Exits: The process of stalling

Time as a loop the Sixers have mastered.

Jun 26, 2022

Someone unsubscribed from Basketball Feelings earlier this season and the reason they gave, that I didn’t see until months later because I didn’t know that section for subscriber stats existed, was “Anti sixers”. At first I thought it was funny, but I’ve since recalled that comment way more often than what is necessary.

It’s true, I’ve been critical of the Sixers here. Maybe more than other franchises. I’ve also written about the team more than any other, definitely this season, and if the bent was biting it was also discerning, coming from a place of “this could be better”. There was this on the franchise exorcising itself of Ben Simmons’ ghosts of past ceilings, this on the hurricane of Joel Embiid, this on Daryl Morey getting what he wanted and how, more largely, it’s not so bad to want what you do. And finally this on Simmons’ mental health, the discomfort with it, and our own limited capacity for difficult conversions with no clear endings.

The Sixers did an awful lot this season and at times seemed to revel in the gaze it got them. The prolonged attention all those decisions generated. If you watched Hustle then you let yourself get lost in alternate reality the movie’s 117 minute run time made for the Sixers. If you watched the Sixers this season, you were treated to something of the same. Less cinematic, no score, but decisions without the weight or response of the rest of the league’s reality.

What’s detriment without shame? Stalling. And at any minute, something the Sixers might be doing.

Here’s what we know to be true of the franchise this past season: Made plain how much need they had to jettison a star; had some difficulty in jettisoning that star because, partially, they were not on speaking terms with him; so, first had to confirm that his whereabouts would not coincide with theirs; attempted various modes of communication which included inference, gaslighting, pleas, and finally revisionist face-saving where the timeline for his jettisoning was extended into something open-ended, possible years, so that any failed method of communication up to then could be absorbed and diluted the way time will with all conversations and the events surrounding them.

And that didn’t even get us to All-Star.

Am I anti-Sixers? I would argue that my fascination for the franchise springs from a place that has an inclination to find or make sense of something. And that an inclination like that comes before assigning — if ever — a pro or anti stance to something. A kind of intellectual and emotional suspension (stalling).

What compels me most about (toward?) the Sixers is their drive to change the team’s circumstances, but in doing so only ever employ the same methods, again and again, as if what will work best is what didn’t. In that, a quality of chronic striving to reverse fortune not with new means but by the methods that bankrupted in the first place. Maybe it’s the blind tenacity I’m entranced by. A hope that springs eternal, but with teeth that won’t hesitate to bite the hand that offers an out, a change, or a scrap of reflection. It feels like staring at the sun.

Here’s what we know to be true of the franchise: Morey’s convictions, however misplaced they may yet end up being, are real; James Harden needs to take a salary cut this summer or the front office’s hands are tied in building a deeper team around him; Embiid had to have surgery on both hands — both hands — after the playoffs and while historic or symbolic readings of this skew toward punishment, and we should resist the rush to metaphor because this is somebody’s livelihood, the person leaning hardest toward that interpretation of self sacrifice is probably Embiid himself; Doc Rivers, I don’t know, it doesn’t seem as if he’s particularly enjoying himself but when has it ever?

The compulsion for Philly is to do this on their own terms. Not best terms, as in this is the group we’ve got, the options we’ve got for changing it, and the time we have to do it in, but terms that supersede the NBA’s timeline. Or even, basketball time, as we know it.

Morey loves the numbers side, the analytics-first approach to codifying success in order to achieve more of it. But some of his biggest decisions were borne out of nostalgia — Harden, not only in acquisition but the whole, heady trust of him, and now the 23rd pick and Danny Green for De’Antony Melton, who Morey drafted to the Rockets in 2018, the last pick he’d make in his tenure there as GM.

Aside from injuries (but also, those too), the Sixers faced the same deficits this postseason that they have since Embiid took the team to the playoffs the first time. Individualized starters and a revolving door of a bench. Eroding attempts at maintaining a culture for fixes that would wind up setting the team back somewhere else — like plugging holes while gauging out new ones. It’s not that other franchises don’t do this, it’s that Philadelphia knows itself best on a loop. The longest span of continuity has been Embiid’s career and I only mean that as a marker, not that he, or fans, or the franchise, has felt anything like a bucolic stretch.

It’s impressive, when you think about all that upheaval, that this has been a team able to make winning a consistency.

Lasting decisions, somewhere along the process of making them, have to be fixed to something. It could be hope for an outcome, a desire for change, but they can’t be made in the flux of a moment or bound to a feeling as febrile as desperation. Decisions not rooted in anything but compulsion, by the time you’re making them, already have an expiry. I promise, this isn’t a Process metaphor, but it strikes me that decisions that have spent too long in the purgatory of process have the same problem. The outcome becomes the decision. How good, or necessary, or important it was to make, not what the result of making it is meant to be.

(But waiting is fine. There is a seat and things to do, plenty to watch. Should you get up and ask how much longer? No, you’ve been instructed to wait. You wait. Waiting is different than idling, waiting is foundation for some future purpose. Except, the longer you wait, the harder it is to feel the urgency that once leaned against, dutifully compelled, the waiting. Should you get up and check? No, no, you’re sure you’ll be next, that’s always how it goes isn’t it? Give up the spot and have your name called next? You’ll check when the next person leaves. You’ll check when you’re the last one in the room. You’ll check when you’ve run out of reasons to stall. And now you’re waiting to wait.)

Here is where the Sixers currently sit, an NBA franchise stuck in a self-made space-time continuum where the fourth dimension isn’t time, but the process of stalling it. Like a very nice, well-equipped waiting room with everything you could ever want to bide time while you watch others — the Raptors, the Celtics, the Nets, thankfully not yet the Knicks — pick a door and walk through it.