It's Gonna Be Paul Reed's Year
He's pretty much the exact kind of player we want setting the emotional tone for our Sixers.
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The Sixers' disarmingly well-received offseason has mostly been about the moves they made in free agency: stealing PJ Tucker away from the Heat and signing his junior version Danuel House on the cheap, while timing the re-inking of James Harden to make these moves and others possible and still leave the team with some room around the margins. But let's not lose sight of the importance of the biggest move Daryl Morey didn't make: not signing a big-name veteran center to putter around while backing up Joel Embiid, eating up huge minutes in the regular season, and then underwhelming and/or infuriating with their unplayability during the postseason.
Instead, it looks like the backup five minutes should be almost exclusively Paul Reed's to make the most with. And make the most with them, I believe he shall.
I'm not necessarily predicting a major year for Paul Reed statistically. I think that's a distinct possibility, given how (relatively) effective he was against tough competition in the playoffs, given how much room his game has still to grow, and given that Joel should probably miss a good chunk of the season with his usual array of dings -- and maybe even some extra load management now that Jo appears to understand that preserving his body for the playoffs has to be priority No, 1 next season. But his minutes will still be mostly limited, his range will likely be slow-developing, and I don't doubt that there's still some real growing pains to be had with our beloved mud-getter-outer. You usually only get one Tyrese Maxey in a lifetime, you almost certainly only get one per 15-man roster.
But his imminent breakout season won't mostly be measurable in on-court numbers anyway. A weird and underappreciated thing about the Sixers is how the backup center has basically been the bellwether for the team in every season since Jimmy Butler's departure. The 2018-'19 Sixers ultimately followed Al Horford's lead as lethargic, sullen and really just flat and blamey. The 2019-'20 Sixers let Dwight Howard turn them into a bunch of over-excited regular season try-hards -- who, like Dwight historically, fell apart and got kinda nasty at the first major sign of adversity. The 2020-'21 Sixers were unexpectedly frisky with Andre Drummond in the middle, even though we knew it probably wouldn't last in the playoffs -- and when DeAndre Jordan's spin-cycled bones started manning the position regularly, it was pretty clear we were done for from an athleticism and toughness standpoint.
BBall Paul, though? He's pretty much the exact kind of player we want setting the emotional tone for our Sixers. He's tough, he's springy, he's dynamic to the point of frenetic, he has a fun nickname and an aura of chaotic possibility. His energy is somewhere between Reggie Evans, Mike Scott and "Doug Collins lol"-era Marreese Speights -- and he's actually useful on a basketball court, something those three could only say intermittently throughout their Sixers' tenures. For a team with a track record of settling into Tuesday afternoon office blahness a little too easily, Paul Reed's presence as a regular on this team should be a Five-Hour Energy Drink to the system.
And the rest of the NBA world is gonna fall for him, harder than he falls trying to dunk the basketball from eight feet too far away. Many of the real heads already know of course, and he's been a darling to professional hoop nerds like John Hollinger since the very beginning -- but this should be the year where even the casuals get on his wavelength, where even the league's stars start to take notice. Paul Reed has that most precious of qualities in a 2022 quasi-celebrity: He's not seasoned enough yet to do or say all the right things, and he probably wouldn't have much interest in doing or saying them even if he did. It's going to make him loveable in a way that not even Joel or Tyrese can quite match; those guys know exactly what we want from them a little too well already, all Paul Reed knows is that we want Paul Reed.
Of course, that doesn't mean that we're 100% guaranteed to actually get full Paul Reed just yet. Charles Bassey is still milling about and still some folks' idea of a more ideal model for Joel's backup, though his inconsistent-to-be-generous showing in Summer League this July shouldn't inspire confidence in anyone that he's anywhere near ready to lock the position down long-term. And because the void of slop perpetually demands to be filled, last week we got something more than rumors and far less than actual reports that a last-legs DeMarcus Cousins to the Sixers could be a possibility. I don't think either is a real likelihood, but I wouldn't have thought going down the stretch with DeAndre Jordan as our primary backup C last year would've been particularly probable either -- Doc and Daryl still have plenty of time to materialize another solution that's actually much more of a needless problem.
Assuming the roster stays as constructed, though, we get the luxury of going into this season without having to squint at our backup bigs to try to visualize a version of them that might actually be playable in the postseason. We've already seen proof of concept from Paul Reed in the Raptors series -- more than we've ever seen from a Sixers center not named Joel Embiid in May or June. And now we should get to see what more he has to offer us (and everyone else) with consistent minutes, a bizarrely pivotal and influential team role, and a regular platform to do way too much with. Simply not getting in the way of that would maybe be our greatest win of the summer.