Finally, A Loss That Ends the Sixers' Season Without Ending the Whole World With It

The Sixers lost and nothing matters. But this short postseason run still couldn't have been much more from the heart.

I've been pretty hard on Nick Nurse for his press conferences this season. I generally expected our new head coach to be a little goofier, a little nerdier, a little more entertainingly weird, a little more something. But every media availability he's been a part of has been similarly nothing, similarly bleh. Any time he's had a microphone in front of him, he's seemed to be on a mission to be as uninteresting as possible. Which, to be fair, is probably a good strategy: Being interesting as a head coach can really only make your life harder. But I'd hoped we'd get more memorable quotes or moments out of him this season than, y'know, zero. 

Well, it really must have been the final game of the season, because we finally got a couple on Thursday night. Asked pre-game about the themes of the series, Nurse summed up the back-and-forth between the two teams with uncharacteristically raw accuracy: "I've decided nothing matters. They kill us on the glass, it goes down to the buzzer. We kill them on the glass, it goes down to the buzzer. Joel scores 50, it goes down to the buzzer. Brunson scores 47, it goes down to the buzzer.” Then, post-game, he was asked about the difference in the series and offered a similarly frill-less response: "Well, i’m not sure there was much difference. I mean, I think they hit a couple shots at the end is the difference.”

Gotta say, even if Coach might've been mentally stuck in his most recent Metallica jam session while offering that answer, he kinda nailed it. The Sixers and Knicks played six games of exhaustingly back-and-forth basketball: Game Six was the first time either team led by more than 15 points all series, and just a quarter after leading by 22, the Knicks were once again trailing. One team would do some stuff that worked for a while, then the other team would do some stuff that worked for a while. Any time either team threatened to reach escape velocity, they were pulled back down to earth as if by gravity itself. Superlative individual performances, team-wide defensive strategies and role players either stepping up or going invisible all played parts, but at the end of the day they basically all kinda canceled each other out. Nothing really Mattered. Except that with everything zeroed out at the end, the Knicks hit a couple shots. And that was the difference. 

The Sixers lost in the first round this year, in six games, on their home floor. Those are the facts, and for many Sixers fans they will be the only facts of importance. Even those of us who will take less of a hardline stance on the matter do have to acknowledge that the outcome is objectively disappointing. It's been seven years of early playoff exits and this is now the second-earliest one yet; with Joel Embiid now on the other side of 30, the Sixers will only have so many chances left at winning a title -- or at least getting within a round of competing for one -- and this now goes down as another one squandered. The Knicks are a very good team but they are not the likely Eastern Conference favorites; we could have beaten them and then had a very good chance of getting through the Pacers in the conference semis to likely face off once more with Boston in the third round. Instead, we're already planning for the offseason. Again. Brutal. 

But if you feel just a little less doom and gloom from the fanbase around the early exit this year, I think there's a good reason for that. For the first time since the loss to the Raptors in 2019, the Sixers faced down a very good team and never once quit against them. Their stars showed up and showed out -- not in every game, and not necessarily for every quarter, but enough to generally leave the series looking handsome. They didn't come through with the W often enough, but you never felt stupid just for believing that they could. And while the season is now over, for once, that feels like the only thing that's over -- not the Sixers' window, or the entire Process, or our ability to ever love this team again. The Sixers lose, but this time, the world goes on.

And for that, I think we can once again thank Tyrese Maxey's heroic effort on Tuesday night first and foremost. If the Sixers had gone out in that Game Five, I think the tenor of the conversation around the team's exit would have sounded pretty different. To get just one game in what felt like a dead-even series, with Embiid spiraling into what was easily the worst performance of his postseason, and have that be the enduring memory for the entire offseason... Maybe we could've all gotten through it -- lord knows we've gotten through plenty already -- but the potential was there for true ugliness. And most discouragingly, the echoes of recent other postseason defeats would've just been too loud to ignore, putting to bed any notion that this year had been in any meaningful way different. Same script, slightly different cast. It could have been back-breaking. 

