Why Aren't We Excited About the Sixers Yet? The Top 10 Reasons
Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and 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.
Andrew's writing is brought to you by Kinetic Skateboarding! Not only the Ricky's approved skate shop, but the best place to get Chucks, Vans, any apparel. Use code "DAVESILVER" for 9.1% off your order.
The surging Sixers. That's who we are, according to Zach Lowe's latest Lowe Post podcast -- and also just kinda according to common NBA sense. The Philadelphia 76ers are indeed 16-4 in their past 20 games, dating back to early December -- and when you win 80% of your games over what's essentially a quarter of a season, you can kinda throw out any additional context or extenuating circumstances: 16-4 means you're going good, full stop. Yet Sixers fans aren't exactly doing the "Motownphilly" boogie down the city streets; talk to an average Process Truster about the team in January 2023 and you're still probably gonna get an "ugh, I know, right?" Like Tony Soprano, we continue to go about in pity for ourselves, while all the while a great wind carries us across the sky.
What's going on here exactly? Why can we not get pumped about this team that started the season 12-12 and is now a half a game out of second place in the East, with the league's most unstoppable two-man attack? Let's break down the 10 most likely reasons, in rough ascending order of relevance, and how fair or unfair it actually is for us to use them as justification for us taking a hardline wait-and-see attitude towards what is objectively one of the hottest teams in the NBA.
10. They're a distant third in the Philly pecking order.
True, at least for now, though not nearly as much as it was at the beginning of the season when the Eagles were undefeated and the Phillies looked like a team of destiny. Still, even after a disappointing end to the World Series, you can get more pop on Philly sports Twitter reminiscing on Nick Castellanos sliding catches or Rhys Hoskins bat demolitions than you can tweeting about Embiid poster dunks from that night, and even with a deflating 1-2 end to the Eagles' regular season, it's still Birdstown until the playoffs officially say otherwise. It'll be interesting to see if the Sixers can get a little more local juice once the Eagles wrap it up one way or the other, though the pervasiveness of the fan malaise suggests less that the fanbase is distracted and more that we've been paying far too much attention for far too long.
9. They can't really hang with the truly elite teams.
Maybe -- but who even are the really elite teams? Maybe the Nuggets and Grizzlies in the West? Maybe the Celtics and the pre-injury Nets in the East? The only team of that bunch that the Sixers seem legitimately outclassed by are the Celtics, and I say that as much out of institutional trauma as I do out of legitimate belief in Boston's supremacy this season. Otherwise, we've split so far with the Bucks and Pelicans, and beat Brooklyn without our three best players. The Sixers don't have a lot of signature wins this season against the best teams, but outside of the season opener against Boston, we don't have a lot of signature losses in that regard either. We'll find out more about our ability to keep pace with those teams once we start playing more of them over the next couple months; until then, who knows about anyone, really.
8. The losses have been terrible.
There've only been four of 'em over the past 20 games, as previously mentioned, but those four have been pretty tough: C.J. McCollum and Zach LaVine shooting the absolute lights out on consecutive Friday nights for the Pelicans and Bulls respectively, and the middling Wizards and Thunder proving too much for us to handle in games we badly needed for momentum's (and Coach Mike prophecies') sake. All four felt like games we should or at least could win. But that's the thing about going into a season with championship-type aspirations -- you feel like you should win just about every game, and no one actually does. (Especially not in the 2023 NBA, where even the lousy teams still have a LaVine or SGA or even a Porzingis to potentially go nuclear every so often.) If you only get four of 'em out of a 20-game stretch, that's still pretty solid.
7. Some of the wins haven't been much better.
Included in those 16 most recent wins: A one-point victory over the Jazz after leading by 20 in the first quarter, a three-point OT escape against the Raptors where we led by 14 in the third, and of course, an 11-point Lakers OT success that we were somehow an Anthony Davis free throw away from losing despite leading by nine with 30 seconds to go. Those are just (arguably) the worst of a less-than-resounding slate of Ws that has often left fans feeling uninspired, to say the least. Still, outside of the 100% inexcusable Lakers game, you could still frame most of their more pathetic wins as a team having the character to not let disheartening late-game performances turn into truly catastrophic losses -- which they very well might have in previous seasons -- and anyway, they have to be pretty good to get up that much on these teams in the first place. You'd certainly rather they win by 20 every night, but if your biggest complaint about a team is "their wins aren't undramatic enough," you may need to be strapped down and force fed a few games' worth of the March 2016 Sixers for perspective's sake.
