The NBA All-Star break could not have come sooner for the Philadelphia 76ers and their fans. Given how poorly this season has gone, it would be welcomed if the Sixers could just stay on break.
A season from Hell does not even begin to describe the bad vibes that have permeated through this team since training camp. It is now mid-February, with the playoffs starting in two months, and the Sixers are somehow in a worse spot than they were when their record was 3-14 through 17 games.
Every single main character for the Sixers has played a leading role in this debacle. It starts at the top with Daryl Morey and Nick Nurse — a fish rots from the head down.
Tyrese Maxey got off to a rough individual start this season and, for the first time in his career, showed cracks in the armor of his effervescent personality.
Paul George was supposed to be the team’s missing connector, but he has instead brought his lackadaisical “California cool” to South Philadelphia, admittedly the worst place in the country to play and act careless.
And, of course, there is the man in the center of it all: Joel Embiid. Whether it be his own ego, organizational malpractice, or (most likely) both, he is the reason this team has no direction today, and he is the reason why it is hard to see the team have a direction in the near future.
Daryl Morey
Daryl Morey has always had a very specific philosophy of team building, dating back to his original trade for James Harden over a decade ago with the Houston Rockets. The greatest collection of talent often does win out in the NBA, but Morey’s hyper-fixation on acquiring superstars has left any roster he has overseen with too many holes to hoist the Larry O’Brien trophy.
This is not meant to be a referendum on Morey’s efforts. The most success of Joel Embiid’s career came with Morey building the team around him. Morey is not afraid to admit his mistakes on a transactional basis, but at some point, he has to evolve his entire line of thinking instead of throwing the same thing at the wall and hoping it sticks.
Morey has been here long enough to understand that Embiid is not like other superstars in the NBA. He is going to miss more time than anyone else and is a far greater injury risk than most others, as well. What Daryl Morey has done is continue to build the team as if he is on the floor every night, still dominating the league, instead of building out a roster that can stay afloat and even succeed when he is not there. For a team that has Tyrese Maxey and Paul George signed to $200-plus million contracts, that is unacceptable.
Nick Nurse
Joel Embiid was at the peak of his basketball powers playing under Nick Nurse until he tore his meniscus last season. Nick Nurse is also, clearly, not the right coach moving forward for the Sixers. Both things can be true.
Nick Nurse won a championship as head coach of the Toronto Raptors behind an all-time great playoff run by Kawhi Leonard and going through a Golden State Warriors team that saw both Kevin Durant tear his Achilles tendon and Klay Thompson tear his ACL in the Finals. Kawhi Leonard then left for the Clippers, and the Raptors never found a semblance of that success again.
That is not all on Nurse, of course. Kawhi had an argument at the time for being the single most effective player in the sport on a game-to-game basis when he played. Kyle Lowry was not getting any younger either (and still is not, as Sixers fans know). The roster was incredibly clunky. However, Nick Nurse showed his hand as a coach during the Raptors’ descent, and it was overlooked for the most part when he came to Philadelphia for those aforementioned reasons.
Nick Nurse needs a dominant offensive force on his roster to make up for his lack of innovation on that end of the floor. When that force leaves like Leonard or rarely suits up like Embiid, he has not shown the ability to adjust- and he has had years to figure something out. Defense is Nurse’s specialty, and even that has not been consistently good enough. His players in Toronto were tuning him out as his tenure was coming to an end, and it sure seems like that is the case here, too.
Tyrese Maxey
It has been a tough year for Tyrese Maxey, even as he has started to pick up his level of play these past couple of months. He was very poor offensively by his standards to start the season. He put on a lot of muscle over the summer to play more physically, and there’s been a lot of speculation that it affected his shooting stroke for a while before his body adjusted. The weight of expectations that come from signing a massive contract extension did not help either.
With Joel Embiid and Paul George both out when the season started, Maxey was not capable of carrying the team to victories on his own. As the losses piled up, so did his visible, outward frustration. That was something he had never really shown before, and it continued for the first three months of the season. To his credit, he has pulled himself out of the funk he was in, but now we know somewhere in that blinding smile is a man who is not happy with the state of affairs right now.
Paul George
The larger the sample we see from Paul George, the more obvious his intentions in a Sixers uniform become. It does not matter that he has not gotten nearly as much playing time with Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey as he and everyone would like. It does not matter that he has been banged up a few times—including currently with a tendon issue in his finger—because everyone on the team has. What matters are his actions on the court.
Paul George made it clear that he wanted to stay and end his career in his home state of California. Still, when he signed with a team as far away from California as possible for as much money as possible, he said all the right things. He had a preexisting friendship with Embiid and quickly looked to develop one with Maxey. It felt like the Sixers finally had the core in place that they wanted.
As the season has gone on, however, George has become less and less engaged. He has been bad offensively all year- sometimes that happens. But as the Sixers have continued to plummet, so have his efforts everywhere else on the court. It is reasonable to think he did not expect the vibes to be this awful, and he is also 34 years old, but it is becoming increasingly evident that he has no heart in this. Kelly Oubre and Guerschon Yabusele might not make nearly as much money, but they give a damn. Tyrese Maxey also makes significantly less money than George, and he gives a damn too.
Joel Embiid
Where to even start…
Joel Embiid tore his meniscus in Jan. 2024. He rushed back for the playoffs, but the Sixers were dispatched in the first round while he played physically compromised. He then played in the Olympics and won a Gold Medal. By the time training camp and the start of the NBA season roll around, he is nowhere to be found.
To make matters worse, any time someone was asked about his health or his absence, nobody gave a real answer. That trend has continued literally to this day. Joel Embiid has played a total of 17 games this season. The Sixers are 8-9 in those games. Last year, in Embiid’s 39 games played, the Sixers were 31-8. Tyrese Maxey called him out in a closed-door meeting that someone decided needed to be open-door.
Then Lisa Salters of ESPN reported that Embiid himself stated that he would “likely require” another surgery and an extended recovery time after the season.
If that is the case, why is Embiid playing at all? It is completely nonsensical that a player who needs knee surgery announces the need while the team does not mention the idea once and for the player to be currently suited up in an NBA basketball game the moment the public is told of this.
This is truly infuriating stuff that does not happen to any normal franchise in the NBA. These persisting issues are as much, if not more, on Joel than on the Sixers organization. Shut it all down. Destination nowhere.
