Apocalypse Soon: It's Not the End if This Sixers Season Busts, But It May Be Nigh

So what is really going to happen if this season is a dud?

[photo: Mitchell Leff/Getty Images]

Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and is now writing 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. 

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Man, has losing these last few games in L.A. been fun. Having two losses whose results you can just laugh off, while also reading way too much into role players’ strong showings and a general Good Showing effort level… feels like home, dunnit? Plus, Shake’s breakout, Tobias’ increased urgency, even Glenn Robinson III finally accepting his role as Basketball Player Who Is Alive -- these are all legitimately positive developments that should help this team for the rest of the season. (Al Horford, uh… well, that coast-to-coast jet lag sure is a killer, huh?) 

But as much as a lark as these games have been, and as excited as we can get at the prospect of Damian Lillard 2.0 coming off the bench for the rest of the season -- hell, as angry as we Horf playing like Arcade Fire singer Win Butler having snuck into an actual NBA game -- it’s hard to shake the feeling that without Ben Simmons, the season’s already over. Not officially today, or at Game 82, or even in the first round of the playoffs if things break right -- but the team’s championship ceiling, already mid-crumble, has fallen. And given how fatalistic many of us are being about the imminent update on Simmons’ current back injury (and how crushing an early playoff exit would be for this team) it might be time to start asking just how big the blow will be to the Sixers’ present and future if this year is indeed already kaputt.

And my best answer to that question is: We won’t be at nuclear winter just yet, but we might be just a button push removed from it. The team is currently fortified around its two in-their-prime stars, and that should be enough to still build a contending team around -- even without the assets or cap space to match a third star with them -- as long as the two of them reach something close to their full potential. But after another wasted year, another season-ending injury and another big-picture demonstration of why this front office and ownership is not to be trusted, we’re just a shot away from either Simmons or Embiid wanting out -- or giving out. 

First though, let’s go over the obvious fallout if this season goes down the tubes: The team will almost definitely have a different coach next year. A Simmons injury could allow Brett Brown a certain degree of clemency and generosity, but things had already been largely underwhelming with this team well before that fateful Bucks game, a large portion of the fanbase is fed up, and… well, someone has usually to go after a year like this, and Brown is the easiest scapegoat. Maybe Elton gets replaced (or just reshuffled) along with him, but the entire front office situation and its relationship with ownership is so strange that making predictions there with any degree of confidence feels like trying to guess what’s going to happen in the Democratic primaries strictly from reading the most extreme accounts in your Twitter feed.

Then, some players might be next to go: Namely one former (possibly still current?) Celtics center who Process Trusters are no doubt already sending links to real estate listings in Oklahoma City and Cleveland. Of course, that might be easier said than done -- Horf’s contract (still three years and nearly $70 million) won’t dump easy, and might cost a good deal in terms of picks and other assets for us to move. Tobias Harris, at more years and more money, might be similarly unmovable without most of our team’s sugar alternatives thrown in.

Besides, as someone on Sixers Twitter (forgive me not recalling who) pointed out recently, trading either Horford or Harris just to shed the salary doesn’t make sense unless we also boot the other one; with Simmons’ extension kicking in next season, the team won’t have any meaningful cap space otherwise. Dumping both of them would cost basically every worthwhile asset we have (and maybe some we don’t); dealing them for actually valuable player return (Chris Paul, Jrue Holiday, Buddy Hield) may require the same. It’s very possible the smart play for this team is just to essentially run it back next year. 

Maybe to you, this is already starting to sound pretty apocalyptic, and given how this year has gone so far, I can’t totally blame you. Our SixersAdam wrote recently about the Sixers’ spectacular job of taking the dim sum cart’s worth of assets that Our Once and Always Dark Lord Sam Hinkie left them (along with Embiid and the No. 1 pick that would become Ben Simmons), and plowed through them until all they have left is a couple soggy spring rolls. He also braces the prospect of the team looking the same this year and concludes that maybe it’s already too late for this team to be true contenders. 