Instead, after Maxey's historic flurry saved the season in regulation and the entire team finished the job in overtime, the Sixers got to live another day, and write a slightly less gut-wrenching end to the year's story. Embiid was gifted a chance to bounce back from his shit showing and did -- both with his superior play in that OT period in Game Five, and then throughout Game Six, where he put up 39 points and 13 rebounds, and generally directed things for the Sixers on both ends of the floor. It wasn't a perfect performance by any means -- he turned the ball over six times and got a little too passive late as Jalen Brunson took the game over for New York -- but it was still much closer to the kind of typical performance we're accustomed to from the reigning MVP, a significantly less sour note to end the series on. 

The same can't really be said for Tyrese Maxey, unfortunately: He had just 17 points on 6-18 shooting, never finding the right rhythm in the half court and missing badly on a lot of his long-range attempts. As the Sixers' lead started to balloon to double digits in the second half, it felt like we needed a Tyrese mini-heater at some point to help us pull away -- but it never quite came, and the Knicks were always able to eat at the deficit and get back into the game. Still, he had two absolutely enormous and-ones late in the fourth to keep the Knicks from putting the final stake through Franklin's heart -- including one on a hair's-length goaltending that tied the game with half a minute to go -- and generally continued battling on both ends until the final buzzer. It wasn't a game to remember from our young star, but it's not one we'll have to work extra hard to forget, either. 

And when you average out the performances of Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey from this series, you know what you see? An MVP-caliber superstar and a perfect rising co-star. Embiid: 33 points, 11 rebounds and six assists a game, on 44/33/86% shooting splits. Maxey: 30 points, five rebounds and seven assists a game, on 49/40/89% shooting. And this was of course in their first year as real co-stars, with Embiid both badly hobbled after already missing half the season, and Maxey stepping into a full-time lead guard role for the first time at just 23 years of age. This initial run for the two hardly went perfectly, but it was still a pretty clear proof of concept that Joel and Tyrese can make a pretty devastating 1-2 combo for some time still to come. 

We Finally Got a Miracle

Beyond that... well, that's the question isn't it? The reason I've already talked so much about Embiid and Maxey without even mentioning the name of a single other player on the Sixers yet is because we don't really know if any of these other guys matter for the team's future or not. The Sixers could have max cap space this summer, as well as some decent draft assets to work with, and while there are guys on the roster I'm sure the Sixers would like to retain, not a single one of them is definitely coming back next year. And that's particularly relevant, because if there was something that did Matter in this series, it was that despite having two of the three best players for pretty much the entirety of it, we still often felt at a talent deficit, because the Knicks' three through seven guys were so much stronger (literally and figuratively) than ours. 

I don't want to get too deep into the offseason mud here -- and shoutout to BBall Paul here after possibly his last game as a Sixer, as his contract becomes non-guaranteed with the Sixers' first-round exit, while his play in the last four games of the series likely leaves Nick Nurse and Daryl Morey feeling none too protective about keeping him around. But if I can offer one thought to Daryl, it would be this: If you look at the areas where the Sixers were most at a disadvantage in this series -- toughness, rebounding, athleticism, size, secondary play-making, general play-finishing -- they are not generally best addressed by adding one high-priced catch-and-shoot wing already in his mid 30s. Just saying. 

In any event, the Sixers' season ultimately swung on one Knicks non-star player -- somewhere between their second and fourth option, kinda hard to tell -- getting the ball open beyond the arc, and lifting up and hitting the triple. It was the shot we'd dared Josh Hart to take all series, and more often than not, he'd taken it and drained it. Hart isn't generally the kind of player you build championship teams around, but he's the kind of player that every championship team has, and also the kind that the Sixers have historically been in short supply of. The Sixers weren't totally bereft of those types of players in this series: Nicolas Batum, Kelly Oubre Jr., Kyle Lowry, Cam Payne and (for exactly one quarter, anyway) Buddy Hield were all instrumental in keeping the Sixers afloat for stretches, and I'd be happy to see at least a couple of them back next season. But it felt like we had to ask each of them to do a little too much, like they were all slotted one or two spots too high on the Sixers' depth chart for comfort. 

