Yeah I Don't Know
Was this postseason ultimately an overachieving triumph or yet another bitter disappointment? Ask AU in two months. Or don't.
I thought there was absolutely nothing good about the Sixers’ first Mother’s Day Massacre game three years ago, when they got blown out by Boston in Boston in Game 7 and absolutely nobody from the Sixers (except maybe PJ Tucker who would never be a relevant NBA player again) played anywhere near acceptably. It was an embarrassing, shameful, quintessentially losery performance by a team who was on the precipice of turning the corner and instead fell into the street and got run over by a garbage truck. But there was one good thing about it, I guess: There was absolutely no ambiguity in how we should feel about it. We should have felt humiliated, furious and just fucking stoopid to be Sixers fans that year, and we did. Easy enough.
This second time around is trickier. Yes we got blown out on Mother’s Day again, yes we got absolutely pantsed by a division rival and now inarguably superior team, yes we had the extra iodine poisoning this time of it happening at a home that didn’t particularly feel like home, where we are somehow now 3-8 in our last 11 playoff games. (Let the XMA now forever be known as Madison Square Garden East, geographical appropriateness be damned.) Yes we again get to feel particularly good about nobody, yes we again have no idea what the way forward is with this team, yes we again lost again in the fucking second round (again). Seems conclusive, and it would be the final word if any of us had expected to get this far in the first place, if we hadn’t already given up on this team at halftime of Game Five against Boston, and of course if we hadn’t come back from down 3-1 for the best Sixers series victory in over 25 years, by a magnitude of about 100x.
So should we be glad to have gotten this far, or livid about how much further we didn’t get? Should we smile because it happened or cry because it’s over? Will we remember this more as ok yeah but Fuck Boston or ok yeah but FUCK New York? In truth, I don’t know what to tell y’all. I don’t even know what to tell myself.
The good news, I suppose, is that we don’t really have to play the Well If Only game. It was tempting for a minute after Game Two, the only game in this series that the Sixers arguably should have won, to say Well If Only Daryl Morey Wasn’t So Arrogant or Well If Only Josh Harris Wasn’t Such a Cheapskate then maybe we’d still have Jared McCain, maybe we’d have some more playable bench pieces, maybe our starters wouldn’t be so exhausted and maybe we’d actually have a real chance in the rest of the series. Even after Game Three, which started out like the Sixers roaring back and quickly turned into the Sixers being thoroughly tamed, well, maybe it all could’ve been flipped by just having a couple more guys. After Game Four, in which we lost by 40 and spent about four minutes not being down by double digits, you can’t direct your anger at any one person, place or thing being the difference, all you can really say is Fuck Everyone and Everything.
Or maybe you can. I dunno. My main take here is that I don’t feel like I can tell anyone how they should feel about this game or Joel or Daryl or Nick Nurse or really any part of any of this. Just about everyone involved with this team sashayed from inexcusable to vindicated to shrug over the past two weeks. Eight days ago the Sixers were conquering heroes, achieving the impossible. Now they’re losers again, maybe forever. Which one is the real thing? Which one will we remember five years from now? Five months from now?
Ask us five years or five months from now, I guess. For now, I love how Daryl secured us a core coherent enough to finally come alive against Boston, but hate how he punted on making it deep enough to survive beyond them. I love how Nurse figured out how to expose the Celtics’ vulnerabilities but hate how he could only exacerbate our own against the Knicks. I love how Tyrese Maxey closed out the first round but hate how he got completely taken out of the second. I love how Joel Embiid fought to get back on the court, fought to power us past the Celtics, and fought to score 24 points on 8-8 shooting (!!) today — but I hate how I simply have no idea how it’s possible to ever win two playoff rounds with that guy anchoring your defense. All these guys should have nothing to apologize for and all of them should be ashamed to show their face in Philly again this summer. It’s a tough one to read.
