The Sixers swept a back-to-back on their home floor this weekend, and on Tuesday they have a challenging start to a light three-game road trip.

While the shorthanded Sixers will have their hands full with Nikola Jokić and the Denver Nuggets as they kick off this Western Conference swing, they could notch two wins against tanking teams when they go to Utah and Sacramento later in the week. Even if the Denver game goes as expected, it is very possible the Sixers will return home winners of four of their last five games.

It will get more challenging from there, as the Sixers will be welcomed home by the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder on March 23. But that will be the final game of Paul George's suspension, and perhaps by then Joel Embiid will have returned from the oblique injury that has held him out for the entirety of March.

Today is Tuesday, and that means it is time to answer your Sixers questions. Let's see what is on the docket for this week:

From @bearc.bsky.social: I want to keep Tyrese Maxey and VJ Edgecombe, then hit the reset button. It seems that Joel Embiid will never be able to play a meaningful number of games anymore and the Paul George experience has been horribly underwhelming. I don't want to languish as a play-in team. Am I being too fatalistic?

Certainly not. After all, was the Sixers' audacious rebuild, kickstarted more than a decade ago by Sam Hinkie, not all about avoiding being stuck in the middle? The most challenging place for an NBA team to be: not good enough to seriously compete for a championship, but too good to have a reasonable chance at picking high in the draft to land a player capable of leading you to heights great enough to be in the title mix. Sure, a sudden tanking effort and a little bit of lottery luck landed the Sixers the chance to draft Edgecombe, but he is the only surefire keeper on this roster when it comes to players on rookie contracts.

The Sixers have, quite possibly, the two worst contracts in the NBA on their books right now. And while it is easier to see the light at the end of the tunnel on George, who only has two years left after this season (he could conceivably be on a useful expiring deal in about 15 months from now) and is a relatively easy player to slot into any roster and rotation, the dynamic with Embiid is paralyzing.

Embiid, whose three-year supermax extension will not kick in until 2026-27 and is projected to be worth about a whopping $190 million, is not movable. He is so infrequently available that it appears basically impossible to craft a championship-caliber roster around his salary. Embiid is singular in how way a team must approach offense and defense if he is on the floor given his slow-paced dominance as a scorer. And he remains such an effective player when healthy that it feels impossible not to cater to his strengths and weaknesses schematically.

But this year's Sixers, whose best chance of winning without Embiid involve maximizing their transition frequency, have learned very well how hard it is to toggle from one extreme to the other at a moment's notice. Most teams have an identity and try to lean into it; with Embiid on board the Sixers have to try to adopt two of them at once and end up struggling to master either one.

The question is: What can the Sixers actually do about all of this? Because George's contract, if the Sixers found themselves bound and determined to shed it, could probably be moved. The Sixers might have to give something up that they value in addition to taking on less bad money – it is worth questioning if the juice would be worth the squeeze – but it is not inconceivable that they find a way. But to what end? Meanwhile, getting out of the Embiid experience feels wholly unrealistic.

Given how many games Embiid has missed over the last two years and change, it would be irresponsible for any NBA team taking him on to do so with plans of short-term competitiveness. If there is any Embiid trade framework that feels remotely feasible, it would be one in which a team in the early stages of a rebuild was willing to take on his albatross of a contract for a considerable collection of assets because they did not plan on pushing for the playoffs in the next two or three years. Those teams do exist, but whether or not one would have the appetite to take on Embiid's contract is very much up in the air.

If the Sixers are locked into paying Embiid massive money for three years, how will they be able to field a title-caliber team at any point during that period? Are they going to waste Maxey's prime? Have the Sixers become exactly what they hoped to never become – stuck in the middle? These are all fair questions to pose, even as the duo of Maxey and Edgecombe provides more forward-looking hope than a lot of backcourts around the league.

