LOS ANGELES — It would be hard to draw up a weirder — some might say “cursed” — beginning to what was supposed to be the celebratory start of the Philadelphia 76ers successful high-stakes offseason.
A fact that kept on going Wednesday, as the Sixers lost here to the Clippers, 110-98, in a game that saw Tyrese Maxey leave early with hamstring soreness.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
Before this slow-off-the-block season began, the Sixers somehow turned the Clippers poor management of Paul George‘s contract situation into the star’s arrival in Philly. Joel Embiid, having played in the Olympics for the United State national team, and presumably therefore ready to go for the NBA regular season, was to be paired with George and Maxey.
Those three stars, alone enough to push you close to the top of Eastern Conference projections, would be augmented by the 10 other new players the Sixers had brought in when president of basketball operations Daryl Morey, betting he could turn ample cap space and a nearly blank slate into a better, brand-new team, came up aces.
Hell, even Tobias Harris was gone. The future seemed assured.
And then, as Philly fans — longsuffering, well-meaning, scarred by failure and oh-so-close calls — would tell you: Wham. Back to reality.
Embiid announced he would likely not play back-to-backs, even as his debut was pushed back by the chronic injuries that have marred his otherwise marvelous career. A media frenzy ensued. PG, too, would see his Philly beginning pushed back after a preseason injury. This Clippers game Wednesday night — a return to the place he had just left — was only his second of the season.
Amidst all of this, of course, Embiid shoved Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Marcus Hayes last week over a piece that had been painfully personal — one that referenced Embiid’s deceased brother, and his son, named after him. On Tuesday, a three-game suspension followed, the latest bit of relentless drama for a team that last night fell to that 1-6 mark — tied for last in the Eastern Conference with the 1-6 Milwaukee Bucks (and last in the NBA as the Jazz are also 1-6).
This mix of injuries, incidents and ill-begotten play seemed to add up to a season on the brink, already, again, just a handful of games into the season.
But this Sixers team — even with the shove, the injuries, NBA investigations and a brutal start to the season — is not in dire danger. So slow that disaster forecast down. There’s still plenty of time for Philly to be fine, and ample reason to remember their case if vastly different than, say, Milwaukee’s.
This isn’t the Bucks situation, in which the sample size between Damian Lillard and Giannis Antetokounmpo is large enough to believe something may be inherently wrong. For Milwaukee, a bad start this year, and the wrong head coach, could indeed be a recipe for a would-be divorce with Giannis down the road.
Philly’s situation is markedly different.
The Sixers have the right head coach in Nick Nurse. They have yet to see the Embiid-PG-Maxey trio at work. Embiid hasn’t even played yet this season. Even when he does, it will take time once he starts to play with PG and his new teammates. But the odds remain it will in fact work.
The team seems to know it. On Wednesday, before the loss but with that then-1-5 record, you could feel the calm in the locker room, with the head coach, and among team officials who’d made the trip out west. They’re confident of the mix they have, and hopeful, when it finally comes together — when Embiid returns next week, if Maxey’s injury is not serious, as PG shakes off the rust as he did Wednesday — that this brand-new team will to play together, and good things will follow.
It’s also worth noting that George chose Philly in a way Lillard never chose Milwaukee. He wants to be here. Dysfunction is not lurking the shadows.
No, the real key for Philly is Embiid’s health, and the organization’s ability to thread the needle between having him healthy at the end of the season, and having him play enough on the way to that point that his team is good enough, once he gets there, for it to matter.
Philly seems to be falling back on the advice Nurse said he gave Tyrese Maxey earlier in this young season, during a short-lived shooting slump: “Keep firing, no matter what’s going on.”
The same logic applies to the team as a whole: Just keep firing.
There will be drama, a fact those in the Philly’s organization know and accept. There will be losses like Wednesday night’s. Embiid will miss games this year — many. The plan is for doctors to routinely monitor him, laser-focused on making sure he can play in May and June, even if that means missing ample games in November, December and January. They will be overly cautious, even as the media, the league and maybe even fans become increasingly irritated and critical.
George, too, is likely to miss enough games to summon headlines, raise the the ire of a league office still hellbent on players playing more, while eliminating award eligibility under the second year of the league’s minimum threshold. They don’t care. They have a plan — a gamble, as we saw this summer, by an organization willing to take risks to get where they want to go.
Even the Embiid saga with Hayes seems to be a fleeting moment, at least for the team. Nurse summed it up before the Clippers game Wednesday night when, asked for his reaction, he said he was happy it’s over.
“I’m glad it’s done,” he said. “Now we have a timeline for when we’ll see him on the floor.”
And that is the timeline that matters. Not Wednesday’s game, not the record today, not even the record before Embiid is back next Tuesday.
The Sixers had planned all along to risk missed games for its two stars in exchange, five months from now, for the chance to have what they haven’t in a very, very long time: A healthy enough Embiid, and a good enough team, to finally make a real run.
