When I returned to cover the Sixers after traveling across the world for the first week and a half of the season, the sense of doom in this fanbase was palpable. They were ready to fire the head coach, were concerned the off-season additions weren’t good enough, and went though a “here we go again” moment with the star center, who began the season with fatigue, focus, and health problems.
That was mid-October. It's now early December, and the needle has moved very little for the full-strength (or at least close to full-strength) Sixers. The fanbase wants the coach fired, P.J. Tucker benched, for James Harden to be a guy he hasn’t been in a while, and for Embiid to stop hampering himself with the same mistakes he made as a wide-eyed rookie still learning the sport.
It has not helped that sports joy has flooded this city elsewhere. The Eagles are absolutely cruising right now, fresh off of one of their best performances of the season, and riding a quarterback who took any offseason doubts and crushed them with a monumental leap. A Phillies team fired the veteran coach with a big name and ended up making a storybook run to the World Series, their big-money player going on a heater for the ages to get them there. And the Sixers, well, they’ve mostly offered fleeting moments of joy provided by players who (no offense to them) will be mostly irrelevant when it comes to their playoff fate.
It is hard to escape the feeling that all of us have seen this movie before. The NBA’s 82-game slate is a slog, no doubt, enjoyed only by people like me who revel in the day-to-day grind. It’s a much tougher sell on someone who comes home from work, wants to disconnect from the stresses of their life, and ends up adding more of those by hitching their star to a team that can’t seem to get out of its own way.
The Phillies parallels have made it tougher for people to accept that this is just the product and they have to deal with it. "They went to the World Series after firing their coach!" is a compelling argument, at least if you believe that's a replicable path for the Sixers to follow. The Jekyll and Hyde nature of the Sixers makes it hard to pinpoint that as the thing holding back the Sixers — an undermanned group of role players was clearly bought into what Rivers was preaching, but the more important, star-led group looks aimless. They are 2-5 with Embiid and Harden in the lineup, and those games have been characterized by the exact opposite traits of the shorthanded games, the Sixers transforming from hungry and team-first to lethargic and disconnected.
That isn't to remove Rivers from the list of problems. If you were putting together a list of a coach's most important qualities, winning games with backups ranks pretty far down the list. You aren't going to win a title because Shake Milton proved capable of leading a team to a win over the Orlando Magic in late November. Rivers wants (and to a degree, deserves) credit for the step forward Embiid has taken over the last few years, so it's fair for him to take some blame when motivation and focus fade in and out for his stars.
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To me, the biggest thing that falls in Rivers' lap is the air of entitlement the Sixers seem to carry themselves with when they are fully healthy. This is not a team that has earned any real trust or respect from the league at large, yet the product on the floor suggests they are above building the habits and the chemistry of the teams they need to surpass to get out of the second round of the playoffs. Press conference answers only tell you so much about a team, but you can trace the defiance of "would you ask Pop that question?" through the team's play, this group not showing any real urgency to shed their reputation as a talented but ultimately toothless pseudo contender.
Consistency is hard to come by around here, even if we're judging them on their words and not their actions. Rivers stood in front of a microphone recently and said they work on zone defense every day, only for one of his players to immediately note during his own presser that they hardly work on it and it wasn't that successful in the game in question. It was a funny moment when it happened, but the more you zoom out, the more you roll your eyes at the idea that they can't even agree on what has been worked on.
To this point, though, the Sixers have not even entertained the idea that coaching is the central problem or that Rivers could move on. Just looking at Daryl Morey's history, he has given coaches (even maligned coaches) time and patience to figure things out, which I believe is about future hiring as much as it is about his belief in said coaches. He has credibly been able to say to potential coaches that he does not just haphazardly throw them under the bus in tough times. But the organization's approach to this point, one of solidarity and "we'll figure this out together," has turned off the portion of the fanbase that is ready to see a new coach in charge whether it makes a difference or not.
