What If the Sixers Are Actually Good?
MOC considers the extremely frightening alternative.
There’s nothing that makes you feel like an idiot quite like being a sports fan. All off-season long, I’ve been banging the drum that we shouldn’t really expect anything meaningful this Sixers season in terms of wins and losses, but instead we should try and focus on enjoying watching the development of the team’s young core. All I care about is the vibes, I said.
And then, I saw the Sixers social team post a six-second video of Joel Embiid partaking in an individual workout and appearing to be in great shape, and I started daydreaming. All it took was just one small glimmer of hope, and I’ve already let my mind run away with it. At this point, if the reports out of training camp are positive, and the Sixers start the season 3-0 on the backs of good performances from Embiid, I’ll be thinking about a deep playoff run. I know, I’m an idiot.
But then again… am I an idiot? Don’t we all agree that the Sixers should be in the mix for the playoffs almost regardless of what they get from Embiid and Paul George? Doesn’t the East still suck? Can Embiid and PG just be healthy for 3.5 consecutive weeks of basketball in April and May? That would be enough to get them to the Conference Finals.
Yeah yeah, I know, the chances of it all coming together remain very small. But I do think that if you’re refusing to even entertain the possibility, you’re just engaging in a self-protection mechanism from all the disappointment of the last several years. To a certain extent, I feel as though Ben Simmons and James Harden have done irreparable damage to our brains – the cycle of always looking like a contender only to always pathetically flame out in the playoffs has scarred us so much that we now care about being fun and respectable more so than we care about actually winning.
While I’m certainly not backtracking on any of the lessons we’ve learned from all of the playoff flame-outs, I do think that we should all probably care more and expect more in terms of winning. Once the Quentin Grimes contract hits the books, the Sixers will more than likely have a top-10 payroll in the league. They’ve got three players who made the All-Star team two years ago, and two incredibly promising young guards off the bench. If the team seems remotely worth investing in, they have plenty of assets to use to acquire more depth. If the Sixers are abjectly awful once again, it would be an absolute embarrassment. Missing the playoffs would be an unacceptable failure.
While I didn’t share AU’s neverending quest to keep everyone on the “win now” bandwagon last season, I do think there’s a large kernel of truth in what he was saying. We, as fans, only get so many of these. If you’re quick to punt on the season any time you’re not obviously in the inner circle of contenders, you might as well not follow the team at all. By that standard, only 2-3 times per decade will you have a team worth caring about, if you’re lucky.
His message rings even more true if you are the type of fan still heavily invested in winning with Embiid. If this year is another dumpster fire for Embiid’s health and the team overall, it’s more than likely that the team will subsequently enter into a much different phase of their life cycle that somewhat resembles a true rebuild. If you want to see them win something with Joel, you’d better hope it happens this year; we can’t afford to only care about vibes.
While acknowledging what a sucker I am for entertaining some semblance of belief, I do think it’s worth tinkering a bit with the “only caring about the vibes” mentality that I’ve been carrying with me all off-season. There is a parasocial element to following a sports team, and it’s great that we’re all trying to prioritize enjoying that aspect of it. But sports are also a proxy for war. And I can’t name very many wars where one side got their asses kicked over and over again but had a really nice time.
Even if their luck is as bad as it was last year, the Sixers should not be a terrible basketball team once again. And if their luck is even slightly on the positive side, they should be a legitimately good team. They are not in need of some unimaginable set of circumstances in order to be a fun, formidable team. They just need one or two good things to happen to them – or, put differently, they need one or two bad things to not happen to them.
Perhaps in a very short amount of time, I’ll feel dumb for asking this question. But is it really so hard to believe that good things could happen to the Philadelphia 76ers?
Mike O’Connor is the best O’Connor in basketball writing. Previously of The Athletic, you can find Mike on Twitter @MOConnor_NBA. Mike’s writing is brought to you by Body Bio, supplements based on science, focusing on your gut and brain health.
Not a bad first attempt as far as manifesting goes.
I don't think this team can accidentally be good because part of what the Sixers had with Simmons that people lose track of is we were by default pretty good defensively. By default has an edge most nights with athleticism and length. That's gone. Some guards that can score when featured don't add up to contention.