And as you no doubt already know if you've read on this far, there's a fairly specific reason for that, and its name is Tobias Harris. I don't want to be too hard on Tobias, either for the game or for the series -- he tried, he really did, and in Game Five he made a number of plays early and late without which we would not even have been close enough to be rescued by the Maxey Miracle. But even at his best, Tobias was just never what we needed him to be at either his salary or for his No. 3 spot on the team hierarchy, and for him to go out in his final game as a Sixer with zero points on two shots... when he does sign elsewhere this summer, the cheering from Sixers fans will be like Bricken for Chicken just won them each their own individual Chik-Fil-A franchise. It's not totally fair to Tobais, who was never less than a good soldier here, but sadly there are few combinations in sports less sympathetic than being expensively ineffective and uninspiring, and whatever money remains from his $180 million contract will unfortunately be the lone legacy he leaves Philadelphia with. 

Letting Tobias walk will be the easy part of the offseason, but the rest will be hard, and it is on Daryl Morey to figure out what it must consist of to get the Sixers through to the next level. Morey -- and by extension, the whole team -- was offered a little leeway this season as it functioned in effect like a gap year for the franchise, following the Harden trade with the Clippers, with the great majority of their money set to come off the books this summer, at which point we'd also get some draft picks freed up and finally get some room to move around in free agency and on the trade market. Morey declined to make any big moves at the trade deadline, and this upcoming offseason -- combined with the time missed by Embiid due to injury -- was the implicit reason why. Hell, we even have the No. 16 pick in the draft this summer, easily the highest we've had since we took Mikal Bridges for 45 seconds in 2018. The possibilities for this summer are numerous and exciting. 

Still, that's all they are: possibilities. For the four years he's been here, Morey has only made two truly big moves as the team's president of operations: Trading for James Harden, and then trading away James Harden. Aside from that, it's been a lot of lateral trades, signings on the margins, and drafting for depth -- with one obvious, Mike Muscala-prompted, 21st-selected exception who still serves as Morey's trump card to all the You Haven't Done Nothin' accusations. This is all to say that this summer, the pressure will really be on him to make good on the room he's made, the assets he's accrued and the patience he's preached -- because not only are we out of excuses with this era of Sixers basketball, but we'll be out of time before you know it. Embiid is already 30, and as we've seen this year with the rises of teams led by Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Anthony Edwards and Tyrese Haliburton along with the falls of squads led by Kevin Durant, Steph Curry and LeBron James, the NBA is once again becoming a young man's game. (Also worth mentioning that the Knicks having a core in their 20s where the Sixers relied mostly on guys in their 30s was another thing that certainly may have Mattered in this series.)

But while the Sixers are of course on the clock, there does once again seem to be a real future with this team, in a way that was pretty hard to see after their past couple years of being eliminated. It's the difference between hoping and planning. Last year, we were hoping things somehow worked out uncatastrophically with the Harden situation; this year, we have cap space and picks we've gotten by dealing him to actually rebuild our team with this summer. Last year, we were hoping Maxey would be able to make the leap to stardom; this year, he's already made it, and it's just a question of watching him further mature and develop and blossom and smile from here. Last year, we were hoping Embiid would have the patience to stick it out during one of the most unsettled periods the franchise has had since drafting him; this year, reports say Maxey's emergence means Embiid is locked in and no longer questioning whether Philly is the place for him moving forward. Last year, we were hoping we could find a way to stomach ever even thinking about this team again; this year, I dunno about you but I'm already kinda itching to get started. 

