Last year’s Philadelphia 76ers squad is looked upon now as a dysfunctional mess. Looking back, they really were a lot better than people now remember.
The chic thing to do now is to look down upon the 2019-20 Philadelphia 76ers as, basically, a steaming pile of garbage.
With a new head coach, new highly-touted group of assistants and a new administration in charge, the old regime is looked upon with derision, if not outright disdain.
“Thank goodness we have the new better people, not those old incompetent fools we thankfully got rid of,” is the basic refrain from Sixers fandom nowadays.
The latest news, that Ben Simmons practiced away from team last year, due to ‘tension with the Sixers staff’ just cemented the perception that the Sixers last year were a total mess.
(We could make a snide remark and point out Simmons obviously was not working on his jump shot in those private workouts, but that is not the point of the story).
People now consider coach Brett Brown was some kind of a clown and his assistants no help at all. Al Horford did nothing but get in the way on offense and Joel Embiid pretty much moped through much of the season.
The offense was clunky, the defense nowhere near as good as advertised.
Gee whiz, if you did not check the record books, you would think the Sixers last year had been fighting the Minnesota Timberwolves and Cleveland Cavaliers for worst record in the NBA.
The reality was, the 76ers were considered a contender for the NBA championship before the season started. The statistical site 538 gave the Sixers a 55 percent chance of making the NBA finals (they gave the Miami Heat, who eventually did make it, a 4 percent chance).
Coach Brett Brown announced before the season their simple goal, to be the No. 1 seed in the East. That might have been an error, even if Brown believed it. The goals might have been raised too high, and anything less than total success seemed like failure.
But a lot of basketball experts, as well as computers, thought they were going to do really well last year. That might be the problem in evaluating that team.
One can argue, if not for the pandemic stopping the season in its tracks, the Sixers might (I said might) have achieved their goal of making the NBA finals.
Lets knock down some fallacies with a dose of reality:
Their record was so bad, they were only a No. 6 seed
Fact: When play was stopped on March 11, the Sixers had a record o 39-26 and were tied for fifth place in the Eastern Conference with the Indiana Pacers (we are not going to look at games in the Bubble, that is a different animal).
They were only two games behind the Miami Heat for fourth place and four behind the Boston Celtics for third place.
As they always seem to have due to some scheduling anomaly, the Sixers had a fluffball schedule to round out the season. Powerrankingsguru said only the lowly Atlanta Hawks had an easier schedule than the 76ers in the entire Eastern Conference if the schedule had played out.
If you remember the state of the team on March 11, 2020. They had just come back from a road swing without Joel Embiid or Ben Simmons. They had beaten Sacramento and gave the Lakers and Clippers tough games before falling (with much more talent, at home and with fans, the Clippers coached by Doc Rivers held on for a 136-130 win).
On March 11, Embiid was back and tore apart the Detroit Pistons, 124-106, in a game that was never close. Play was halted with the 76ers having 17 more games in the regular season, many against teams looking ahead to draft position, and in no way wanting to win games.
At the time of the stoppage, the Sixers had a .600 winning percentage. This was with Embiid, Simmons and Josh Richardson having missed, at some points, a large stretch of games due to injury. ALl but Simmons were back at that point.
If the Sixers simply won as many of the reaming games as they had been, they would have went 10-7 the rest of the way for a final record of 49-33 on the season. Adjusting it for strength of schedule, it is more realistic that the Sixers would have gone 12-5 in the rest of their games.
That means the clunky,poorly-coached, tension-filled, ill-fitted Sixers, if not for the pandemic, would have ended up 51-31 for the regular season. Well, the 2018-19 76ers, with Jimmy Butler, JJ Redick and whole gang. You know, the team that came within a lucky quadruple bounce of possibly winning the NBA title. Guess what:
They finished with a record of 51-31. Last year’s Sixers would have had an identical record to the previous years with Butler!