There’s really only two parts of this I do feel confident in — at least in how I feel about them, even if I don’t feel 100% comfortable in trying to persuade you to feel the same way. One is that the Celtics series win is still one for the ages. I’m not going to say it’s not diminished by this Knicks series being such a beatdown — of course it is, that’s just reality — but it was still the first Sixers series win of the Process era that inspired true joy, not just relief or catharsis or anticipation for what comes next. It was a truly, unreservedly happy memory, and regardless of whatever it does or doesn’t still say about this Sixers team in any meaningful fashion, you can’t take sports memories like that for granted. You just can’t. Or I can’t anyway. I don’t want to.
The other part is that the Knicks better win the fucking East now. I’m sure this is a controversial take and it’s your right to disagree but I don’t care. All I can say is I will be 1000% fucking FURIOUS if the fucking Knicks don’t win the fucking East at this point. I’ll be madder at them for losing in the next round than I am at the Sixers for losing in this one. And actually I can’t even totally say that because the Knicks losing in the next round will retroactively make me so much madder at the Sixers for losing in this one. If this is New York’s team-of-destiny year, if they’re at least gonna make it to the finals and give the Thunder or Spurs a real go at it, I can live with that; maybe it’s just their turn, whatever. And if they wanna lose to OKC or the Spurs at that point that’s fine. But if they should pound us into protons and electrons and then turn around and go out like some goddamn punks to the fucking Fraud Centaral Pistons or Cavs? Who both came inches away from giving their first-round series away to likely the two worst teams in this whole postseason? I’m gonna blame some of the people in this series. And THAT I do not forgive.
Anyway. The most confusing thing about all of this isn’t how we should feel about this team today, it’s what we should do about this team tomorrow. These Sixers showed their potential, and why you keep a core this talented together for as long as you can, and they also showed why the entire franchise should fall into a sinkhole and never be heard from again. Maybe you look at Games 5-7 of the Boston series, when everything seemed to gel at a level higher than we long thought possible for this Sixers squad, and say OK well run it back and get them help and just hope that next year they don’t get so friggin’ exhausted by the end of the first round that their hands are glued to their knees for the entire second round. Or maybe you look at that second round when the Sixers were basically drawing dead from the first deal and say OK no matter how they got here, it was never going to end any differently from this. Both seem pretty reasonable conclusions to me.
There’s certainly a fair temptation to just go scorched earth at this point. Fire Morey and Nurse, deal Embiid and George even at cost, and move forward with Maxey and VJ Edgecombe knowing that even if things end up worse next year, at least they’ll end differently. I’ll never actively push for them to trade Joel, but I’m not generally unamenable to that line of thinking. It’s been about a decade of this by now. Last year was a disaster. The fact that this year even went as well as it did was a sizable miracle. Next year everyone’s a year older and crankier. Of all the available plans of action, ripping it up and starting again feels like the hardest to truly argue against.
And yet.... man, we really did see something for a minute in that Boston series, huh? We saw the Sixers operating on a higher plane. A championship plane? At the very least a third-round plane. It seemed like for a hot second, all the ghosts and traumas of the past took a breather and the game got kinda simple and easy all of a sudden. We prayed it would last just long enough to see us through that series, through the offensive cold spells, through the ass-clenched fourth quarters and the open Payton Pritchard threes in the corner, just long enough for us to feel it just one time. And we got we ordered. And then the bill came. Fair play there, but you get a taste of a meal that full, that satisfying, that nourishing — it’s just hard to think about it and say tear down the restaurant.
We’ll see. For now, it’s another few weeks of Being Sad Quietly, as the NBA playoffs once again go on without us, a feeling that always hurts at least a little bit more than we expect it will. There are big decisions to be made in the offseason and one of those big decisions is about who’s going to be making all of the other big decisions. Maybe it’s the guy we already have, and maybe it isn’t. Maybe the pieces of the next great Sixers team are already in place, and maybe they’re not. Maybe this’ll all have been worth it in the end and maybe it won’t. We’ll all come to our own conclusions over time. We have to. We have nothing else to do. The Sixers may change their roster or their front office but we’ll still be here. We can fire the GM, we can fire the coach, we can maybe even fire the players, but we can’t fire ourselves. Sorry Mom.
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.