Don't Worry About Who's in the Lineup

There is going to be a constant and patience-testing shuttling of players in and out of the Sixers' active roster this year. It's gonna be best not to think about it much.

I had a dream last night about Sixers opening night. It was midway through the first quarter, and the Sixers were shredding the Bucks early on the backs of an electric Tyrese Maxey and a steady Paul George -- both healthy enough to play and looking pretty good. But then Joel Embiid -- who I guess hadn't started the game, but was on the bench and technically available to play at some point -- got up from the sidelines and, trailed by a number of Sixers doctors and other employees, grimaced his way to the locker room. The announcers on the national broadcast bemoaned the Sixers' hot start being overshadowed by this discouraging development for the suddenly audibly anxious fans in attendance at the Wells Fargo Center. 

It's not surprising that my subconscious has been conditioned to expect this kind of in-game narrative from the Sixers already this season. That's basically been the story of the entire preseason, which showed us everything we wanted to see from the guys on the roster: Maxey looks like a world-beater, George looks like a perfect fit, Andre Drummond looks like an always-entertaining sidequest, Jared McCain looks like.... well, basically whatever you wanted and expected him to look like, since all positive and negative projections about him seem to somehow be simultaneously accurate. But the course of it played out like an Agatha Christie novel, where every so often you'd look around the room and notice that one guy had gone missing, then you'd stumble over their body in the study and find out to your horror that they'd been ruled out with a thumb contusion, or a hyperextended knee, or something with the word "pulmonary" in it. Ultimately, analyzing the preseason Sixers became like listening to jazz; you were watching more for the guys who weren't playing. 

This is no way to live. This is going to be (should be, anyway) an extremely fun season for the Sixers almost regardless of who's on the floor, and we can't (shouldn't, anyway) let our worries about who might be back in the locker room getting their gangrenous limbs amputated get in the way of that. This has got to be a year where we just decide to stop worrying about who's in the lineup on a game-to-game basis and learn to embrace the regular-season Sixers in any form they might take. 

This is rich coming from me, I know. Over the decades, I've worn out tracking pads and used up all my mobile data refreshing Twitter for updates about whether a questionable Joel Embiid would be suiting up for a Thursday night game against the Pelicans, praying he'd be a go. Other Sixers fans would at least lie to each other and themselves about wanting Joel Embiid to only play 60 games a year and perform outrage about him playing in games he didn't really need to; I could never even get that far. Even last year, when Embiid obviously looked a mess against Golden State and left the game looking a whole lot worse after Jonathan Kuminga picked up the 7-10 split on his lower limbs, I wasn't one of those many fans screaming "WHAT WAS HE DOING IN THE GAME IN THE FIRST PLACE???" If there was a chance of Joel Embiid playing, I always wanted him playing. I would always be distraught at anything else. 

But this year... well, I guess I can't promise I'll be OK with him sitting out until I see how I feel when we get to 6:30 before opening tip and he's still got that Q next to his name. But at the very least, I'm gonna give the lying to myself and to y'all thing a try. And not just with him: with Paul George, with Tyrese Maxey, with anyone else who might be in and out of the lineup this year. Because at the very least, this year I can acknowledge that this is just the way things are going to be, and it's fine. Well, not fine of course, but inevitable, and at least for the regular season, probably not overly consequential. 

The 2024 Sixers’ Preseason Playbook

It's gonna be a good team this year, and it's gonna be a fun team. We've got Tyrese, fresh off his first All-Star campaign and first taste of true playoff heroism, bound to take yet another big step towards superstardom. We've got PG, who's going to feel like a revelation every single time he pulls up for a stop-and-pop three; like the first time you ever heard two-finger tapping on a sick guitar solo. We've got Drummond, who's gonna mix a BBall Paul sense of total half-court anarchy with a very un-BBall rate of offensive rebounding. We've got McCain trying to be a Steph Curry/Jalen Brunson hybrid and always dancing on the borderline of transcendent and unplayable. We've got Eric Gordon hoisting from 28 feet with 17 left on the shot clock. We've got Guerschon Yabusele as our classic Spursy role player. We've got Kelly Oubre Jr as our classic One Extremely Non-Spursy Guy on a Spurs Team role player. We've got Reggie Jackson for reasons no one is entirely sure of yet. And when we do have him, we've got Joel Embiid, only maybe the best regular-season player in all of basketball. It's a real squad, for sure. 

But it's just not gonna be a full squad very often, and I think we need to be OK with that. It's gonna be less like a basketball roster and more like an extended high school group of friends -- maybe a handful of times throughout the schoolyear you get everyone together for the Friday night basement party, but more often than not, someone is off with their new significant other, someone's parents are taking them out of town, someone has a new video game or RPG or porn site they'd rather stay at home with. And depending on who is around, maybe you have to switch up the activities and the soundtrack accordingly, and that's fine. You'd always rather have everyone in the building, but being forced by available personnel into a different style of hang isn't always the worst thing. 

Especially because this year, I think we can weather a few absences -- even some important ones, even some extended ones. Tyrese Maxey has gotten to the point of offensive potency where him plus good role players can already be the recipe for a break-even team; Paul George maybe a little less so, but he's certainly capable of being a two-way fulcrum for games at a time. Then Tyrese plus PG is a better one-two than all but maybe a half-dozen teams in the league can claim, you could probably win 48 games in a season with just those two guys leading the way. We might not have all three of Tyrese, PG and Joel together in the lineup for more than 30 games total this year, but I think we could still win 50 games for the season like that. 

It's going to take some mindset adjusting. Joel in particular is going to probably miss a lot of games this year -- most likely including opening night, and maybe the next few after that -- for vague, shady, entirely unsatisfying reasons, the kind that in prior years would have sent us into an absolute spiral. I expect PG is gonna be out for weeks at a time too, maybe during stretches when it seems like the team is really starting to find its next gear with one another and all of a sudden we're right back to zero. We're not going to be able to avoid that this year -- the only thing we can hope to avoid is any injury designation that includes the phrase "out for the year." As long as those four words aren't in the mix, I expect to continue trucking along happily this regular season. 

And for the playoffs? Truly who the fuck knows. Certainly injuries and games missed will lower the ceiling for our regular-season win total, and thus perhaps get us into a postseason situation like last year where a lower seeding than our talent level would suggest dooms us to an impossibly treacherous playoff path. If so, we'll deal with that then -- but I do think this Sixers team is just better-equipped to play left-handed than last year's was, thanks to a true third star, a more easily substituted backup center (still miss you tho BBall) and a greater depth of both veteran role players and young energy guys. Maybe the East's overachieving upper-middle class of last year gets hit with a wave of regression to the mean and 48 wins gets you the four seed next year anyway. But the Sixers have approached the regular season from every which way over the past seven years and it hasn't really made a difference come playoff time; clearly, the main thing with getting through these next 82 games is just pure survival. 

And maybe getting Joel Embiid fully healthy to the postseason is all that really matters anyway -- as much as there even is such a thing left as a full healthy Joel Embiid -- and that whatever regular season hits we have to take in the name of getting him there as such will all be well worth it in the end. But after seven years of playoff disappointment, I'm really not even thinking about all that yet. I can't put all my stock in postseason success anymore; just figuring out a way to really enjoy the regular season is an equally important priority to me. And the way to do that this year is to just approach each game like you're showing up to a party where you're not even sure who's going to be in attendance, and any really familiar faces you see when you open the door are just kind of a pleasant surprise. If we're constantly checking back on the e-vite and refreshing the guest list ahead of time, it's gonna be a real long season. 

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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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