The Sixers, against all odds, have a chance to return home next week as winners of four of their last five games.

After sweeping their weekend back-to-back at home, the Sixers are heading out for another Western Conference road trip. Up first is a notoriously difficult matchup: on Tuesday night, the Sixers will face Nikola Jokić and the Nuggets in Denver. But after that come two opponents near the bottom of the NBA standings. They will face the Sacramento Kings and Utah Jazz, both incentivized to lose games. Even if the Sixers do not play particularly well, they could come home having banked two more important wins as they try to avoid a slide in the Eastern Conference standings.

"We definitely want to go over .500 when we go on a road trip," Quentin Grimes said after leading the Sixers in scoring for the second day in a row, scoring a season-high 31 points in an impressive win over the Portland Trail Blazers. "We've got a tough team in Denver, then we have Utah and [Sacramento]. So we feel like we can go out there and not get too far ahead [of ourselves] on some teams out there that aren't playing as well right now, but they still have good players over there. Just taking it one game at a time, and I feel like we can have a pretty successful road trip for sure."

In this week's 5 Sixers thoughts, breaking down the team's best win of March before surveying some relevant non-Sixers developments:

Best win of the month

If there was a player of the game on Sunday evening it was certainly Grimes, who scored 14 of his 31 points in a dominant fourth quarter. Grimes played the entire final frame, making four of his five shot attempts and shooting a perfect 6-for-6 on free throws. But in their first win over a decent team all month, the Sixers operated as something greater than the sum of their parts, something that has to be more frequent with such a massive collection of players sidelined.

Justin Edwards, for the first time as an NBA player, is in the midst of an extended stretch of quality minutes for a team trying to win games. Edwards had stronger and longer stretches of production as a rookie, but it came when the Sixers had already thrown in the towel on the 2025-26 season. After scoring 19 points with a dominant inside-the-arc performance on Saturday, Edwards knocked down three triples and totaled 21 points against the Trail Blazers.

The hometown kid has been the recipient of significant praise from head coach Nick Nurse and many of his teammates over the last few days. He has navigated a challenging set of circumstances this season and is starting to find his form when the Sixers need it most. He made the play of the game on Sunday, what he called an "underrated" steal leading to a ferocious one-handed jam in the final minutes:

While Grimes, Edwards and VJ Edgecombe (the rookie scored 18 points and grabbed a career-high 12 rebounds) were all somewhat predictable heroes for the Sixers given who was sidelined, they also got an unlikely boost from Andre Drummond, the veteran center whose minutes have been dreadful for the last few months after a spirited early season push.

Going against fellow Connecticut native and UConn product Donovan Clingan, Drummond realized quickly that he would be needed to play major minutes off the bench. He played his best game in months, grabbing 17 rebounds in 35 minutes in his return from a two-game absence caused by back spasms.

"I think everybody knows if I can play, I'm going to play," Drummond said. "If I can't, I'm going to sit. So for me, it was tough because I did want to try to play, but I knew I wouldn't be able to do what I did tonight if I tried to play those last couple of games. So it was good to get those few nights off, and come back tonight and play great."

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Checking in on Jared McCain

Hours before the Sixers beat Portland, the Oklahoma City Thunder beat the Minnesota Timberwolves despite Shai Gilgeous-Alexander having one of his least efficient performances in recent memory. It helped to get nine threes off the bench from guards Jared McCain and Isaiah Joe.

McCain, whose return to Philadelphia as a member of the defending champions is a week away, shot 5-for-10 from the field and 5-for-9 from three-point range, scoring 15 points in 17 minutes to help get Oklahoma City across the finish line. He looked like his rookie self, with his unique movement shooting skill being weaponized for the betterment of Oklahoma City's offense:

McCain has played 16 games for the Thunder, and even with Gilgeous-Alexander, Alex Caruso and Ajay Mitchell returning from injuries, adding to a list of guards already including Cason Wallace, McCain and the red-hot Joe, the 21-year-old remains part of head coach Mark Daigneault's rotation.

McCain's numbers in a Thunder jersey so far: 18.6 minutes and 11.4 points per game, shooting 43.8 percent from three-point range on 5.0 attempts per game and a gargantuan 13.0 attempts per 100 possessions. If it was not already clear by the fact that Thunder shot-caller Sam Presti made an uncharacteristically aggressive push to trade for McCain – he had not traded a first-round pick for an active player in almost 10 years – it is now abundantly clear the degree to which Oklahoma City had a vision for how McCain could help them. Even in a stacked guard rotation, McCain seems to project as a playoff rotation piece for the Thunder.

