Well Let's See If I Can Talk Myself Into This One
Is there life for the Sixers after appendicitis? AU hopes he can at least convince himself that there is.
The more time I have to internalize the likely season-ending — for him, for them, for us — news that Joel Embiid is suffering from appendicitis, the more I’m just glad it happened now and not a week ago. After the back-to-back wins against Chicago and Charlotte (ah for the simpler times of fighting over Best Wins of the Season), and after the VJ Edgecombe-led Hospital Sixers went 5-2, and after it seemed like we were finally getting healthy at the right time, the rug getting swept from under Joel’s feet yet again would have been devastating. It still is, kinda, but it’s a gentler crush coming after two bad losses to the Pistons and Spurs — and right before a quickly inevitable L to the Rockets — which had already removed a sizeable amount of the dip from our collective chip. Now, the sudden reminder of this team being cursed anyway feels less like “Ah c’mon, really??” and more “Yep, checks out.”
The fact of the matter is, even when this team was good, they weren’t that good, and even when they were totally healthy, they weren’t that much better. As Beckett pointed out in his most recent article (and Spike cited on last night’s pod), the two main lineups this team ultimately had to decide between for their postseason starting five had produced results that were just slightly varying shades of mid — and that was supposed to be them at the Sixers’ best and fullest. Maybe in a perfect world, the healthy version of this team would’ve gotten four months together to build familiarity and optimize lineup patterns and become best buds on and off the court, but that perfect world might not exist for any NBA franchise in 2026, and certainly not this one. This one was always gonna be a little leaky, and with Joel now out for weeks if not longer, there’s a big hole in the center that the team can’t possibly hope to plug quickly enough.
In other words, this is gonna be my biggest challenge of Sixers sicko self-delusion yet.
Generally speaking, I’d like to think at this point that my work in the field speaks for itself. I’ve talked myself into the Sixers winning it all in the pandemic season, into Justin Edwards being better than Paul George, into Tobias Harris being different this season (??), into the Knicks series loss being a good thing for the team long-term, actually. When Joel suffered an orbital fracture against the Raptors at the end of their first-round series in 2022, it took me like an hour of airport drinking to decide that fuck it, we were gonna beat the Heat in the second round anyway. Even when I maybe didn’t totally 100% believe it, I’ve always felt it.
This one is proving tough for me to feel. The Sixers dropping three straight games they really needed to win at least one of means they’re practically guaranteed a play-in spot, which means a strong chance of a pre-playoff exit and a best-case result of a first-round matchup with the wildly superior Pistons or Celtics. None of those scenarios would inspire optimism for the Sixers even if they were fully healthy; the fact that they’ll be without Embiid means you need a magnifying glass the size of Texas to find the slightest crumbs of hope for a path to an upset, or even a feel-good-ish loss.
On the podcast last night I felt obligated to at least ask if it was worth playing the calendar game with Joel, wondering if there was some universe where we could extend our playoff timeline long enough to once again contemplate Jo rejoining for part of it. Spike shut me down, and rightly so: The playoffs begin in nine days and Jo’s surgery almost certainly will knock him out for a minimum of three weeks. We’d basically need a seven-game series to have any hope of him coming back in the first round, and even then he’d have to rush back in a way likely no one would or should be comfortable with. I don’t know if there’s any road map to Sixers optimism this postseason, no matter how skewed, that involves Jo playing a part in the first round.
So is there any way to talk ourselves into getting to round two without him? We do still have two all-stars on this team, and we’ve got Kelly Oubre Jr and Quentin Grimes and VJ Edgecombe and let me stop me right there because we’ve seen way too much of what this team looks like without Joel to really go much further with this one. The Jo-less version of this team couldn’t beat the Hawks once this year, let alone the Pistons or Celtics four times. Hell, we saw how overmatched the Jo-less squad looked against Detroit a week ago, and that was when the Pistons were still missing Cade Cunningham and Isaiah Stewart, both of whom have since returned from injury. Besides, Tyrese Maxey still looks hurt or fed up or both, and relying on Paul George to save your season is like relying on DJ Khaled to elevate your new single. If these are the guys we’re hoping to shock the world with right now, a new slant might be something we need to find.
The best I can do right now is VJ. Not that I’m trying to sell you or myself on him being able to lead the team to the second round and a Joel reunion essentially on his own, but he can give us something real to root for. While Maxey seems to be getting increasingly smothered by the baggage of his six seasons in Philly and PG seems to be weighing his give-it-all on a possession by possession basis, VJ is still howling at the moon. He’s crashing for offensive rebounds, he’s lunging for deflections, he’s trying to dunk on everyone and multiple generations of their dead relatives. He still wants to win, and he still wants that winning to matter. No matter how stacked the deck is against the Sixers right now, he’s the one guy we can count on to keep battling until he’s dragged away from the table.
And so I at least want him to get a taste of the real thing. Even if it’s just in a sweep, even if his numbers don’t ultimately end up being all that, even if it comes against the fucking Celtics. I want him to get out of the play-in and into the playoffs, and I want to see what four-plus games of Playoff VJ looks like. I may not be delusional enough to think we can win a series, but I bet you I can talk myself into VJ winning us a game. Maybe he comes up with a steal on a pivotal possession? Maybe he finally gets that big poster he’s been hunting all season? Maybe it’s on fucking Jayson Tatum or Al Horford (who’s undoubtedly somehow found his way back to Boston by now)? Any one such memory could keep us warm throughout what’s looking to be a bitterly cold summer offseason.
Plus, who knows — VJ gives the team a bit of a spark in the play-in, maybe the guys start catching his vibe a little... could there be life left in this team? Could there be a one-last-go-around mentality that takes hold, knowing that almost certainly the team is going to look very different at the start of next year? Could going in with odds this long be just the thing the team needs to rally behind and produce the miracle we’ve so long hoped for with them? Ehhhhhhh... we’re probably getting a little ahead of ourselves here. Let’s see if an historically unburdened VJ can get this team to the show first and then we’ll take it from there. One sicko delusion at a time.
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.