6. P.J. Tucker and Montrezl Harrell are slowly killing us.
The Sixers never make it through a full season without at least one player in the rotation ending up a fanbase scapegoat, but we have two this year who are uniquely frustrating: P.J. Tucker plays offense like the kid who volunteers to rebound during shootaround because he doesn't really have any basketball skill or interest but still wants the cool kids to like him, while Montrezl Harrell is all but invisible on both sides of the ball, an innings-eater in the true Adam Eaton sense of "well, I guess if there's absolutely no one else available." (There is.)
Having to watch these two for a combined 35-40 minutes a night can certainly be draining -- we don't really need Tucker like this until the playoffs, and we don't really need Harrell at all -- though at least the disappointment of their free agency signings has largely been made up for by how electric DeAnthony Melton, our other main new acquisition, has been for most of the season. (The less said about Danuel House Jr., who may have cost us a future second-round pick and will hopefully play about as many meaningful minutes for the Sixers moving forward this year as Zhaire Smith, the better.)
5. Doc.
As FOTB Jason Lipshutz has pointed out, maybe the worst thing about this recent Sixers Surge is the fact that it probably cost the Sixers their best (and for this season at least, last) chance to fire Doc Rivers -- who, of course, is the reason why Tucker and Harrell continue to get the minutes they get, and who is still probably 10x a bigger Sixers fanbase scapegoat than both of them put together. (Though due to some combination of politics, optics and contractual stipulations, it does seem likely that Daryl was never gonna be able to fire Doc regardless.)
Ultimately, our top 15 all-time coach's preference for rotation guys who reliably do nothing over guys who actually do stuff well but occasionally mess up may prove very costly for this team, as may his infamous inability to make playoff adjustments. I still mostly agree with Spike that coaches don't matter as much as we think they do, and that we're unfair in giving Doc all of the blame for everything that's wrong with the Sixers and none of the credit for anything that's right. But yeah, I'd probably feel better about this team going into the playoffs with Dave Joerger or Sam Cassell pacing the sidelines than a hunched-over, nutrilbullet-throated Doc.
4. Their defense has been abysmal.
Defense may win championships, but the Sixers have certainly treated it as optional for the regular season so far this calendar year. The rotations have been half-hearted and sloppy, the fouling has been brutal, the perimeter resistance close to non-existent. Obviously Maxey and Harden are mostly one-way guys, but the supposedly good defenders have also been unreliable over this stretch: Tucker is creaky, Thybulle is mistake-prone, Melton is moveable, and even Embiid seems to take quarters off every so often. The Sixers have scored at least 110 points in each of the last 15 games, but they've also let up at least 110 points in 13 of those; as a result, they've seen their once-mighty third-ranked defense plummet all the way to fifth.
Wait, what? This team has been derelict on defense for at least a full month now, how the hell are they still top five in the league? It's confounding, but as Spike and Mike discussed on last night's pod... there really isn't much defense being played anywhere right now. It's probably some combination of offenses being too potent, reffing being too stifling, and the regular season simply being too meaningless -- even if you were capable of playing defense at an elite level in January, there might not be much point in expending the effort. The Sixers might not be stopping anyone right now, but other teams are proving even worse at stopping them. That might just be the way you win basketball games in January 2023.
3. Their schedule has been mid-'70s Olivia Newton-John soft.
No argument here. The Sixers had a tough road for the first couple months schedule-wise, but the driving has been about as smooth and frictionless as you could possibly ask for over the last 20-game stretch -- mostly at home, mostly against teams around or under .500, mostly without the weird clumps of back-to-backs or inexplicably long breaks between games that we kept getting in November. And, in fact, many have pointed out that the team's remaining slate of games is the toughest in the league (by strength-of-schedule at least) for the rest of the season, meaning that the next couple months may ultimately give us a much better sense of just how much this team can really hang with the dudes they'll be seeing in late April and May.