So your eyes turn to the roster, and you find the sources of apathy there, too. Tucker has had some great defensive moments in individual matchups with stars, and coaches have crowed about his leadership and voice as part of their culture-setting. But he has been as susceptible to dips in form and focus the same as everyone else, his touch as cold as Mr. Freeze for the month of November. To those who want him benched, I ask you: how do you turn the group they have into one that solves their problems?
Had Matisse Thybulle shown offensive progress at any point during the last few years, increasing his minutes to chase a more athletic version of this team would be one of the easiest moves you could make. But Thybulle's inability to shoot, dribble, or stop fouling has left them in a place where only spot minutes will do. Danuel House Jr. offers some athleticism and theoretical three-and-D play off the bench, but he's the exact sort of player you'd expect on the contract he's on, scatterbrained half of the time and only effective every so often. And on their best day, Philadelphia's backcourt is one featuring one of the most notoriously apathetic defenders among stars in the NBA, combined with a young and eager Tyrese Maxey who finds himself too small or too young to help on D much of the time.
There’s no rotation move to make that doesn’t come with some sort of cost, adding mental flightiness or worse spacing or perhaps both at the same time. In the interim, the Sixers get pounded on the glass by younger and more athletic teams, or sometimes just hungrier teams, who fly in from the perimeter and challenge Philadelphia to meet their aggression when the ball is in the air. The last two games against Memphis and Houston have shown how successful you can be with that approach.
And then we reach the stars, who are most important of all. We are now at the point of Embiid’s career where passing off his self-inflicted wounds as a product of the environment isn’t good enough. He is deep enough in his career to separate the limitations he imposes on a team vs. the other way around. His box-score production is undeniable, and his best play has been up there with all-time greats, let alone his current peers in the league. But whether it’s apathy or a lack of awareness, he often fails to understand the responsibility he has at the center of this team.
This has hurt him in individual matters the same as it does for team endeavors, and it’s something I feel was lost by much of this fanbase in the decisive games for the MVP race last year. When the two played heads up, Embiid outplayed Nikola Jokic in their late-season battle last year, showing the two-way dominance you see at his best. But the decisive stretch of that loss to Denver came when a lineup led by Bones Hyland and DeMarcus Cousins outplayed a Sixers group with Embiid, whose attentiveness defending those two in pick-and-pops only met the moment after they had gotten hot enough to flip the game.
You could point to Embiid’s line that night — 34 points, 9 rebounds, 4 assists a +2 on the sheet — and excuse him for culpability in the loss. It’s easy enough to use coaches and role players and maligned teammates as a shield. But he has the supermax contract, effective control of the team, and the glare of the spotlight because it is his responsibility to take every minute and every matchup seriously, whatever his path to winning it is. Often, we see he does not take it seriously enough, giving enough to the team to escape blame but not enough to turn his team into who outsiders expect them to be.
Last two years, it was much rarer to watch Embiid and feel any level of concern about his engagement from a game’s start to the game’s end. He earned praise for the maturation he showed as a leader and a day-to-day calming force for this team. Right now, it feels like we’re back where we were with Embiid prior to Rivers’ arrival, with his engagement level not a guarantee from moment to moment.
Maybe the reason people are tuning out on this experience is simple — their paths out of this situation are limited. If Ben Simmons for Harden was a straight-up trade, they would have been left with more outs and options for trades, and better current depth to boot. But they had to pay a premium to go and get Harden from the Nets, and while his offensive contributions far exceed the man he was dealt for, you’re still left with the impression that this is just a rough outline of who Harden used to be. Patience post-foot injury is deserved, but he was turning in high-profile clunkers in big playoff moments long before his legs began to suffer from the aging process. Trust has not been earned, not with this fanbase and not with most people in the basketball universe.
That's what this ultimately comes back to: trust. This city has been not-so-patiently waiting for a reason to buy in and believe its team will make it past the second round. They've got the same old Sixers instead.
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