The Sixers have lost four straight, dropping them to 8-6 on the young NBA season. That’s good for sixth place in the East, just a half-game removed from the play-in tournament.
It’s always hard to put a positive spin on a four-game losing streak, but it’s even harder when it comes at such an inopportune time. The Sixers were 8-2, first place in the East, and playing with copious amounts of positive momentum. Now, due to an untimely and deeply unfortunate wave of COVID-positive tests, the Sixers’ season-long outlook has changed substantially.
Despite that, this article will focus on the positives of the last few weeks — and why there’s no reason for panic in Philadelphia, even with a challenging five-game road stretch on the horizon.
Why you shouldn’t panic over Sixers losing streak: The cold spell will end
The NBA is a game of runs, both in the micro and the macro sense. Every game is determined by mini-hot streaks and cold spells. Every stretch of games for an NBA team is similarly dependent on some level of inherent shooting variance. The Sixers began the season on a torrid pace from 3-point land. Now, those numbers have cooled off. The pendulum will swing back the other way eventually.
For example: in three appearances across the Sixers’ four-game slide, Seth Curry is shooting “only” 37.5 percent from deep. That number appears fine on the surface, but he’s seven percentage points below his career average and even further below where he started the season. Georges Niang is shooting 33.3 percent over that span, while Furkan Korkmaz is shooting an even ghastlier 28.9 percent.
You can except three elite shooters to right the ship sooner than later.
Beyond the shooters, Philadelphia has also seen slippage from others on the roster. Saturday’s loss in Indiana, for example, was easily the worst offensive game of the season for Andre Drummond and Shake Milton. Tobias Harris only returned recently, and the Sixers are missing three all-world defenders in Joel Embiid, Matisse Thybulle, and of course, Ben Simmons.
As health is gradually restored and the shooters shake their slumps, Philadelphia will start to look like a league-leading offense again. There’s never a good time to lose four straight on the verge of a lengthy road trip, but it’s early in the season. The Sixers have plenty of time to recover.