The Sixers Are the NBA’s Loudest Circus — But the Pelicans Are the Real Sideshow

In a battle of the league's most disappointing teams, New Orleans actually somehow beats Philly.

Tyrese Maxey of the Philadelphia 76ers dribbles the ball against Jeremiah Robinson-Earl of the New Orleans Pelicans at the Wells Fargo Center on January 10, 2025. (Mitchell Leff/Getty Images)

If the Philadelphia 76ers’ once-promising disaster of a 2024-25 season followed the stages of grief, it blew past denial, anger and bargaining back before the New Year, and now sits somewhere between depression — Joel Embiid is reportedly “morose” about his ongoing knee problems, as the team continues its slide into total oblivion — and acceptance — while outwardly denying that they were tanking, Paul George all but admitted the team had lost any will or ability to fight through its recent struggles:

“We’ve shown no signs of a team that will compete,” George said. “And we just don’t have the habits [that] a playoff-contending team would have. To be honest, right now, it’s a little far-fetched. All we can do is work hard, try to just keep going for one another.”

It seems like every NBA season needs a trainwreck to gawk at. Preferably that’s the LeBron Lakers, as happened in 2018-19 and 2021-22 — but if necessary, a team like the Sixers will do just fine. They went all-in on the Big Three strategy, surrounding Embiid and Tyrese Maxey with George to form a classic superteam, despite the fact that this team-building tactic has lost effectiveness in recent years. When these types of rosters go bust, the rest of the league tends to erupt in an outpouring of schadenfreude.

Because of this, the Sixers are certainly the highest-profile flop of 2024-25. But are they actually the most disappointing team? By the numbers, there may actually be another, even more catastrophic wreck flying under the NBA’s radar.

One simple way to measure the disappointment factor for each NBA team is to look at expected Wins Above Replacement (WAR) for players on their roster, versus what kind of production the team actually ended up getting. And for measuring expected value, I’ve always really liked this concept of “WARcel” projections created by MLB data guru Tom “Tangotiger” Tango.

The idea is simple: Take the weighted average of a player’s most recent three seasons, regress that to the mean by some amount, and adjust for aging effects. The MLB version has its own specific parameters, but here’s what seems to work best for NBA WARcels:

• Take a weighted average of the previous three seasons’ WAR per 82 team games, giving 71% weight to last season, 21% to the year before, and 8% to the year before that.

• Regress to the mean by multiplying the previous value by 88 percent.

• Create an age-adjustment modifier by multiplying 0.1015 times [28.95 minus the player’s age in the season being projected]. (So essentially, players under 29 will gain value, while players 29 or older will lose value.) Add that to the player’s regressed, weighted WAR.

And that’s it! You can also prorate the entire league’s WAR up/down to match the actual observed total if you want. I did that here so that every team would add up to net-zero WAR versus expected, but it’s not strictly necessary.

If we add up those totals for each team this season, we find that the Cleveland Cavaliers are the most surprising team in the league — yes, they probably were going to be good, but this good? — while the Memphis Grizzlies have bounced back from last year’s disaster decisively.

At the other end of the spectrum, we do indeed find the Sixers at roughly 17 wins below expected, thanks to massive WAR shortfalls from Embiid (-6.0) and George (-4.1). No other team has two players who missed the mark by such a degree this season.

However, the New Orleans Pelicans check in as 11.8 wins of disappointment worse than Philadelphia, even. At more than 28 WAR below projected, they are far and away the most underwhelming team in the league — and in fact, they are tracking to be the third-most disappointing team in the NBA since 1979-80 by this measure:

Why are the Pels so disappointing, even relative to flameouts like the Sixers — which will probably be remembered for a longer time?

For one thing, Philly is a far bigger media market than New Orleans, with fans that are famously insane. Every fiasco is magnified under a microscope in a town like that. (I should know, as a former resident of the city myself.)

But the compositions of the two clubs also feed the surprising nature of the comparison. While most of Philly’s shortfall is tied up in its stars, the Pelicans’ success last season was built around depth — nine different players had at least 2.0 WAR — and thus, their struggles also reflect a depth of players not performing to expectations up and down the roster:

Even my beloved Herb Jones, whom I called the most underrated player in the NBA last season, saw a big dip in WAR/82 after being limited to just 20 games due to a shoulder injury — and was recently shut down for the season. He was part of a group that included 17 of the Pelicans’ top 18 projected players all missing their WAR forecasts.¹ Your season never even has a chance when so many players underperform all at the same time.

The Sixers aren’t much better in that regard — 14 of their top 16 projected players are also running shy of expectations — but that could have been mostly offset if Embiid and George delivered. (Instead, both have missed time — Embiid most of all — and neither has performed at their usual levels even when healthy.) The underwhelming role players are just the icing on the misery cake that has been this season in Philly.

Ultimately, both the Sixers and Pelicans serve as cautionary tales for how quickly an NBA team’s hopes can unravel. The Sixers’ collapse is more ostentatious, the age-old tale of a superteam gone wrong in one of basketball’s most intense markets. But Pelican fans might be quietly experiencing an even worse kind of pain: Not the sharp sting of a team imploding under the national spotlight, but the simultaneous failure of an entire roster.

Is it better to be the high-profile trainwreck everyone gawks at? Or the slow-motion collapse that might be even worse, but goes less noticed? Who’s to say. But it’s clear that both franchises have a lot of work cut out for them in recovering from the historic disasters they suffered this season.

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Filed under: NBA

1. One of those, Brandon Ingram, was traded at the deadline, but the remaining roster is in flux (to put it lightly).