A night that exposed flaws in the process
Embiid, Fultz and Okafor all missing in action
PHILADELPHIA » Four and a quarter years into their unsanitary, unprofessional process, the 76ers would face a moment Thursday with the potential to define their progress.
Playing well but not at a championship level, showing improvement but not enough, entertaining nightly but winning only at a pace that they once deemed unacceptable, the Sixers squeezed into Boston Garden to play the Celtics. For the occasion, they would not issue charterflight boarding passes to Joel Embiid, Jahlil Okafor or Markelle Fultz. All were healthy enough to play, give or take a nod from some obscure shoulder specialist. None did.
On brand, as their tubthumpers like to say.
Not that any November game means much in the October-to-June NBA wagon-train-roll, but for every healthy reason, the one Thursday had that chance. One is that history will forever welcome Celtics-Sixers comparisons. Another is that the particular moment in pro-basketball time was ideal for a renewal of the rivalry.
Though the Sixers pretend not to have noticed, they began their rebuilding at roughly the same time as the Celtics. Both Brad Stevens and Brett Brown were hired before the 2013 season. The Celtics were slightly more advanced at the time. Neither operation, though, was right. Both had a chance to improve. The Sixers chose tanking. The Celtics were more aggressive. A gap opened. On some levels, it is being narrowed. But that will require trying, too.
All of which made what happened Thursday more than just a game, more than a standard 10897 Boston victory, more than just one of those back-to-back, road-game nights. That, of course, figured into the Sixers’ rationale for electing not to play Embiid, a healthy 23-year-old man with a $148,000,000 contract. The Sixers actually had to play 48 minutes of basketball twice in as many days, with one of those hitches being a taxing 95-minute luxury charter flight away.
Ever since Embiid used two words and four syllables to describe the utter nonsense that was the year-plus sports-science restrictions on his playing time, the Sixers have quietly pretended that it all just went away. They did, however, reserve those brainiacs some dignity, agreeing to rest Embiid in back-to-back situations. Load management, they would call it, expecting the unwashed to accept it as long as it was so cleverly packaged.
But it wasn’t the absence of Embiid that turned the night in Boston into a telling in-theprocess moment. It was central, though, to the reality that the Sixers are not as close to solving the NBA system as they would like their fans to believe. It took the absence of Okafor and Fultz, too, to make it all come into focus.
While those who have made the process a religion believe that only they can see the truth, nothing the Sixers did to reinvent their organization was clever or innovative. Their plot was simple: Lose, acquire premium draft choices, win. It was a sick plot. But it was an understandable one. They even boasted of their transparency. The only requirement: Don’t make drafting mistakes. They made drafting mistakes. And that’s why they are good but not great at a time when they should no longer be pretending they are still in development.
Okafor wants to play. But Brown doesn’t think he can play. At all. The short version is that Okafor is too slow to play a stretch-anything at the defensive end. That makes him a center only. Since Embiid has MVP-level skills, that leaves Okafor out. Way out. So far down the depth chart that the Sixers don’t even bother to use him on Embiid’s load-management nights. And he could have helped against the Celtics, in a game the Sixers kept close, even with Embiid and T.J. McConnell unavailable. He could have helped because he can score. Brown once said he could wake up from a sleep and drop 20. He’s that kind of scorer. And he is the reason the Sixers wasted their entire 2015 season. He was their target. Yet three years later, the No. 3 overall pick in a draft is useless.
Fultz, the Sixers keep saying, has some kind of a crooked shoulder. That didn’t bother them until he showed that he couldn’t play at the NBA level, something they should have realized when his college team won two conference games and then had its coach fired. But the No. 1 overall pick in the last draft has a better chance to roll into history as a talk-show punch line than a difference-maker.
The trick to winning a 21st Century NBA championship is not complicated. It requires collecting three superstars. Four, even. Fill in the rest of the roster with guys unlikely to disturb anything. Coach well. Take a postseason chance.
The Sixers should have had those players in place by now. They did what they had to do, surrendering their pride for all those years. They have Ben Simmons, who fits the profile. And Embiid.
But the No. 3 pick in the 2014 is not always available.
And the No. 3 pick in the 2015 draft can’t play.
And the No. 1 pick in the 2017 draft can’t play.
Because they are well coached, and because No. 1 pick in the 2016 draft can play, and because Embiid and Dario Saric, J.J. Redick and T.J. McConnell are cut-above competitors, the Sixers can win on enough nights. They are on a pace to win 47 times. Yet that wasn’t the bargain, not this late into the process.
Ignore it, if that’s what the religion demands.
But from one telling November night in Boston, that was the message. And it was clear.