The Philadelphia 76ers are a five-alarm dumpster fire. They’re 20-36 and the current owners of the longest active losing streak in the NBA. Two of their stars, Joel Embiid and Paul George, look old and broken down, and Jared McCain, who was once the favorite for Rookie of the Year, has been out since mid-December with a torn meniscus and will not return this season.
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Even though the Eastern Conference is so mediocre that the 76ers are only 1.5 games out of a play-in spot, the question needs to be asked — is it time to tank?
Three factors go into answering this question, so let’s go through them one by one.
First off, is there any benefit to tanking?
The answer to that is emphatically yes. The upcoming draft class is a special one, with Duke freshman Cooper Flagg the presumptive top pick and Rutgers teammates Ace Bailey and Dylan Harper as outstanding consolations.
Even outside the top three, there’s a lot to be excited about. Many of the top prospects, like Flagg, Bailey, and Harper, are college freshmen with huge upsides.
That includes VJ Edgecombe of Baylor, Flagg’s teammates Kon Knueppel and Khaman Maluach, and UConn’s Liam McNeeley, among others.
In short, it’s in every team’s best interests to get themselves a lottery ticket. The Sixers have the sixth-worst record in the league right now, and a full embrace of the tank could guarantee them an even higher draft slot.
Is there any chance that the Sixers can turn their season around by going all-out?
On paper, the answer would appear to be yes, as Embiid, George, and Tyrese Maxey are All-NBA caliber talents. In reality, though, that hasn’t been the case. Embiid played in the Olympics but missed the first nine games of the season with an injured knee.
He’s played in only 19 games and has been laboring through that injury all year, and it was just reported yesterday that he could miss extended time as he consults doctors about the best course of action.
George has only played 37 games since joining the 76ers this summer, but already he’s looking like one of the worst free-agent signings in the last decade.
He’s admitted to playing through a painful finger injury, and his scoring is way down. Defensively, he looks like a shell of his former self. That leaves Maxey to carry the load, and though he’s been doing all he can, he’s not at the level where he can single-handedly make a team a contender.
For these reasons, the answer is no, the Sixers can’t turn their season around.
Could they make the play-in? Sure, but only because the bar is so low. Even if they somehow got there and eked their way into the playoffs with two straight wins, they would be summarily destroyed by either the Cavs or the Celtics in the first round. There’s no upside here.
Are there any benefits to tanking besides securing a top pick?
The answer to this one is yes. Embiid and George are currently under contract for a combined six years and $355 million after this season, a truly depressing situation for any Sixers fan.
This fanbase suffered through so many years of ‘The Process’ with the hope that it would all be worth it someday, and that’s clearly not been the case. Now the future looks bleak once again.
There are added benefits to shutting Embiid and George down besides getting better lottery odds.
The first is that it will give them extra time to heal up and hopefully come back next season closer to full strength. It may be a long shot because of their respective injury histories and the advanced points they’re at in their careers, but the Sixers don’t have a choice but to hope for the best.
Given how beaten up both players have been, the 76ers won’t have to worry about running afoul of Adam Silver by shutting them down. That’s good, and it will also ensure that they don’t get injured any worse, which would take their already minimal trade value and sink it even further.
General manager Daryl Morey will probably do everything he can to get out from under these contracts this summer, but if teams don’t believe Embiid or George have any shot at bouncing back, then there won’t be any interested teams.
The Sixers need an organizational reset, and the only way that can happen is to encase Embiid and George in bubble wrap and put them on the shelf. Maybe they’ll be able to trade them (probably not), but at least they’ll have a chance of being in better shape next year, and they’ll have an exciting rookie to go with McCain and Maxey regardless. This needs to be the start of “The Process 2.0.”
