Is Jared McCain Gonna Make All This Worth It?

The Sixers are bad. But maybe life is good?

On Wednesday night, the Sixers lost to the still-undefeated Cleveland Cavaliers to move to 2-9 on the season. A season that started with championship aspirations has instead gotten locked in the East's basement, with the team still yet to play a single game featuring all three of their Joel Embiid / Tyrese Maxey / Paul George star trio. Notably, the Cleveland loss featured zero of the three, with Embiid ruled out of back-to-backs, Maxey rehabbing a busted hammy and George still working his way back from a bone bruise. It should have been the most depressing moment of a season that's already had fans eating cookie dough straight out of the tube since it started. Instead, it was probably the happiest Sixers fans have been since Maxey dragged Ben Stiller and Tracy Morgan to hell last May. 

Chances are you already know the reason why: Rookie Jared McCain, 16th pick of the 2024 NBA draft, went off for 34 points and 10 assists in his first career start, keeping the Sixers competitive through all four quarters in a game that should've been all over but the Chicken by the mid-third. McCain electrified the Wells Fargo Center crowd -- most of whom were actually rooting for the Sixers this time -- and not for the first time; he's been awesome since breaking out in the second half of the home loss to the Tobias-led Pistons (cursed phrase) and is seemingly only getting better. Whether he's the new Tyrese Maxey or simply the new Shake Milton may not yet be 100% decided, but the Sixers can be decently assured of one thing already: For the second time this decade, they got one with their late-first-rounder. 

It's exciting enough to make you wonder -- if it took this 2-9 start for us to really see what we had with McCain, has this all maybe actually been for the best? 

Tough to bright-side a start that has us with as many wins through 11 games as the Wizards and Raptors, but consider it this way: In a normal season, Jared McCain would probably still be fighting his way into the rotation right now. He was fully on the outs to start the year, only getting in garbage time during the home opener against Milwaukee and only getting spot minutes the next game in Toronto. Even in Phoenix, following back-to-back double-digit games against Detroit and Memphis, he didn't even crack three minutes; Paul George was back and McCain was still the low-man PT-wise. If we had a fully or even mostly stocked roster at this point -- hell, if we just had Maxey and a competitive squad around him -- we'd probably see McCain in some games and not in others. We'd be debating him vs. Eric Gordon. We might already be feeding him to the Trade Machine. 

Instead, the ever-more-hospitalized Sixers have given McCain all the opportunity in the world, and he has seized it with all 10 painted fingers. Past performances could've been written off as stat-padding in already-decided games against second- and third-stringers, but 57 combined points on 42 combined shots in 68 minutes against the Knicks and Cavs -- two of the East's best, probably anyway -- is a lot harder to psshaw. He's hitting shots after a cold start from the outside, but more impressively, he's figuring out the mid-range, he's developing chemistry with teammates, he's (very occasionally) getting to the rim. He's also mixing it up on the boards, he's diving for loose balls, he's attempting to yam on them hoes. He has been excellent, he has been poised, he has been as joyous as Sabrina Carpenter's "Juno." He has been exactly what we needed to weather this hurricane of a start to the season. 

And he might be exactly what we need moving forward, too. Nick Nurse probably isn't taking out his black permanent marker and very dramatically and performatively scribbling McCain's name into the starting two-guard spot for the rest of the season -- there will be growing pains, and defensive concerns and rebounding and all that. But we will almost certainly continue to see him as our PG1 until Maxey returns in a week or two -- and hopefully his productivity as a lead guard also gives us a little extra breathing room to not have to push our Increasingly Mad Max to return before he's ready to. And then once Maxey is back, we'll almost certainly see a good amount of the two of them together -- maybe as co-starters, maybe just as time-sharers -- and we'll get ample opportunity to start developing a joint nickname for them. (The M+M Boys is an early frontrunner there but seems too obvious, I'm workshopping variations on the Splash Brothers but haven't totally gotten there yet.) 

BTW, as for a quarterback controversy between our two prodigious young guards -- I'm sure it'll come up among fans, because it always does, especially as Fake Trade season kicks into high gear, but I can't say I'm terribly worried about it between the two of them. With maybe literally any other young star guard in the Association aside from Tyrese, sure, but he is such a being of pure light -- even when these shitty-ass Sixers games push him into Dark Mode -- that I truly cannot imagine any amount of jealousy or animus between him and Jared; Maxey was going as nuts as anyone on the sideline when Jared's shooting night officially turned into a heater against New York on Tuesday. Watching them together is gonna be like The Muppets Take Broad Street. 

There is, of course, a part of me that wants to keep my guard up with Jared -- not because I'm worried this is all a mirage with him because fuck that let's go, but because a midseason deal with him is definitely not off the table yet. We need his energy and his exuberance, but probably not quite as much as we need, y'know, rebounding, and size, and perimeter toughness and championship experience or whatever it is that the Sixers always need in April and May but never quite have enough of. McCain making himself a hot number is great for the team in the on-court sense, but it's arguably just as valuable to the team in a trade-deadline sense, where he could be that undeniable blue-chipper in a deal for a guy who can be the difference-maker for the Sixers right now. It's undoubtedly the Grand Prix already with the wheels spinning in Daryl Morey's head. 

We can worry about all that when the time comes, but needless to say, it's a good problem to have -- and one we wouldn't even have considered having had this lane not opened by our impossibly shitty start to the season for McCain to come cruising through. If the full-strength Sixers go 12-3 in January while bombing 20 threes a game as Maxey and McCain co-star in their own original Disney+ series, this start is going to feel as distant as the 5-0 beginning to the Horf season. If we really did get another late-first-round steal like this -- without even the cursed involvement of Mike Muscala this time -- we won't remember the losing, the injuries, the overall miserableness. All we will remember from this first month will be Jared McCain smiling through it all, and us not believing that this is our life. 

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Andrew Unterberger 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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