It's Time to Get Excited About These Sixers (Or Not)

Maybe nothing matters during the regular season. But if any of it does matter, it did against Denver on Saturday.

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. 

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Thinking back on Saturday's game against the Nuggets, it's wild how much of it we spent thinking -- very reasonably, I'd say -- that this was going to be the game that kept us from really getting excited about the Sixers. The team looked out of their depth for most of the first half, unable to hang with the Nuggets' livewire offense or expose the gaps in their defense, while Joel Embiid tried to get Nikola Jokic in foul trouble early and instead ended up in his own head. Even after Embiid and James Harden rallied the team to start the third and cut the Nuggets' halftime lead of 15 all the way down to four by just three minutes in, Denver's sparkling execution and Philly's shoddy perimeter defense ballooned the lead right back to 15 with two and a half minutes to go in the quarter. A lot of Delco-area folks probably turned their attention to their last-second tailgating checklist for Eagles-Niners on Sunday at that point. Hard to blame them. 

With hopes and expectations for this Sixers team getting higher and higher throughout their recent six-game winning streak, we really couldn't have asked for a more appropriate time for reality to layeth the smacketh down on us. OK, yes, the Sixers are a good regular-season team again, but c'mon -- their defense is a joke, they've barely beaten anyone real, and you know you're still never going to trust them in a big game down the stretch. And of course, at the center of it all was Embiid and rival center/teacher's pet Jokic: the guy who beat him for MVP two years running, who always seems to find a way to one-up him in last night's box score, and who has the reputation for keeping his composure during big games (and making the big plays during Winning Time) that has eluded Joel for most of his career. For however much good we'd accomplished in a stretch that encompassed 19 wins in 23 tries, it felt like this game might end up being one big "Yeah, so?" dismissal of all of it. 

But against all odds and gravity, the Sixers flipped the game from "Yeah, so?" to "So... yeah." They made the plays they needed to on defense, Embiid went semi-nuclear in the late third and fourth, and it was actually Jokic who ended this one helpless on D and coughing up the ball with inexcusable sloppiness (and regularity) in the final minutes. The come-from-behind win ended up basically filling every missing item from their regular-season resumé at once: It gave them a win over a contending team at (close enough to) full health, a playoff-style win in the national spotlight on daytime ABC, and one where their best players dragged them over the finish line in heroic, our-best-is-better-than-your-best fashion. Embiid even seemed to be enjoying himself again. Outside of beating the Celtics in Boston while Al Horford misses a key layup and Paul Reed punts Marcus Smart into the scoreboard, it's hard to imagine what a more satisfying and meaningful regular season win would look like for this team. 

And so, after a long and oft-sludgey first three months of the regular season that left many of us still mostly unmoved, I can now officially say: It is time to put your fears aside and once again get excited about the Sixers. Unless you don't want to, which is also cool. 

Basically, I think it comes down to this: This game mattered, and this game makes a difference -- but only if you're willing to believe that anything that happens in the regular season matters or makes a difference, at least as far as the playoffs go. I've been beating the Regular Season Doesn't Mean Anything drum all season and will continue to do so, because that's the way the league and most of the players are treating it, and because we've seen too many Sixers regular seasons end the same way in the playoffs to be able to expect different until different transpires. The Sixers seem very good right now -- it is #SixersJanuary after all -- but in a season where few teams are ever at full strength night-to-night and stars like Joel openly admit that this is all basically just an extended tuneup before the playoffs, it's hard to speak with confidence on who's actually good and who isn't. If I had to bet on which round we're eliminated in the postseason I'd probably still say second.

But if you think meaning is discoverable during the regular season, that Saturday game would certainly be a big red X on the map. It was the kind of statement win that was missing from the Sixers' season post-Harden acquisition last year -- they had some nice Ws against borderline playoff teams or good teams down a few key players, but whenever they had to square off against a real contender at full strength, they came up lacking. And they certainly didn't have a win where Embiid simply outdueled one of his fellow superstar MVP candidates to drag the Sixers to victory; if this game had happened last season, I really think it might've changed the vote's final outcome. (It might still have something to say about this year's race, too, but I’m not ready to get too caught up in that again just yet.) 

It was a potentially meaningful win for smaller reasons, too. It showed that Harden can continue to impact winning at the highest level without needing to take over games as a scorer. It showed that Doc is capable of making mid-game schematic adjustments, and that PJ Tucker (and perhaps even Matisse Thybulle) will have a use in the playoffs, even if he’s overexposed when given big minutes during the regular season. It showed that Tobias Harris can go scoreless for a half and still show up when we need him most. Hell, it showed that the WFC, mostly dead all year, can still come through in full force when given proper cause to do so. As much as the game was headlined by Embiid's superlative performance, it was also just a game that made you feel like we have the guys we need to get this thing done. (Montrezl Harrell not included.) 

And speaking of the rest of the team -- to get a big win this way potentially felt more significant for coming directly after a big game that we won with Embiid not playing particularly well. The Nets aren't the Nuggets, particularly with Kevin Durant hurt, but they're still a dangerous team with plenty of reason to want to show up against us, and with a greater ability to cause Joel problems with their long and rangy frontline of Nic Claxton and Ben Simmons, their ability to switch, and their ability to distract Embiid via his all-consuming desire to give Simmons the RIP Bozo treatment on every single half-court possession. But even with Jo taken largely out of his game, they still pulled out a mostly convincing win, with their guards stepping up offensively and the rest of the team contributing just enough on defense to keep Brooklyn at bay. The Sixers are going to have to pull out both kinds of wins to go far in the playoffs -- games where Embiid fully takes over, and games where the rest of the roster picks up his slack -- so it was encouraging to see them pick up one of each in big spots this past week. 

Ultimately, though, if you read all of this and still roll your eyes at the suggestion that anything is actually different about this team than we thought a week ago, that's fair. I imagine plenty of Sixers fans simply can't get excited about this team until they are undeniably headed towards playing in a playoff series that does not include the qualifiers "quarter-" or "semi-" in their title, and I get it. It's not our fault that the NBA has devalued the regular season to the point that it's basically just 82 games of open practice for the playoffs, or that the latter ends up being our lone relevant barometer for how a player’s or team’s season is remembered. And I remember thinking that I'd seen everything that I needed to see from the Sixers as a contender after their Christmas 2020 blowout over Milwaukee; we all probably recall how that year turned out.

It's fine if you can't get excited for the regular-season Sixers at this point for any reason. If you think you might have it in you though, now would be the time to get started. It might be a long while till we get another regular season game that gives us everything we always hoped to see from this team and its best player, and there's only two games left in #SixersJanuary.