The Sixers play three games this week against teams in a position they’ve been in plenty in recent seasons. Except this year, Sixers fans won’t be on the edge of their seats wondering how the team will disappoint them in the postseason.
The Knicks, Bucks and Timberwolves are this week’s opponents for the Sixers as the 2024-25 season has thankfully reached its penultimate week. If you take a quick glance at the standings you’ll find New York, Milwaukee and Minnesota all in spots the Sixers have been in quite a bit in recent seasons.
The Knicks are third in the East and on their way to a 50+ win regular season. However, New York is currently 0-7 against Boston, Cleveland and Oklahoma City this year. That mark could reach 0-10 for the Knicks too with a pair of games remaining against Cleveland and one to go against Boston in the regular season.
The Bucks are comfortably above the play-in tournament cut line. However, they’re unlikely to get home-court advantage in the first round of the playoffs thanks to the blood clot to Damian Lillard. Milwaukee probably would have reached the 50-win plateau itself if Lillard had been healthy but nevertheless will be in the playoffs and in with a good chance to win a round regardless.
Out West, Minnesota is battling to avoid the play-in tournament. The Wolves are jumbled up with the Grizzlies, Warriors and Clippers for the fifth through eighth seeds in the Western Conference playoffs. It looks like Minnesota will finish with a regular season win total in the high 40s and in a West that appears to be pretty wide open after Oklahoma City, Wolves fans might talk themselves into another deep playoff run with the right draw after making the conference finals last year.
If these situations sound familiar, it’s because they are. Since first making the playoffs with Joel Embiid on the roster in 2017-18, Philadelphia has finished at the top, middle and bottom of the playoff seeding picture. Some years, a deep playoff run was looking promising, if not probable. Other years, it took more of a glass-half-full approach to envision the Sixers ending their conference finals drought, that will get to 24 years with this season’s conclusion.
I don’t blame anyone for buying in during some or all of the previous seven trips to the playoffs. Truthfully, I always questioned why people who just expect pain every year, or always seem to be miserable when discussing their teams, even watch sports.
There is however a difference between always viewing sports through such a negative lens and being able to see an early playoff exit coming for one of your teams. The former is a perspective that bars someone from ever truly enjoying a successful season for one of their teams to the fullest extent. The latter is a realistic perspective that fans can glean from paying close enough attention to their team in the regular season when facing stiffer competition or simply looking a bit too leaky to withstand the inevitable challenges that come with the two-month postseason.
It is that feeling that Sixers fans likely felt time and time again in the last seven springs. Each team seemed to lack mental toughness. There were lots of personnel changes, coaching changes and front office changes from 2018 to 2024. The lack of stability invited enough change around Embiid to where you never saw one roster stay the same long enough to know if it was talented enough to win a championship.
Simply put, regardless of where your expectations lied during the last seven trips to the playoffs, they were all fairly exhausting for different reasons. For at least a couple of the recent playoff exits, you probably thought to yourself “That’s exactly what I thought was going to happen.” So, in an odd way, there is a sense of freedom that comes with a down season like 2024-25 after seven straight trips to the playoffs, especially as we near the end of 2024-25.
Perhaps the nicest thing about The Process was that the game-to-game results did not matter. Everyone knew what was happening and the losses did not come with a lick of frustration. This season of course came with plenty of frustration given the preseason expectations. But if you hopped on the tank train early enough, you’ve been gradually building towards this feeling of freedom.
With the NBA Playoffs right around the corner, I’m now there. I’m at the point where I’m happy to accept a one-year hiatus from the playoffs and willing to deal with how this season went. I say one year because I fully anticipate the Sixers to make every effort to be back in the postseason next year, and they may even be positioned well to do so.
They’ll have a healthy Tyrese Maxey and Jared McCain. Justin Edwards might be a better player next year than he’s been this year — and he’s been a nice silver lining this year. The offseason will hopefully include the return of Quentin Grimes and a top-six draft pick among other things. Those are all positives before we even discuss what next season might look like for Embiid and Paul George.
Maybe this is all just one large coping mechanism for the worst Sixers season since the Andrew Bynum fiasco. But I’m starting to feel more positive about the Sixers as the tank looks more and more successful. As of this writing, they are two wins clear of the Nets for the coveted fifth slot in the lottery standings.
I didn’t spend much time waffling between play-in tournament and tank train this season. The 3-14 start felt like too deep of a hole to dig out of and if I was told after 17 games that the Sixers would have a 64% chance by lottery night to draft in the top six, I would have signed up for it in a heartbeat. With the Sixers now in control of their own destiny to secure that fate, I’m feeling rather liberated in the early spring instead of anxious and fearful.
Provided the 64% chance to retain the pick is achieved, I’m sure the aforementioned fan that chooses to view everything through a negative lens will fixate on the 36% chance Philadelphia sends its first-rounder to Oklahoma City. But not me. The lottery reveal is always a fun rush of emotion. The glee that comes with every card being turned over that helps your team is an awesome feeling, especially when the prize is a player like Cooper Flagg.
Instead of waiting around all regular season for a two-week long playoff series that ends in catastrophic fashion, we get 10 minutes of a lottery reveal that no one has any control over (now’s not the time for conspiracy theories) that will determine how we feel about this season. Given the way the last seven postseasons have gone for the Sixers, I’ll take 10 minutes of an uncontrollable fate over two to four weeks of playoff misery. It’s a nice respite.