Twice already this regular season, the website Defector has posted blogs about how the horrid and miserable Philadelphia 76ers might be stabilizing and revving up for a charge up the standings. Ridiculous, foolish, irresponsible blog behavior. No more of this! The 76ers are cooked. A last-second bucket Saturday by Nic Claxton of the aimless Brooklyn Nets sent Philly to its seventh consecutive loss and ninth in 10 games, dropping them to a season-worst 16 games below .500. They now hold the 12th seed in the Eastern Conference, one game in the loss column out of the bottom of the play-in and a whopping 10.5 games from the sixth seed. Do not stop with a single fork: Empty your silverware drawer into a cannon, aim the cannon at their cowering forms, and fire away. It would be a mercy.
It is possible to drop a game to a bad team without necessarily being a very bad team yourself. The 76ers are very bad. Their core was in place Saturday and was roundly outplayed by the various fungible goobers presently filling out Brooklyn's rotation. Tyrese Maxey was his usual heroic self, but Paul George was in Tobias Harris mode, and Joel Embiid was history's saddest statue. Brooklyn led most of the way, and very comfortably through the middle quarters, until a spell of sloppy offense and a Philly rebounding edge allowed the otherwise punchless 76ers back into the game late. Notably, Embiid touched the court not at all in the fourth quarter, which head coach Nick Nurse chalked up unconvincingly to the chemistry of the lineup on the floor. To their credit, the 76ers played with spirit down the stretch, but they needed a pair of missed freebies to stay within a bucket, and the game-winner came on an embarrassingly anticlimactic put-back of what should've been an easy defensive rebound for George.
Prudence may finally put this sad-sack team out of its misery. Embiid, who has not looked well for even one entire game this season, recently told Lisa Salters that he will probably require another meniscus surgery at the conclusion of this season, by way of acknowledging that injuries have made it so that he is presently incapable of playing winning basketball on an NBA floor. Sunday evening, Shams Charania of ESPN reported that the 76ers are now finally "consulting doctors and considering alternative options" for Embiid, up to and including season-ending surgery. Shutting him down in any normal season might feel like a surrender, but in this one it could hardly make the 76ers any crummier: They're pretty crummy in any case, but they're worse by net rating and dramatically worse by points per possession so far this season when Embiid is on the court. Guerschon Yabusele has been approximately one zillion times better and livelier in Embiid's place. Also, and this is not nothing, the team's vibes are worlds better with the undersized Frenchman holding it down. On top of just stinking real bad, the sight of Embiid groaning, wincing, limping, and bumbling around out there has to make everyone involved feel like total shit.
Hoops fans are slowly resigning themselves to the end of Embiid. I gasped this morning to recall that Embiid won his MVP award just two years ago. He was excellent when he was upright last year but was basically never upright, and was so busted down for Philadelphia's first-round playoff exit that his exertions started to resemble body horror. Embiid rushed a return to the floor late last season, then infamously did not give himself a full summer to heal, and now he is a zombie. Even the hope of getting things right this time around seems far-fetched: As Nate Duncan observed on his podcast before the all-star break, surgical intervention inevitably produces diminishing returns. Eventually Embiid is going to run out of salvageable tissue, as happened to Blake Griffin. Cartilage replacement is not unheard of, but it's noteworthy that Lonzo Ball's surgeon attempted to talk him out of having it done, on the grounds that it could make things worse and that even in a best-case scenario it would mean years, plural, of recovery and rehab. Ball was then 25 years old and proportioned pretty normally; Embiid is 30 and humongous.
That's putting several carts before the horse. For now, it is enough to say that if Embiid is hurting and incapable of giving very much more than he is, the 76ers have basically no reason to wait even a couple of days to shut him down. They're rocketing down the standings; even Daryl Morey cannot earnestly believe they have any hope of a dark-horse run to the title in their present condition. In the East's basement, with the vibes of hell, with Embiid decaying before our eyes and with George starting to make noise about his own ailing body, the 76ers have to weigh the rewards of snagging an unlikely and deeply shameful 10th seed against the risks of putting more pointless wear on core players who, if nothing else, at least retain some theoretical trade value.
It sucks to be thinking about asset value and engaging the general manager lobe of your poor brain, but the 76ers also have a first-round pick in the upcoming and loaded-seeming draft to consider, which will go to the Oklahoma City Thunder if it falls out of the top six of the draft order. Perhaps a month ago it was hard to imagine the 76ers plummeting all the way into the pick's protections, but the Trail Blazers and Nets are rising, the Bulls are once again failing to fail, and Monday morning the 76ers find themselves in sole possession of the NBA's sixth-worst record. It is certainly not a coincidence that they are thinking long and hard about Embiid's knee. Even a couple of weeks of committed self-sabotage could help to meaningfully steady the franchise's future.
Just over three weeks ago, Morey said it was still possible, with a little bit of squinting, to see a championship contender in the current 76ers. They've lost six straight since then, all but one of them with their core trio on the court together. The only way to detect a contender in there now is with eyes shut, and with fingers jammed in ears, and while shouting "LA LA LA" at maximum volume. The longer Morey keeps that up, the more gruesome the scene may be when he next dares to take an honest look.