Limited Edition 'The Year' Stateside Bottle

If there is one thing with this team and this seventh straight playoff exit that's a little hard for me to get past, it's quite simply that they could have won it and they still lost it. Not a particularly grand epiphany there, I know, but with all the positives we can take from this series, with all the excuses -- legitimate or eh -- that we can offer as to why, the difference in the series is still what Nick Nurse says it was: They hit a couple shots that we didn't. If this was Year One or even Year Two or Three of this run you could write that off pretty easily -- shit happens, make-or-miss league, probably the refs' fault because they hate us -- but in Year Seven of the Embiid-led Sixers being playoff caliber, it feels a little more personal. Why does the shit always seem to happen to us? If it's a make-or-miss league, what does it say that the other team seems to always make the shots that we miss? If not a single one of these seeming coin-flip series has ever gone our way, then maybe we're not even flipping a two-sided coin in the first place. Maybe we already have enough evidence to think, whether through deep-seated character flaws or a bunch of forever-ornery cosmic forces we upset long ago, it's just never gonna come up our way. 

Maybe. But enough did feel different about this year -- notably, demonstrably, crucially different -- that I think I'm already willing to give this thing at least one more good-faith shot, to see it through at least one more season. Maxey's emergence means that not only has the Sixers' window been kept from shutting, it's arguably more open than it's been since Ben Simmons' second or third season. The big-picture worry with Embiid was always if he (or any true big man) could hold up through four playoff series as the top late-game offensive option, but with Maxey already being where he is offensively, the answer may be that Embiid doesn't even have to. If he can stay healthy-ish and on the floor, there's a world -- maybe not all that far away, even -- where he can downshift on offense to more of a second option, setting screens and popping out for threes like late-Miami Chris Bosh rather than having to run everything through him in the post 50 times a game, as he channels his energy more towards defense and rebounding and keeping the team connected. That's a crazy thing to say about a two-time scoring champ who scored 70 in a game this season, but that's also how good Maxey is already on offense, and how much better we have every reason to expect him still to get. 

And the most important thing is that even with all their inevitable frustration over having lost this Knicks series, Maxey and Embiid can still look at each other and go all right, we really got something here. Both succeeded individually in crucial moments and failed in others, but on the whole they made beautiful music with one another, without ever totally letting the other down or giving the other implicit permission to let go of the rope, as both Simmons and Harden had done for Embiid during past runs. Rather, Maxey picked up Embiid in Game Five, and Embiid returned the favor in Game Six. It wasn't enough for the team, but it should hopefully be enough for the two of them -- a shared experience for them to build on, to grow from, to ultimately be more inspired than discouraged by. 

All this said, of course I would much rather be coming to your email inboxes and Twitter feeds this Friday morning talking about how great it is that we won rather than how not-so-terrible it is that we lost. We only get so many chances at this thing, and while the future feels much brighter currently than the Gesaffelstein-at-Coachella darkness that followed the last few postseason exits, no team is ever promised a future in the NBA. Embiid should be healthier next year, but there's also a world where he's never even this healthy again, where the Sixers compromise or kick the can again with their activity this summer, where Tyrese plateaus as a No. 2 option without ever totally convincing as a No. 1. Someday, an opportunity wasted will be the last one the Sixers get in this era. That day could be right now. You never know. 

Still, when we first talked about it being The Year on the Ricky -- back in November, when Joel was healthy, the Sixers were on an early winning streak, and I was still on an idyllic Greek vacation with my girlfriend, rather than on my couch at 3:00 in the morning pounding Dr. Pepper so that the stomach ache will keep me awake long enough to finish writing -- Spike qualified that it being The Year did not necessarily mean winning the championship, or really even winning anything, It was about getting to the finish line of the season and being able to say, "Our guys did what they could." That Embiid and Maxey didn't let us or each other down. That it felt different than all those other shitty playoff runs that ended with us feeling like chumps for giving a shit in the first place. And even though those themed Stateside Vodka bottles are probably looking a little too ironic right now, I do think that this playoff run qualifies. It was an awesome first-round series with multiple classic games, which even non-fans of the two teams will still remember fondly decades from now. The Sixers showed up. The Sixers showed out. We were wrong about them winning, but not wrong to believe they could. 

It was The Year. We have reason to believe Next Year will be, too. We're so close, no matter how far. And nothing else Matters, really. 

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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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