It might be. But as long as they have Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid -- two legitimate top 15 players this season, and still just 23 and 25 years old -- they’ll at least get another shot at it. Elton & Co. might have lost their only real chance to add a third true star to go with them, but as the NBA is showing us pretty clearly this season (Milwaukee, Houston, both L.A. teams), two stars is still plenty to contend at the highest level, provided your stars are playing at their apex and the team makes sense around them. 

The team went all in on talent and identity over the summer and hoped that that would make up  for the lack of conventional fit between its biggest pieces. That doesn’t seem to have worked -- though I’d argue that this would be a very different evaluation if Al Horford was still 80% of the player he was last year, even 80% of the player he was this November -- and now it’s probably time for us to go all in on fit. Luckily, finding role players to serve as complementary pieces is a relatively cheap pivot from going star hunting; hell, a number of them might already be on the Sixers’ roster in the young, inexpensive likes of Matisse Thybulle, Furkan Korkmaz and Shake Milton. Keep Horford coming off (or staying on) the bench and Harris starting at the four, develop our sweeter-shooting and ball-handling wings alongside Embiid and Simmons, and see if that kind of soft reset helps those two reach closer to their full potential. 

A question recently asked on the Ricky wondered if the Sixers were doomed to be the successors to the Oklahoma City Thunder, doomed to break up before ever winning a title  together. But as pointed out by Spike and Mike, Durant and Westbrook had a lot longer together than Simmons and Embiid have had so far: eight seasons total (seven in the playoffs) for KD and Russ, compared to just three for Ben and JoJo. Even after the Thunder brass made their two most disastrous franchise decisions around their two young stars -- trading a pre-prime James Harden and investing heavily in a decrepit Kendrick Perkins -- the team stayed together for another four seasons, coming a miracle GSW comeback away from the finals in 2016. Of course Durant and Westbrook were also a lot better at their peak than Embiid and Simmons are currently, but that’s sort of the point: The team’s ceiling still has more to do with the two of them growing into the MVP-caliber performers we believe they can be than in the ancillary pieces surrounding them. 

That’s all the somewhat good news. The much more bad news is that this season, which was supposed to end in a conference finals trip at a minimum, instead ending up a wash -- and Simmons exiting it with an injury -- would bring our star duo that much closer to the brink of calling it a wrap themselves. They’re both under contract for at least another three years, and over the All-Star break were seeming more recommitted to each other and to this city than they had in a long time. But these things happen quickly in the 2020s NBA, and Simmons and Embiid have already had to experience a near-unprecedented level of pressure, scrutiny and frustration for players of their age and experience. The moves the front office made the past two years have at times served to alienate both players, while ultimately bringing the team no closer to actual championship contention. You never know what the straw to break the camel’s back will be for either.

And speaking of busted backs, of course -- this is obviously a scary, scary sort injury for Simmons to have at such a young age. I’m no expert so I won’t talk about timetables or odds of recurrence or anything, just to say that back injuries have certainly derailed and ultimately ended great NBA careers, and that if I was Simmons, I could hardly trust the Sixers’ medical staff and other decision-makers to know how to properly keep me upright. Add in Embiid’s career being a six-year game of Operation, and it’s entirely possible that these dudes’ bodies make the decision to check out before their egos (or agents) make it for them. 

That would seem to be the biggest danger of the two-star system: it makes both of them totally irreplaceable. If Harris and Horford worked out to the extent the team hoped, you could picture a world in which Embiid could be compromised and the team could still surge behind a totally unleashed Simmons. Or if Jimmy Butler had re-signed in Philly -- something I’ll always wonder about, sorry -- and Simmons had wanted out, Embiid and Butler plus a Simmons trade return could still have the Sixers as championship-caliber for a couple years. But now, a trade demand from or injury to either and it’s Have a Great Summer, maybe forever. 

So if this year is revealed to already be over in a couple days -- or two-to-three weeks after that, or two-to-three weeks after that -- it’s not the end of the world. But we all better stock up on canned goods and other non-perishables, because at that point, the true apocalypse may never be more than a Sixers email or press conference away again.