The Sixers’ Season From Hell Continues Unabated

Never ask how things can get worse…

In the latest calamity coming out of Sixer-land, Paul George suffered a hyperextended left knee on Wednesday. (Screenshot: ESPN)

Sometimes, you have a season where everything just goes right. For examples of such charmed years, see the 2014-15 Golden State Warriors, or the 2023-24 Boston Celtics.

But sometimes, you have the exact opposite of that.

Which brings us to the 2024-25 Philadelphia 76ers.

Back before the season, I wrote that the Sixers’ new Big Three — with Paul George joining Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey — had championship potential, based on the traditional relationship between star power and rings. But as I also noted there and in a follow-up post, the relationship between star-powered cores and titles was fraying in recent years, with the 2020-2024 period yielding the lowest championship success rate for star-laden rosters in any 5-year block since at least 2000.

There might be a number of reasons for this, but one which stood out to me in that second piece was the increased prevalence of star injuries — and the way the economics of the league makes it harder to compensate when those injuries happen:

“[T]here are structural reasons to think that this trend isn’t merely small-sample noise. With injuries playing as large a role in the playoffs as ever, it might be exposing a flaw in the model that relies on a few core stars to be healthy. The NBA has also been making a concerted effort to discourage this approach to team-building — how many times do we hear the phrase ‘second apron’ nowadays?? — or, even if you do manage to assemble your stars, make it difficult to surround them with any kind of supporting cast.”

It’s still early, but the 2024-25 Sixers might go down as the ultimate cautionary tale for these forces at work. It took 14 games before Embiid, Maxey and George appeared together in the starting lineup for the first time this season, and they only played a grand total of six minutes together before George exited Wednesday’s game with a hyperextended left knee.

Here’s a breakdown of all the different star combos the Sixers have used (or not) so far this season, along with their on-court efficiency ratings, per the wonderful PBPStats:

Aside from those six minutes with all three stars, plus the 42 minutes that Embiid played without either Maxey or George over the past week or so, Philly has rung up significantly negative point margins in all of its different configurations, most notably including Embiid/George and Maxey/George. And as I wrote early on, before Embiid or George had made their season debuts, the Maxey-only version of the Sixers — which has still made up the bulk of the team’s minutes — looks very bad.

(Ironically, the 156 minutes that Philly played without any of their stars is among the team’s least-negative combos, though 151 of those came in either low- or medium-leverage situations.)

After George’s injury, the Sixers will likely need to survive even deeper into the season without playing their Big Three at full strength, further testing the depth of a team where only two of 11 players with 100+ minutes (Jared McCain and Guerschon Yabusele) boast a positive Estimated RAPTOR rating. And with a record of 2-12, tied for the fourth-worst start in franchise history, time is starting to run out already.

Is it possible to salvage a season that starts 2-12? Sure, it’s possible. But if we go back to the 1976 ABA-NBA merger, only two of the 48 teams that started 2-12 finished with a .500 record or better: the 1976-77 Chicago Bulls (who won 44 games) and the 2004-05 Chicago Bulls (who won 47). The average across all 2-12 teams who played an 82-game schedule, however, was just 23.3 wins.

One place that still believes in the Sixers’ star potential is the betting market. As of Wednesday, FanDuel still gave Philly -420 odds to make the Eastern Conference playoffs, which works out to 78 percent after removing the vigorish. That number has dipped from Philly’s 92 percent mark in preseason, but not by as much as you might expect when a team starts 2-12. Contrast that with the other component of my composite NBA forecast model, which is based on rolling power ratings for each team derived from game results. By that accounting, the Sixers were down to just a 21 percent to make the playoffs on Thursday morning:

The oddsmakers clearly think the Sixers’ stars will eventually get healthy and figure things out. And maybe that’s true, as little precedent as there is of teams overcoming this kind of start and making anything of their season.

For the record, I also want to make it clear that Daryl Morey and the Sixers’ brain trust was not wrong to pursue George and double down on the star model. With so much pressure to earn Philly the results to match their self-conception as a first-class NBA franchise, and the team having topped out no higher than the second round previously in the Embiid Era, they had to try something to achieve different results.

But sometimes even the most well-informed bets fail anyway.

The Sixers aren’t quite guaranteed to be in that group yet… but unless they turn around their Season From Hell soon, this group is destined to be one of the most spectacular examples in NBA history of everything going sideways.

---

Filed under: NBA