September 12, 2025
Colleen Claggett/For PhillyVoice
Adem Bona showed plenty of positive flashes in his rookie season. The Sixers will soon be reliant on him.
Welcome to our Sixers player preview series, where in the weeks leading up to Media Day we will preview the upcoming 2025-26 season for each and every member of the Sixers' standard roster. For each player, we will pose two key questions about their season before making a prediction.
The pressure is on after a miserable 24-58 campaign last season. After entering a year with championship aspirations and spending multiple months having to tank for the sake of a protected first-round pick, the Sixers have lost any and all benefit of the doubt that their signature season is finally coming.
It is safe to say there is a whole lot of work to do on the Sixers' end to prove the doubters wrong. Do they have a roster good enough to make it happen?
Up next: Adem Bona, the No. 41 overall pick in the 2024 NBA Draft whose rookie season included many tantalizing indications of upside. One of the silver linings of the Sixers' miserable 2024-25 season was their ability to give extended run to youngsters in need of development; Bona was one of the most significant beneficiaries of that. Does he have enough experience to be a quality backup center in the NBA next season?
SIXERS PLAYER PREVIEWS
Jared McCain | Justin Edwards | VJ Edgecombe | Kyle Lowry | Kelly Oubre Jr. | Johni Broome | Adem Bona
Bona has a motor that never stops, a combination of size and leaping ability that is nearly unparalleled, tremendous length and a clear desire to swat shots. It is a makeup which helped him be one of the best shot-blockers in the NBA right away. Only two players topped Bona's 2.7 blocks per 36 minutes last season, and he is able to get to shots a lot of rim protectors cannot.
Bona's shot-blocking aggressiveness, however, has come at a price. It was inevitable that he would post gargantuan foul rates as a rookie, and early on in his season he did just that. To some, it was not much of a concern: Bona was not primed for big minutes anyways, so fouling out was not worth worrying about.
It matters quite a bit, though. Bona's role expanded as the year went on because of injuries to Joel Embiid and Andre Drummond. And even if fouling out was not a risk, it never helps to have a player constantly inciting whistles.
As Bona started getting more frequent rotation cameos in early 2025, he was very early in the process of learning how to defend against NBA speed and physicality without fouling. For two months, Bona really struggled. But it was clear as time went on that he was finding ways to play with at least a bit of discipline.
By the time March arrived, Bona's workload had grown. He missed a week with a foot injury, but returned and was suddenly starting and playing heavy minutes. That continued into April as the season ended. Bona's foul rates were still high, but he made substantial progress in the final months of the season:
| Month(s) | Bona games played | Bona minutes per game | Bona fouls per game | Bona fouls per 36 minutes |
| January + February | 24 | 14.3 | 2.5 | 6.2 |
| March | 11 | 21.8 | 1.9 | 3.1 |
| April | 7 | 31.6 | 3.6 | 4.1 |
Moving forward, Bona is the favorite to be Embiid's primary backup center. Given how often Embiid has missed time in his career, Bona being able to play upwards of 30 minutes on any given night will be crucial. In order to do that, he must stay out of foul trouble.
Bona is a non-shooter, though he was pleased with his accuracy on free throws for much of the season before a poor finish to the year on that front. Bona's offensive production was largely limited to finishing plays – either serving as a lob threat or receiving dump-off passes under the rim.
But the Sixers have, in recent years, focused on developing their bigs as short-roll passers. Bona is no exception, and his physical and athletic tools make him the prototypical screen-setting big. That means, on a team with plenty of ball-handlers capable of commanding double-teams, he will need to be a reliable decision-maker in 4-on-3 situations:
Adem Bona makes a good read out of a short roll, Ricky Council IV makes a wise extra pass and KJ Martin knocks down a triple: pic.twitter.com/ee1nZQXseI
— Adam Aaronson's clips (@SixersAdamClips) December 1, 2024
“One of our daily habits that we work on is playing out of double-teams," Sixers head coach Nick Nurse said in March. "Because it affects both Joel and Tyrese so much that we almost start every day working on Tyrese getting blitzed, Paul George getting blitzed, Joel getting blitzed. And the first two, usually the play has to run through the big after the first [pass] – or second pass for sure, normally the first. And then they've got to make them pay. It's 4-on-3, you know, we usually want a super high-percentage attempt at the rim or a catch-and-shoot three out of those situations."
MORE: Why Sixers spent 2024-25 teaching their bigs to pass
Nurse went out of his way to praise Bona for his improvement in that area on multiple occasions in the final months of the season. To his credit, Bona understands how that skill can make him especially valuable to this team moving forward.
"I think that will be a really big part of my game, because playing with Tyrese, he's probably going to get blitzed a lot. So being able to make decisions off the blitz, I think that's going to help me and also help the team," Bona told PhillyVoice in March. "I've kind of seen a similar situation when I was in college, I was getting double-teamed a lot so I had to pass out of double-teams. So I think that helped me translate it into making plays out of the blitzes, so I've just got to keep developing and that's going to really help me develop my game. And to be able to share the floor with better shooters, I can find them for wide-open shots."
Bona's lofty fouling rates remain an issue as his role expands, but he proves to clearly be the Sixers' best option at center when Embiid is off the floor. He remains on an impressive trajectory for a player drafted in the middle of the second round.
Bona is never going to have a pristine foul rate. He should not aim for one. To get, one must give; Bona will not be able to become one of the league's most terrific shot-blockers if he is afraid to have a whistle blown on him. Of course, a balance must be struck so aggression does not turn into recklessness.
Bona's jumpy nature works against him at times. But it was clear from Bona's rookie season that reps go a long way for him. He got much better on the fly, noticeably more disciplined and attentive. It bodes well for his future, even if he never becomes an Earth-shattering rim protector.
To no fault of his own, Bona's rookie season was nightmarish for the Sixers. But all of the chaos and injuries gave him an opportunity. He is much better – and more confident – because of it.
"We'd be talking about him as like, ‘Hey, can Adem contribute this year?' in a normal year. In a normal year, he probably doesn't play last year, and it was just one of the positives of last year," Sixers President of Basketball Operations Daryl Morey said in July. "We didn't have a lot of positives, but one of the positives was Adem and Justin [Edwards] and Jared [McCain] and all these guys got pretty significant minutes they normally wouldn't have gotten. And I think Adem, especially at the end of the year, got the confidence of Nick and his staff.”
MORE: Bona plans to be patient, know his role... and scream as loud as he can
