Embiid and Simmons Being Awesome Again Is More Important Than the Sixers' Current Issues

Everything is gonna be fine.

[Photo: @Sixers]

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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Many a morning during the 2018-19 Sixers campaign would begin with me in the office of FOTB Jason Lipshutz, unloading my many fears about the season and how it might end. Especially in the wayward days leading up to the first-round series against the Nets -- and especially after that disastrous Game One -- I would gesticulate wildly and get vocally pinched up to my whistle register fretting about the Sixers. How poorly they defended shooty combo guards, how dumb they were to have included Landry Shamet in the Tobias Harris trade, how the fan booing was exacerbating an already-growing team-wide discontent, etc. 

And every time, Jason would remain calm, and offer some smiling variation of the same response: “Here’s the thing -- I think they’re gonna be fine.” 

In the moment, it just made me nuttier. “What could it possibly take for things not to be fine??” I yelled at him on multiple occasions. But Jason was right: The team was going to be fine. They came back to smoke the Nets in four consecutive, then took the eventual champs to the brink in a close-to-even seven-game series. There were flaws, certainly, and those might’ve ultimately been the difference between them making it past the second round and them being left Googling “magnetic rims” all June. But they weren’t the kind of crippling foundational flaws that render rosters unable to truly compete at the higher level. The team was actually really good.

Can probably guess where I’m going with this, but yeah: This year, and this month particularly, I find myself just kinda shrugging when the Sixers go through as rough a stretch as they’ve gone through since plastering Milwaukee on Christmas. Even with the piss-poor effort during (and collar-tugging locker room quotes following) the game in Indiana, I find myself unable to muster any legitimate panic or outrage. And the biggest reason why is because the only thing I was really worried about with this team isn’t such an issue anymore. 

There was no way around it in October and November: Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons were having a majorly disappointing start to the season. If you squinted at the stats from a certain angle you could maybe argue that their overall showing wasn’t as bad as it seemed, but it seemed pretty bad -- Simmons wasn’t shooting or scoring, and Embiid felt like he was leaking productivity, efficiency and overall gusto as he struggled to play himself into both physical and spiritual game shape. I wondered if I’d overrated both of their ceilings, if Joel in particular was simply unlikely to ever resemble the consistently MVP-caliber two-way force I’d always figured nothing but his own body was standing in the way of him becoming. I feared maybe those Clippers/Wizards comparisons weren’t as dumb as we thought they were.

But then December came, and go figure: Turns out both are still pretty righteous. Simmons still isn’t shooting -- it may be a point of pride by now -- but he’s attacking the basket with both a new ferocity and finesse, upping his scoring from 11.9 PPG on 52% FG in November to 16.2 PPG on 60% FG in December. He’s not exactly matching Brett Brown’s eight-FTs-a-game challenge, but he is getting to the line significantly more -- up to 5.5 FTAs per game from just 3.4 last month. He’s also at 8.7 assists a game this month, raising his season total to a career-high 8.5, and his leading the league straight out in steals per game with his 2.2. Hard to let concerns go over him still not doing all the things you want him to, but December Ben has been the best-case version of the old Buzz Bin maxim: If you don’t expect too much from him, you might not be let down.

And Embiid has simply been all-world. For December, he’s 25 and 13 in a cool 32 minutes a game on 50/38/86 shooting splits. He’s got more assists than turnovers, he’s been unkind on defense, and he’s submitted signature performances this month against the Bucks, Celtics and Heat -- even though a couple late fumbles in the latter sadly prevented a 3-0 sweep in those games. After improbably debuting as the lowest-listed Sixers starter in ESPN’s first RPM rankings of the season, he’s back up to 14th overall now, highest on the whole team. For all of our ack-ing (and all the TNT crew’s insincere ball-busting) about JoJo’s early-season drudgery, he closes the 2019 calendar year averaging his highest PER, TS%, WS/48 and BPM of his career. He is once again as vast, beautiful and overwhelming as the ocean. 

These aren’t the only things that matter with the Sixers, of course. It matters if the team falls to the sixth seed, though I believe they’ll at least wind up top four (and while the top tier of the East is better than it was last year, I don’t think there’s one team as good as the champion Raptors were). It matters if Al Horford is actually as washed and disgruntled as he’s looked and sounded the past few weeks, though I still suspect a lot of both just stems from missing shots that he usually makes. It matters if the locker room is fracturing and slipping away from Brett’s grasp, though I bet a couple good wins against Houston and OKC and the sniping quotes become a quickly distant memory.

A lot of things are going wrong with the Sixers right now, but I think they’re still well within the realm of the natural swings of a long regular season, rather than signs of the team spiraling out or simply not being good enough. There were four games that have truly mattered for the Sixers this season -- the first home games against Miami and Milwaukee, and the first road games in Toronto and Boston -- and the Sixers are 3-1 in those games, with two of the wins being smackdowns and the one loss coming down to the final minute. We’ve seen how formidable this team at its best is, and with Embiid and Simmons once again playing up to their highest levels, there just isn’t a team in the East that scares me in the playoffs. 

I’ve seen a number of comparisons between this year’s Sixers and last year’s Cus Crisis Celtics -- the high expectations, the on-court awkwardness, the upsetting unpredictability. I don’t see it though: The toxicity of that squad stemmed from its nominal No. 1 guy being a What’s With Today Today agent of galaxy-brain chaos, and several of its core players being in walk years, neither of which are the case with Philly. To me, it’s more like the Celtics of ‘09-’10 -- the year the C’s added a post-prime Rasheed Wallace, half-hearted their way through an extremely lumpy 50-win regular season, then tore through the East (including LeBron’s final Cleveland Mk. 1 squad) on the way to taking the Lakers the distance in the finals, because no one on their side of the bracket could hang with their overall talent and experience. 

Of course, that Celtics team already had a championship to their name, as well as three star vets well on their way to the Hall of Fame. The Sixers probably can’t boast the latter and certainly can’t claim anything near the former, which should make them less amenable to mid-season sleepwalking, at least in theory. Meh. I’m not claiming that viewing the entire regular season the way Shaq viewed free-throw shooting is an advisable approach for this squad -- I just think it’s one they can survive, particularly if it gets everyone to Game 82 healthy and hearty. In the playoffs, how high your ceiling is simply matters more than how low your floor is. 

I’m aware I might be looking at this all selectively, that a lot of things could deteriorate over the next month or two to make me look especially naive to be freaking out this little, and that a blowout win at home against Miami doesn’t inherently mean more about a team’s true nature than a blowout loss on the road against Indiana. But I’ve just seen too much of what I needed to see from this team and its best players. Read as much as you want into our struggles against Orlando, but we’re not playing them in the playoffs, and if we did it’d probably look a lot like the Brooklyn series last year. I’m not falling for it again. I think they’re gonna be fine.