Well Maybe This Team Just Needed a Shitty Offseason
AU on getting a much-needed taste of not being miserable after six very difficult months of nothingness.
I won’t lie: Last Friday helped a lot. I had been seriously struggling to find my way back into this team during a summer and preseason that offered nothing but discouragement at every turn. Injuries mounted, returns were delayed, Summer League and Preseason games were lost in resounding, depressing fashion. After a season that ended with a month of playing with only one of our top eight guys actually playing, I looked around at a roster that six months later still featured one totally healthy active real guy — Quentin Grimes then, Tyrese Maxey now — surrounded by a whole bunch of dudes who I hoped to see precious little of when the games actually mattered. If the games ever actually mattered. “This is supposed to be the easy part!” I screamed at Spike on the podcast last week. Easy it emphatically had not been.
And then suddenly, last Friday, it was. Reports that there was Some Chance or that it was On the Table that Joel Embiid would play — ha ha yes sure whatever you say Nick Nurse — turned, as Spike correctly predicted, into a gameday No He’s Actually Gonna Be Out There For Real. And there he was: alive and ambulatory and changing ends and working the two-man game and hitting threes and drawing fouls and oh my god Joel please don’t push it so much in the full court just yet. Rusty, sure, but unmistakably Joel, the kind of Joel outing that would seem neither revelatory nor remarkable under normal circumstances, as if “normal circumstances” were a thing again worth considering as a Joel-related possibility.
And not just him: Quentin Grimes was there, scoring 20-plus in a blink, undeniably On the Team, however temporarily. V.J. Edgecombe was balling, also instinctively pouring in 20-plus even while frequently bedeviling with the seemingly easy opportunities he failed to convert. And Maxey seemed freest and easiest of all, with 20-plus of his own — good god is that three guards scoring 20-plus in the same game on the same team? This team? — that all felt like it developed naturally from having his running mate back on the court with him. There were still important dudes out, there were still eminently fungible dudes in, but suddenly it felt like we were watching something real, not just the faint suggestion of an NBA team, but one with a firm and distinct outline.
I’m not saying I’m back. I’m not back. But I am allowing myself to entertain the notion that this offseason’s shittiness was at least partly by design — or at the very least, incidentally fortuitous — in order for us really to let go of the old idea of the Sixers, so that we can hopefully find our way back to the new version.
It’s hard to remember now just how different things were for the Sixers (and more importantly, for us) just one year ago. Championship contention seemed like a lofty but not totally unrealistic goal, and while there were still doubters that the team could hold it together for an extended playoff run, there was no questioning that they’d at least get the opportunity. Even with everything that had already looked wayward with Joel in the offseason — the up-and-down showing in the Olympics, the unclear return-to-play timeline, the frustrating Nick Nurse non-reports — and even as it became clear he wasn’t going to be ready opening night, we still only ever asked when not if with this team last summer. What will the team look like when it’s whole and healthy? How dangerous will they be when they get it together and start ripping off 12-3 months? How stupid is everyone going to feel for doubting him when Joel starts playing like Joel again?
Of course, someday never came for the 2024-25 Philadelphia 76ers. Joel never got his body right, Paul George never stepped up to the All-Star level we hoped he would, even Tyrese Maxey never quite turned the corner in a way that didn’t ultimately lead him back where he started. Jared McCain was the steal of the draft until he went down for the season. Quentin Grimes was the steal of the trade deadline until the team around him essentially dissolved into the ether. As frustrating as they’d been in spots during previous regular seasons, every Sixers team since 2017 had some degree of safety net in place — one largely provided by the promise of at least 50 games of healthy, high-level Joel Embiid — and without that, it turns out there was no limit to how bad things could get. With preseason expectations being what they were, a 44-38 season would’ve been bitterly disappointing; the ‘24-’25 Sixers ended the season 20 games worse than that.
This year, 44-38 seems about the high end of reasonable expectations for the Sixers. MOC just wrote a predictions column where he expressed uncharacteristic bullishness on the Philadelphia 76ers; he dared to dream that their eventual win total could be “somewhere in the mid-40s.” Championship contention? Forget about it. Joel having his long-fabled Giannis-like run storming through the playoffs? Seems unlikely. Paul George becoming our third All-Star as hoped? Hell, if he just stands in the corner and shoots 38% from three we’ll be happy. Absolutely every one of our presumptions for who these Sixers are and what they can accomplish has been tamped down relative to this time last year.
And that’s absolutely as it should be. For as many pieces seemed to slide into place for this team on Friday night, many more remain missing: McCain still out, George still working his way back to the lineup, our starting power forward spot basically still a broken URL. Joel will miss games, a lot of them. V.J. will miss shots, a lot of them. Adem Bona might currently be in our first five? The issues with rebounding and defending up from last year continue to be glaring. The Sixers looked 100 times better and fuller on Friday night than they had at any other point since March, and they still struggled to close out the second-string Timberwolves on the ass-end of a preseason back-to-back. A winning record for the season should hardly be assumed for these Sixers; this team could still very easily suck big time.
But the way this shit-ass summer has forced us — me, anyway — to confront that not only as an abstract possibility but as an undeniable reality has, arguably, been a blessing. If things had been all good health and good vibes with this offseason, maybe there was a chance we/I could have written off last season as a worst-case aberration as opposed to something closer to the new normal. Maybe I would’ve continued along the “Well, why can’t the Sixers contend in the East?” train of thought proposed by Tom Ziller, roughly 15 minutes before the Sixers’ latest depressing injury setback deaded it for the rest of the summer. Maybe I would’ve refused to learn my lessons from last year. Maybe I’d be a truly irresponsible level of Back with this team.
Instead, I got exactly one game of encouragement, one night’s worth of things going right-ish for the 76ers. I got enough that I’m not actively dreading the season’s return on Wednesday; I’m basically looking forward to it. I got enough to not want to automatically roll my eyes at any suggestion that they could make the playoffs this year (though not so much that I won’t automatically roll my eyes at anyone who believes they definitely will). I got enough to not feel like a dumbass for wanting anything good to happen with this team. Low bar, but one the team (or the universe) seemed to have zero interest in getting cleared before last Friday, and now one that I am firmly over with the 76ers.
Was this the grand design all along? Were the Sixers intentionally miserable for six months specifically so that we wouldn’t ask or expect big things of them again? Have Joel Embiid and Paul George secretly been healthy since May? Is Nick Nurse actually PUMPED to be an NBA coach again? Perhaps not — but regardless of intent, I can’t argue that things haven’t worked out about as well as they could have for the Sixers going into these 82 games. Last year, they won the offseason and lost the regular season. This year, they lost the offseason, and the regular season is a big ol’ question mark. We got no expectations, but we’re here and so mostly are they. Now let’s play some basketball.
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.
To quote Ann a Kenrick, because why not, 'I've got my ticket for the long way 'round
Two bottle'a whiskey for the way' Welcome back.