Barely 15 games into the season and the Philadelphia 76ers are teetering on the brink of disaster. They are already nine games under .500 and their big three, Joel Embiid, Tyrese Maxey, and Paul George, have only played one game together thus far.
With 66 games left, it is still early on, but no team has ever won a championship or even made the Eastern Conference Finals after previously falling 10 games under .500.
Their poor start even led to a team meeting where Maxey reportedly called out Embiid. Combine that with George hyperextending his left knee for the second time since joining the Sixers and Embiid in and out of the lineup and they are a mess.
The Philadelphia 76ers are quickly becoming the Clippers 2.0.
The Sixers injury luck is reminiscent of the Los Angeles Clippers during the George and Kawhi Leonard era. The two players failed to be healthy at the right time for most of their five-year run, aside from the 2020 NBA Bubble when they went to the West Semi-Finals. Now, it looks like the Sixers are the new version of the Clippers.
Embiid has already missed 12 of their first 16 games and is guaranteed to miss at least a dozen more, with him set to sit at least one game of all remaining back-to-backs. Having their best player miss around one-third of the season makes it much harder to build around him, as we are seeing now. Add in that George has already been injured twice during his short tenure with the Sixers, and it seems like he may continue to struggle to stay healthy.
In the 76ers' defense, team president Daryl Morey did a great job of putting together a team this past summer. Unfortunately, the Sixers' best player is hard to build around given his health and it may be hard to rely on George either.
They do still have Maxey, who has gotten better every season he's been in the league, culminating with him making his first all-star appearance last season. He can continue to get better, and that should give them a floor as a team, though they are in the basement at the moment.
They also have Jared McCain, who has a chance to win Rookie of the Year. The pieces are there for the Sixers to be great, but it also was for the Kawhi-George Clippers, and we know how that turned out. Let's hope that things will be different for the Sixers.