If I were a fan of the Philadelphia 76ers, I know that I would've already checked out on this season. No one needs this shit! People have lives to live, real priorities, existential matters for the pondering, perfectly blank expanses of painted drywall to stare into while sobbing. Then again, my hoops fandom is weak from decades of malnourishment. Perhaps true 76ers fans—people who've tasted success and grown accustomed to their team's general relevance—are meaningfully better built for enduring such a preposterous first half of the season. Already these people have seen their team lose 14 of its first 17 games, and then win 10 of its next 13 games, and then immediately lose 10 of 12. Not too long ago this team had credible championship aspirations, and now they are this sputtering, lurching, ramshackle mess. Given the condition of their roster, it would require Saint Maud levels of magical thinking to believe this will ever get better; a person capable of such belief is someone with whom I would not want to share an elevator.
It would be a mercy if just one more key 76er found some pretext for missing a month of basketball, so that these poor bozos could finally spiral down the standings and remove all uncertainty about what's to come. Instead, they are once again winning just enough basketball games to stay gripped onto the butt of the entirely sad Eastern Conference play-in pack. Wednesday night, the 76ers rolled out a comically underwhelming rotation of healthy players and managed to outlast the visiting Sacramento Kings, giving them an improbable fourth consecutive win and putting them into a tie for the East's 10th seed. Nick Nurse and Tyrese Maxey have the Sixers hanging on for dear life; lately the team is depending, for whole big chunks of time and production, upon the likes of Guerschon Yabusele, Adem Bona, and 35-year-old Reggie Jackson. And doing some winning! They pretty well crushed the healthy Lakers on Tuesday while starting Eric damn Gordon and giving 18 shots and 39 minutes to Kelly damn Oubre. Yesterday they hammered Sacramento's reserves with bench lineups that got their scoring punch from former two-way contract guy Ricky Council IV.
The 76ers are now two games into a six-game homestand; the schedule is about to stiffen, but also Joel Embiid is closing in on a return from his one jillionth extended injury absence. Embiid has recently been working out with the team's second unit, and doing handstands in practice; he took shots out on the floor before Wednesday's game. There's some hope he may suit up for Friday's tilt against the Denver Nuggets, although no one would be surprised if the 76ers elected to spare him from the toughest positional matchup the sport has to offer and instead brought him back Sunday to face the banged-up Celtics. It'll be a tough run of games, but they'll have a chance to claw up the standings—or at least to claw the standings back toward them—with upcoming games against the Miami Heat and the Detroit Pistons, two play-in outfits within Philadelphia's general shouting distance. There's a very decent chance the 76ers could head into the break still on their present upswing.
Depending upon your outlook, that is either encouraging to think about or absolutely infuriating. It's hard to know what is the more sensible thing for a fan to root for. The broadcast of Philadelphia's Tuesday win over the Lakers shared a breathtaking statistic: Embiid has played 446 regular-season games in his career, and has missed a whopping 400 (now 401) regular-season games due to injuries. Those numbers are warped a lot by the two entire years Embiid missed at the start of his career, but the big man is just never entirely healthy. This will be the second consecutive season in which Embiid participates in fewer than 50 regular-season games. Forget about how this skews his legacy or affects awards races; it's all but impossible to run out a consistent winner when your best player misses 40 percent of every season. This season the team is far enough behind, due largely to Embiid's fitness and persistent unavailability, to seriously consider a switch to tank mode, and it's not even February.
But they are also not in a great position to move into tank mode very decisively, at least in the short term. They have too much talent, even sans Embiid, to suck anywhere near the level of the Portland Trail Blazers, to say nothing of the Charlotte Hornets, and even if they could Utah Jazz their way to a real sustained run of losses, they can't get into the game with a Washington Wizards team that is currently posting its second 15-plus-game losing streak of the season. Maxey alone is too good and too reliable for that scene; frankly, Yabusele would be the best and proudest competitor on Washington's roster today. But there's some real incentive to stay down in the dregs: Philadelphia's first-rounder in the 2025 draft goes to Oklahoma City if it falls outside of the top six of the draft order, and the team has no second-round picks. Right now, with the eighth-worst record in the NBA, Philadelphia has a combined 26.2 percent chance of securing a top-four pick, but no chance whatsoever of landing the fifth or sixth pick, which means the likeliest outcome, without further wheeling and dealing, has the team not able to draft anyone at all in June. Missing the playoffs and also not participating at all in the NBA draft is the kind of thing that will send a true Process stan into paroxysms of disgust.
Almost by default, a Sixers fan has to hope that this miserable sadsack of an underperforming team can defy the odds in the other direction. The good news is, when Embiid is healthy and in Destroyer of Worlds mode, any team he's on is capable of beating the hell out of any other team in basketball. It's also just morally better—a better thing to send out into the universe, for the pseudoscientifically inclined—to root for your guys to stay afloat than to throw up your hands and start fishing around in the toilet for the uncertain rewards stashed down there by the NBA's reverse draft incentives. There's a timeline out there where Embiid is healthy for the next 36 games, and the Sixers charge up the standings; in this timeline they catch a catastrophically exhausted Knicks team in the opening round of the playoffs, and then a somewhat light-in-the-trunks Celtics team in the second round, and all of a sudden Embiid looks like an asteroid and everything in his path looks like whatever pathetic amoebozoa was blinking up into space at the precise moment and spot that the Vredefort crater was formed. That would be legitimately cool for basketball, if also unendurably foul for Knicks fans. With a couple of other Eastern Conference outfits scratched off the interesting list by even worse injuries, it's helpful to remember that the 76ers have at least some hope of becoming healthy.
The 76ers are on another little upswing, amid a period of terrible chaos and at the halfway mark of a season that is beginning to look like a painful inflection point. Every little winning streak moves them closer to relevance but makes them more vulnerable to stall and heartbreak; every losing streak is a shovelful of dirt onto the ambitions of the Process era, but perhaps clears up a lot of angsty uncertainty about the team's future. Self-directed irrelevance may offend and ultimately disappoint as a team-building strategy, but at the emotional level, sometimes the stability and certainty of losing looks mighty appealing. I'm glad I don't have to live and die with this team. My team sucks shit and always will. The calculations are so much simpler this way.