Rockets first-round pick watch

That is a good way to lead into our bi-weekly check-in on the first-round pick the Sixers acquired for McCain, which is that of the Houston Rockets this season. The Sixers, initially set to be one of the few teams without any selections in the 2026 NBA Draft, will now have a pick in the back half of the first-round pick.

Entering Monday's action, the Houston pick is set to land at No. 24 overall. But it is right in the middle of its conceivable range of outcomes. A look at the Tankathon standings:

Tankathon/for PhillyVoice

While the Houston pick could theoretically jump as high as four spots to No. 20, the No. 21 spot – which has been favorable to the Sixers before – is probably its realistic ceiling. Meanwhile, it could very well slide down to No. 26. Sixers fans should be rooting for teams like Denver, the Cleveland Cavaliers, Minnesota Timberwolves, Los Angeles Lakers and New York Knicks to win games in addition to pulling for Rockets losses.

According to Tankathon, the Rockets have the 18th-hardest remaining stretch of schedule, decimal points more favorable than that of the Sixers in terms of opponent winning percentage. 

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Charles Bassey joins Celtics

The Boston Celtics signed former Sixers draftee Charles Bassey to a 10-day contract over the weekend. After Bassey logged five minutes across two 10-day deals with the Sixers earlier in the season, there has been some vocal frustration among Sixers fans that Bassey landed in Boston.

The reality: the Sixers only had Bassey so that their roster would be compliant with complex rules in the league's collective bargaining agreement. If the Sixers did not fill their roster and could not come to an agreement on a standard contract for Dominick Barlow, Barlow would not have been able to play.

Bassey signing in Boston was a perfect storm in terms of timing for Sixers fans' outrage, as the news broke right around when the Sixers lost a game without all four of their centers available. But in reality, there is little to no evidence that signing Bassey would have made for better use of a roster spot than the Sixers getting Barlow and Jabari Walker on standard contracts and signing Cam Payne to a rest-of-season minimum deal. All three are definitively better players than Bassey. The arguments for Barlow and Walker over Bassey are fairly obvious, as they had already established themselves as rotation pieces. At the time and in hindsight, the Sixers trading McCain and Eric Gordon without acquiring anyone else made adding another guard to the mix absolutely necessary, even more than adding additional insurance in the middle.

To be clear, the Celtics signed Bassey for the same reason as the Sixers: roster compliance. They are going through a remarkably complex series of transactions, stemming from a unique trade deadline, which is going to get them just thousands of dollars below the luxury tax threshold when the season ends. Maybe Bassey, who played for Boston in Summer League, will make an early impression and eventually sign a prorated contract near the end of the season. But Boston has used up all of its allotted days of being below 14 players on its standard roster. That is why they added Bassey.

Notes on the Delaware Blue Coats

Ironically, a Bassey jersey was being given away at the Chase Fieldhouse on Friday night after he played a few games with the Delaware Blue Coats. A few observations after attending the Blue Coats' loss to the OKC Blue:

• While the Blue were armed with 2024 lottery pick Nikola Topić and players who have spent time with the Thunder or other NBA teams like Buddy Boehim, Brooks Barnheizer and Dariq Whitehead, the Blue Coats were somewhat limited from a personnel perspective. After all, the Sixers consistently (and successfully) using their two-way contract spots to bolster their NBA rotation has robbed the Blue Coats of a chance to keep up with elite teams in the G League. That they are 14-15 on the season despite never getting a single second of action out of Dominick Barlow or Jabari Walker is impressive in itself.

• Delaware's star of the night was Teddy Allen, who scored 33 points in 28 minutes off the bench. Allen, 27, played for four different collegiate programs – he was dismissed from the Wichita State program in 2019 after an arrest – and has unique shooting mechanics. He does not look like a marksman when he gets shots up, but Allen is a career 39.1 percent three-point shooter in the G League on considerable volume. He spent a year and change with the Rio Grande Valley Vipers before joining the Blue Coats. After going undrafted in 2022, Allen joined the Canadian Elite Basketball League, where he was named the Player of the Year in 2023. A year later, he was released due to causing "unrest". That prompted his arrival to the G League.

• The best player on the Blue Coats is Malcolm Hill, likely one of the best basketball players in the world not signed to an NBA contract of some kind. Hill surprisingly did not get signed to a late-season two-way deal; it would be ill-advised of him to accept a 10-day contract because it would occupy his last remaining year of service before he is no longer two-way eligible. Perhaps Hill will consider playing overseas after this season if he does not generate two-way interest in the NBA. There is always a path back.

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