feeling like that in itself would be good enough. But it might be too late. We’ve gotten a taste of what this team could look like as originally envisioned, and it’s pretty serious. It’s hard to argue that at full strength, this team isn’t the strongest lineup the Sixers have put out in this era — maybe even in this century. A week or two ago I was starting to put together my trade deadline wishlist — for a version of the Sixers whose primary priority wasn’t simply ducking the luxury tax, anyway — and as I scanned the current lineup, I was shocked how few obvious holes there were to be plugged. I guess in a perfect world we’d have a version of Dominick Barlow who was also a threat from deep to play next to Joel, but that felt more like a luxury good than a basic necessity. The Sixers basically have all the dudes they truly need. It’s a real team, Jack.
So if they’re still just not good enough, what does that mean? Nothing good, certainly. It means that there is something intrinsically lacking in the team’s makeup, in their very core. It means that they could have all the supporting talent and youth and athleticism and shooting around their main guys that you could possibly ask for, and the main guys still wouldn’t be able to get the job done. It means that maybe Spike’s Trade Embiid column wasn’t premature, that it’s time to move on from him because winning at the highest levels with him is just never gonna be an option. It means that... well, you can judge for yourself if it means that it really has all been a waste of time, but it’s certainly a discussion.
Way too early to be talking about any of this after just a few bum losses with half the regular season to go, you say? Fucking right it is. It’s way too early to be thinking this conclusively about anything. The real version of this team just showed up for the first time a couple weeks ago, we still don’t know hardly anything about who they actually are or what they actually can be. But they’re here now, in full, which means so are we. We don’t get to play cute with this team anymore. We don’t get to say it’s all gravy now, that we’re fine with 43 wins and just getting out of the play-in or whatever other bullshit we were hawking early in the season. As long as the Sixers are this mostly-if-not-entirely healthy version of the Sixers, it’s back to Eastern Conference Finals or bust, back to all the petty small-time worries and cowering big-picture anxieties, back to going to sleep with a hole in your stomach and waking up with it still there, back to all potatoes, no gravy. That’s just the way it is. Sorry y’all.
The good news, question mark, is that it likely won’t last too long anyway. I half-expect my tweet sharing this article to get buried under seven different Sixers reporters I follow telling me who’s OUT for Monday’s game against Indiana. Betting on the Sixers to stay healthy is like betting on Oasis to continue getting along; sure the recent indicators may be encouraging, but at a certain point the history is the history. When Dominick Barlow went down against the Cavs in the first of the two games I fully expected the injury to be season-ending, it being just a back contusion and him being back the next game felt like the fates letting us off with a warning. Maybe in a week we’ll be back to watching a skeleton crew representing the on-court Sixers, and we’ll all get back to talking “If...” Maybe in a lot of ways we’ll be happier like that.
Until then, though, the Sixers season is officially back on, and all corresponding hopes, dreads and expectations with it. Get ready, ‘coz here they come.
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.