Early returns not encouraging for stale 76ers

PHILADELPHIA » Through four games, the Sixers were a little of this and a little of that. They were good at times, overwhelmed at others. They blew a big lead and lost at home. They won a a couple of road games.

They had some highlights. They had some bloopers. They did some new things. They did some too-familiar things.

They were OK.

They were nothing special. And that’s where it is, early in a season that has more questions than promise. So who are the Sixers, anyway?

The storybook will claim that they are a franchise at the end of a repulsive rebuilding plan, ready after eight years to claim a championship from the flimsy science they followed. The truth is that they are already in decline and will be fortunate to recover anything from their plot.

While the results of a first four games in a league where too few take too little too seriously until too late will mean much, just a causal up-and-down glance at the Sixers makes one thing clear: Their best is already behind. That came and went in 2019 when Jimmy Butler was taking last-second shots, Elton Brand was making win-now maneuvers, Brett Brown was just beginning to wear on the players, Tobias Harris was having a star-level season, Ben Simmons’ on-court quirks were borderline endearing, Joel Embiid was a little younger and they all were up to date on their postseason-disappointment dues.

What happened after that, in many ways for literally worldchanging reasons, was that the Sixers were permitted to slide into decline even as they hid behind some phony results.

The 2019-20 season was its own oddity. That was the year Butler had enough of Brown and walked, the Sixers threw together something including the aged Al Horford and the incomplete Jason Richardson and Brown decided to de-emphasize the three-point shot and promise a form of bully ball. That never clicked, a coronavirus scuttled the season, everyone regathered in Orlando for some cockamamie tournament and the Sixers never made it out of the first round. OK. That season was different for everyone. For that, it was mostly accepted as an historic basketball oddity.

But where the Sixers fooled themselves was in the shortened season of 2020-21. In it, they won at a .681 pace, which would have meant 56 victories in a standard 82-game season. They were usually good. Embiid was great. But it was a season of too many asterisks. They did win the Eastern Conference by a game over Brooklyn, but if the Nets had an interest in the regular season, they had a curious way of making that known. Kevin Durant played 35 games and James Harden 36. Kyrie Irving, team-first workhorse that he is, played 56 out of 72.

The Sixers, industry leaders in load management, needed to play many of their own “bullpen games,” with Embiid sitting out so often that it cost him an MVP plaque. So technically they were playing by the same rules as everyone else and won their conference-best 49 games. It was an achievement of some measure. Good for them. But was it a real reflection of what they were as a basketball club? Or was that better revealed in the postseason, when they needed to outwork Washington before being eliminated by the fifth-seeded Atlanta Hawks, losing three times at home in a first-to-four?

Because they were unable to do much else, the Sixers chose to rely more on the results of a oncein-league-history warped regular season than on a postseason that every team took seriously. They made cosmetic changes and wasted the draft. The only national news they made was when Simmons held out of training camp and later retreated to deal with reported mental challenges.

Then, in their home opener, they wasted a 12-point, fourthquarter lead and lost when Embiid, tormented already by knee pain, kept wobbling into traffic and failing to score, just like in the Atlanta series. Earlier this week, they were over-run in New York, where the Knicks continue to prove that it is a different Eastern

Conference than last season.

Before a game against the Pistons Thursday, Doc Rivers was dragged into a conversation about some rules tweaks for this season, and whether that explained slow starts by the Sixers, Bucks, Celtics and Nets.

“I’m not smart enough to know if it has or hasn’t,” he said. “I don’t think so. That was a short season last year. You look at teams like Milwaukee and all the teams that are always in the Final Eight. It was a short season for everyone. So I think it’s partly that and partly that the teams that were under everyone are a lot better this year.

“You know, everyone can beat you. I think that’s a little bit of it as well.”

The Sixers, when healthy, are good enough to beat anyone. But vice-versa, too. They will have a full season, a trade deadline and a postseason to show what it all means. The early results, though, were not promising.