All fair. Not much for me to say here except to pull out the ol' "You can only win the games you have on the schedule in front of you" truism and to say that winning 16 games out of 20 is meaningful in the NBA pretty much regardless of who the opponents are. Plus, there were some decent wins in that 20 as well -- decisive Ws over the close-to-full-strength Knicks and Clippers on the road and the Pelicans at home, and a close-to-signature blowout performance against the Kings, who are somehow third in the West right now. Nothing that proves beyond a doubt that the Sixers are legit contenders, but enough to show that they're not total pretenders, either.
2. The regular season doesn't matter.
It's the problem underlining everything that's not just wrong with the Sixers, but with the entire NBA right now -- the regular season has been so thoughtlessly devalued that it's basically turned into one long extended preseason. It's particularly true for our Ballers, who really have not that much to play for right now: They're gonna get to the playoffs, probably with home court for a round or two, and then we'll see. But they're not gonna get the one seed this year -- as 2021 demonstrated, it might not matter much if they did -- and Joel's not gonna win the MVP. They can use these games to work stuff out with their rotations, their schemes and their chemistry, but they can't change their overall outlook: After a half-decade of Sixers teams of all shapes and sizes each flaming out around the exact time each spring, no amount of regular-season dominance (or even regular-season crappiness) is gonna convince us that this year is gonna be different, until this year actually ends up being different.
I still love the regular season Sixers -- still look forward to every game, still refuse to skip even a minute of garbage time in either direction. But can I get particularly excited about them in the big-picture sense when my gut still tells me it's gonna be two-and-out for them yet again this postseason? Even if I could, I wouldn't blame anyone else who couldn't. This is the NBA we've been given: 82 games of mostly meaningless prelude and then somewhere between a week and two months to prove your actual worth.
1. The team itself doesn't seem that excited.
I still think this is the biggest thing holding us back from getting particularly pumped about this Sixers squad. I was watching them on League Pass a few weeks ago, and for some reason during the halftime break, they played a compilation of Joel Embiid highlights with him either hyping up the home crowd or taunting the road crowd -- doing his little shimmies, gesturing dramatically with his arms, putting his hands up to his ears and smiling that big-ass, lil-stinker smile of his. And goddamn did it make for a stark contrast to not only the game that Embiid was then currently playing, but basically any Embiid performance this season.
In the past week, Joel hit a game-winning fadeaway jumper against the Jazz and put Lakers center Wenyen Gabriel in the rim with a monster dunk in back-to-back games. Both times, he responded by walking silently and sullenly away from the action, like he was still thinking about that play 10 possessions earlier where he set a pick for Tyrese thinking he was gonna drive left but instead he ignored him and drove right. It's been like that all season: Jo has turned into one of those Far Side cartoons about how to recognize your pet's mood by their facial expression, where every expression is the exact same expression. For whatever reason, the only real juice he's had all season has been for the MSG fans, giving them what-fer from the bench after checking out of the Knicks win on Christmas, and giving them a special shoutout when asked post-game on Wednesday about his L.A. dominance and reminding the TNT reporter that he historically kicks ass in Chicago and New York too.
The rest of the squad kinda follows Joel's emotional lead. There's nobody jumping off the bench after a big shot or thunderous dunk, no designated cheerleader giving the crowd the LET ME HEAR IT, no chest bumps or ass slaps dispensed on the court -- usually just polite, business-like exchanges of high fives or finger-points of recognition, if that. Harden and Tucker certainly aren't going to help in that department, and the rest of the team has mostly been around too long and seen too much; the only two guys likely to breathe life into this moribund bunch are Paul Reed and Tyrese Maxey, but Reed is out of the rotation and Maxey has been on the shelf, with his own rhythm to worry about since returning. At home games it's turned into a chicken/egg thing with the similarly unjazzed crowd, with both team and fans in position to credibly blame the other's lifelessness for their own.
Is Joel emotionally flat just because he recognizes, like the rest of us, that the regular season is a big bag of nothingness? Is it because he hates playing with Harden? Because he hates playing for Doc? Because he's sick of playing in Philly? Because he now believes that this team is a big bag of nothingness?? I've written about this (and debated it with Spike) before, and chances are we probably won't know for sure until we get to the postseason -- if then. In the meantime, it's still proving pretty hard for us to get hyped about a team who can't get hyped about themselves, especially when the identity of the team was once so wrapped up in Joel's chest-beating, dick-swinging extraness. If that guy shows up in the playoffs, though, I'm pretty confident we'll get there too.