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From @Phillyfloyd: Why does Nick Nurse act so oblivious about medical progress? Does he actually expect us to believe that he isn’t well-informed about these things? Didn’t Brett Brown and Doc Rivers at least pretend to know what was going on behind closed doors with the health stuff? Nurse acts as if he’s in a separate world altogether.

This question was sparked by comments Sixers head coach Nick Nurse made on Saturday when asked about Embiid, who remains out with his right oblique strain. Embiid has not played in the month of March and has not been the subject of any status update by the Sixers in the 11 days since they said he would be re-evaluated in "approximately one week." Reporters expected an Embiid update last Friday, and when one did not come the expectation became that the team would provide one before Saturday's game. No news arrived before Nurse's pregame media availability, and the following exchanges ensued:

Reporter: Nick, what's the latest on Joel?

Nurse: The latest on Joel? He got on-court yesterday. Had, obviously, not with the team [which did not practice], but got on-court, individual workout. He's feeling a little better, and that's kind of our next step, was he had a good, long workout yesterday?

Reporter: What's holding him back? What's his next steps physically in terms of –

Nurse: Same. Same as always. He's just got to feel a little bit better, get on the court a little bit, a little conditioning, all that kind of stuff.

Reporter: Do you anticipate him being able to return to you guys on this upcoming road trip or anything?

Nurse: I don't, probably, want to anticipate anything. But I think there's a chance of that. There's a chance, yeah. Hopefully.

Reporter: Do you get the sense that this time off has helped with the knees and the shin at all? Or is it too early to –

Nurse: Haven't even talked about that yet. I assume it has, though, just in general. I mean, he's been in the weight room quite a bit leading up to yesterday's on-court session, so he has been getting some work in, so I would imagine that it's helping.

Reporter: Just to clarify, in companion to the on-court work, did he get any sort of formal reevaluation from the medical staff as well, or just –

Nurse: He must have, to get cleared on-court, yeah.

While I did not cover Brett Brown, I would say that Nurse's wiggling around injury updates is not unique to him. Rivers did it, too, though he often did it in a much different way. He would often point out that "Doc" is just his nickname when he was unable to provide specific insight into what Embiid was dealing with.

Nurse naturally does not enjoy answering questions about Embiid's health as often as us reporters ask him questions about it. Early on last season, he shut down questions about Embiid at a practice, which became a story in itself. And, to be fair, "Nurse" is only his surname; he is not a medical professional. He is also not the person tasked with deciding whether or not Embiid is going to play on any given night.

The issue: no members of the Sixers' medical staff are available to the media. President of Basketball Operations Daryl Morey is only available at Media Day before training camp, after the trade deadline and at the end of the season. Embiid himself is available far less often than any other player in the team's rotation, and he has expressed before his desire to keep his own health statuses under wraps. Nurse is not the organization's lone decision-maker on these issues – far from it – but he is the person closest to those decisions that is consistently available to field questions.

Nurse would rather just talk about basketball. I will not speak for all of the other reporters on my beat, but I would much rather just talk about basketball, too. But Embiid is at the center of this entire organization, and fans rightfully have constant questions about his health when not being informed of what is going on.

There are extremely fair criticisms of how Nurse has handled interactions like the one transcribed above, but this is not a Nurse issue, it is an Embiid issue. Him feeling like he has a right to some level of privacy is entirely understandable, but part of being in the NBA – as a player, coach or executive – is providing accurate information about health statuses. The Sixers, clearly, have created a tremendous sense of distrust with their medical updates (or lack thereof) over the years, particularly when it comes to Embiid.

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From @goh_gary: Any data on points per possession immediately after a timeout? I suspect Nick Nurse is one of the worst among all coaches. Most of those possessions ended up in a turnover or an iso or terrible execution.

As a matter of fact, yes! The following numbers reflected where things stood entering Monday's slate of games and are courtesy of pbpstats.com:

So, while the Sixers have clearly not been a particularly good team this season when it comes to scoring out of timeouts, they have not been dreadful. 

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