The joys of competence: The 76ers rediscover meaningfulness

The Philadelphia 76ers are 0-5 with the worst point differential in the league. For the second year running they have the least efficient offence in the league and the worst net rating.

At present, they are the worst team in the NBA, and that’s a title they’ll likely still be carrying at season’s end. And despite all the ‘worsts’, the Sixers are the best feel good story in basketball.

It wasn’t the losses the past three years that killed Sixers fans – all 199 of them, against just 47 wins – it was the muddled hopelessness that came with them. Defeat is bearable if it comes in ‘the process’ of an end goal – in the process of an ascent.

What made the experience of watching the Sixers so pervasively bleak was that their losses came with the promise of an even deeper descent. That was the plan, to see just how far Morpheus’s rabbit hole of basketball ineptitude could go.

Philadelphia fans thought the 2013-14 season was bad – but two years later they’d be yearning for the days of Michael Carter-Williams and Tony Wroten running pick and pops with Byron Mullens.

Incompetence can be endured if there are distractions. Distractions like hope. The Phoenix Suns are bad right now, but through the pain of accumulating losses they get to feel the sweet novocaine of Devin Booker. They get the excitement of Eric Bledsoe and T.J. Warren, and the occasional firestorm of Brandon Knight. Even though the team is bad, the basement is raised on the Suns thanks to the reliable if uninspiring competence of Tyson Chandler, Jared Dudley and P.J. Tucker.

Phoenix is a mess, but it’s still a group of professionals. Forgiving everything else, players like Bledsoe, Chandler and Dudley know where to go on the court.

The Sixers couldn’t claim such a baseline the past three years. They were a professional team by paycheque, not by nature. What they ran on offence – Isaiah Canaan off the dribble, Robert Covington 30-footers with a hand in his face – did not resemble the NBA.

There were fleeting glimpses of meaningfulness, streaks of light that faintly squeezed through a gap in the Sam Hinkie curtain. In 2014-15 the Sixers had a top four defence with Nerlens Noel on the floor. They unearthed Robert Covington. Last year, Jahlil Okafor in the post gave them a (theoretically) respectable source of scoring for the first time in a long time.

At the same time, though, none of these things were something to really hold onto. People don’t pay to go to games to watch Nerlens Noel survive on perimeter switches. Covington is the eighth or ninth best player on a good team. And for all his talent (and all his problems), it was hard to invest in the Okafor experience last year burdened with the knowledge that it was unlikely that he and Noel could ever co-exist.

This season, those faint, inadequate streaks of light have turned into a beam of sunlight so bright it almost makes you delirious. Where hope was once something theoretical and two to three years down the line, its now in front of our faces. For the past three years, all Sixers fans had to content themselves with were the odds of ping pong balls coming out in their favour. Now they get to watch Joel Embiid hit trail threes and perform his Hakeem Olajuwon impression on a nightly basis.

The Philadelphia hope is almost entirely the product of Embiid. He’s already the most exciting player in the game, as well as the league’s best interview. Thoughts of Embiid being the next Greg Oden have already been somewhat dispelled – Oden never looked like this.

Embiid is an impossibility. Someone who is 7-feet tall should not be able to move with his grace and dexterity. At times he still looks a little awkward out there – running across the lane without a plan and passing to nowhere – but those moments are consumed by the higher Church of Embiid passages.

In his debut he proved that he’s already a capable end of game scorer, going to work on Steven Adams in the post, dazzling him with deft foot work, a perfect release and soft touch. Against the Cavaliers on the weekend he was doing Rajon Rondo ball fakes as part of his post move before hitting hook shots. And the trail threes in rhythm – where he looks like a more fluent Serge Ibaka – just need to stop. They’re too much.

Embiid’s rise has been made all the more special by those around him, players capable of lifting him. Sergio Rodriguez is a more slithery, and much more fun, version of Jose Calderon, giving the Sixers a passing intelligence and point guard competence they haven’t had since Jrue Holiday was shipped to New Orleans.

Gerald Henderson provides a defence and toughness on the wing that has long been absent, and Ersan Ilyasova gives the Sixers a much needed veteran floor spacer to play alongside Embiid, Okafor or Noel. Dario Saric isn’t going to be efficient any time soon, but his skillset – length, passing and shooting – is a perfect fit next to Philly’s high pedigree big men.

Okafor is perhaps the league’s biggest conundrum – a super talented center who doesn’t shoot threes or protect the rim – but when you watch him do his thing, going to work in the post or at the elbows with his pace, timing, strength and touch, you can’t help but feel that he has to have a place in the league, or, at the very least, some value.

Jerryd Bayless is still to return, and will give the Sixers a scoring punch to complement Rodriguez’s altruism. Noel is recovering, and when he comes back in the next month the confusing haze at center will come closer into focus and the team can begin to make decisions. Ben Simmons, who might yet be the brightest star of all, still hasn’t played a minute in the NBA.

The Sixers are still a mess. Three of their four most talented prospects can’t shoot, a death knell in the modern NBA. It’s hard to see how even two of the Embiid, Noel, Okafor trinity can co-exist – it’s almost impossible to see how three of them can be on the same team (sure, you can trade one of them, but there are only 48 minutes for the centre position, and whoever isn’t going to play there is going to see their value dwindle).

But the mess is now doused in hope. And for the first time, competence is now lining the same path as hope. Against the Cavs, the Sixers fell down 41-23 in the second quarter. In the past, that would have been game over. But they came back, all the way to take a lead in the dying minutes. They lost the game, and in the process of losing reminded us how far away they still are. When your final possession play is a Gerald Henderson isolation driving into LeBron James, you’re probably still the worst team in the league.

But no one in Philadelphia will remember the loss. They will, however, remember Embiid hitting all those threes and Okafor eating up anyone the Cavs threw at him. The future is still far away in Philadelphia, but for the first time since the process began, the future is now in sight.