This Sixers Regular Season Is Going to Be 27 Different Regular Seasons
And none of them are really going to mean anything.
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You might not be able to find five Sixers losses over the last ten years worse than the L they took in Houston on Monday night. Not in terms of what the loss meant, of course, but in terms of how it felt. It was a perfect storm of unwatchable frustration: bad turnovers, inexcusable misses, head-smacking decision-making on the court and from the bench, offensive rebound after foul whistle after offensive rebound after foul whistle, all against one of the most beatable teams in the NBA -- and worst of all, just enough good plays to keep the team in it for two overtimes, though you knew the whole time that even Lance McCullers Jr. could've closed us out that night.
It was the cap of a three-game run that doesn't exactly have the fanbase jazzed to give the Sixers a hero's welcome when they return to the not-Wells Fargo Center for their upcoming seven-game homestand. They're on a three-game losing streak, the offense has stagnated, Joel looks perpetually miserable, the whole team rebounds like Daria playing volleyball -- when even Paul Reed is playing too stinky for anyone to really get on Doc for reaching for Montrezl Harrell over him, things are not going good. (And if James Harden's comeback was supposed to get us excited about this team again, safe to say the thrill is gone after 15 misses and seven turnovers in his return game.) It's been enough for Sixers Twitter to make all kinds of declarations about this being the most unwatchable Sixers team yet, far too hopeless to actually do anything in the playoffs, not worth wasting another minute of time or emotional energy on.
And they're right -- about this season. But it'll be another team in six days. And another dozen or two over the 55 games after that. And none of them are really gonna mean anything. It's just one of those years.
By my count, the Sixers have already been six teams so far this year. They've been the 0-3 and Joel Looks Miserable Sixers. They've been the Tyrese Maxey Show Sixers. They've been the Too Much Too Soon for Tyrese Sixers. They've been the Joel Kicking Everyone's Ass (Though He Still Looks Miserable) Sixers. Most recently, they were the team we've come to affectionately know as the Hospital Sixers. Now, they're... well, I dunno what to call these listless Sixers exactly, but I know by the time we think of something appropriate, they'll probably be onto another season entirely -- one with a different vibe, a different record, and a different outlook. And just when we adjust to that one, it'll shift again.
These seasons happen, usually when a team core has been around for a bit, usually when they have a lot of big, established names on the roster and usually when there's a lot of expectations surrounding the team and not a ton of time left to actually meet them. The Knicks of a decade ago were kind of like this; the 2011-'12 and '12-'13 seasons must've comprised about 80 different mini-Knicks seasons between them. And nothing exacerbates them like injuries -- the kind that made a wrench-throw like Linsanity possible for New York a decade ago, and briefly made Shake Milton a superhero in Philly last month. With the Sixers' recent staggered injuries (and the accompanying staggered returns from them), it all but guarantees they'll be changing seasons every week.
And when you're playing season roulette, you never really know what you're going to get. You're going to get the kind of stellar career performances like Tyrese scoring 44 in Toronto and Joel hanging a Wilt Chamberlain line on Utah, and you're going to get PJ Tucker going scoreless in six out of seven games and DeAnthony Melton shooting 4-18 in a two-point loss at MSG. You're going to get stretches of top-three defensive dominance, and you're going to get stretches where the Cavs shoot 15-16 in a quarter. You're going to get games wins like the Brooklyn game that they never should have escaped with, and you're going to get losses like in Houston that should never have even been close. You're going to get absolutely everything -- and in the moment, all of it will feel like the Actual Sixers, even though in reality they're no more or less a mirage than the one that preceded it. This is one of the reasons why I've been beating the drum about this regular season not mattering since before it even started.
If you don't want to take my word for it, well, just look to Joel. Everything about his attitude and play so far this year has screamed "this regular season does not matter to me." He's playing awesome more often than not because he's one of the best players in the world, and he wants to win because that's his job and he prefers it to losing, sure. But he's seen it all in the regular season at this point in his career, he knows the playoffs are the only remaining proving ground that actually matters, he realizes the MVP is probably out of reach for him even in a best-case scenario, and like the fans watching him, he doesn't seem to want to waste any more emotional energy on Sixers wins or losses than he has to. He doesn't seemed pissed off or particularly sulky when the Sixers lose, and he doesn't seem that jubilant or excited when they win. For the regular season, it's strictly look man, I just work here.
That's kind of a bummer, of course. And it matters that the team is only .500, that they seem to have very real roster construction problems (again), that late-2022 James Harden looks a whole lot like early-2022 James Harden. I just think any particularly apocalyptic version of Sixers fatalism is an oversell this season, when we're barely a week removed from the Hospital Sixers' three-game winning streak, two weeks removed Shake and Tobias running Kyrie and KD out of the building, and three weeks removed from Joel out-clutching Giannis down the stretch. There are bad moments interspersed between those good ones, sure, but that's the point -- we're going to get them all this year, and it's a little silly to act like any of them suddenly negates all the rest of them.
Maybe you're just tired of this era of the Sixers in general, in which case I guess I can't blame you. It's been a long decade, for sure, and considering we were promised a relatively stress-free regular season following our Hollinger-approved off-season -- I thought we were probably going to get one too -- it's certainly understandable to be chafed that we instead get 82 games of Regular Season Roulette. Maybe you hoped to be watching the Sixers looking like a True Contender by now, which we definitely haven't seen yet. I think that mini-season is probably coming up soon-ish too, but fair enough.
Still, even following a loss like Monday's, I'm pissed off that I have to wait four days to watch the Sixers again. Even if he's acting about as animated and jovial as the Pixies during a reunion tour, life with Joel Embiid remains exponentially better than life without him. And if that Bucks game was about three weeks ago, that means that Tyrese's return is probably only about a week or two away. I dunno man, I'm gonna keep watching this team this season and enjoying them more often than not throughout their many incarnations to come, knowing that none of what I see deserves to be taken too seriously. I'll save my true misery and self-flagellation for when I really need it in the playoffs.