Philadelphia 76ers: As it turns out, the season isn’t over after all

Pump the breaks on the Philadelphia 76ers’ season being over, folks.

As unnecessary as it may be to say, the last week has been incredibly weird for the Philadelphia 76ers.

They lost Seth Curry to a positive COVID-19 test, a handful of other players to contact tracing, and a few games to the Denver Nuggets and Atlanta Hawks before finally righting the ship in an overtime thriller versus the Miami Heat on the hallowed hardwood of the Wells Fargo Center.

Fans also – justifiably or not – lost their collective stuff over the possibilities of landing James Harden in a trade with Daryl Morey‘s former squad, only to lose out on the deal to a Brooklyn Nets squad willing to cash out essentially every asset not nailed to the floor in a four-team deal that also included the Houston Rockets, the Indiana Pacers, and the Cleveland Cavaliers.

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If you need some time to catch your breath, that is 100 percent understandable – in the meantime, the Sixers still have meaningful basketball to play.

Finally returning to (near) full strength with Matisse Thybulle, Shake Milton, and Tobias Harris all back on the court and in the rotation for Doc Rivers, the Sixes flew out to an early eight-point lead at the end of the first quarter over the Heat and were able to balloon it all the way up to 17 at the end of regulation.

Make no mistake about it; this was a true team win. In a game where Joel Embiid failed to score in double-digits – chalk it up to scoring 45 points in 39 minutes on the two team’s previous meeting two days earlier – the Sixers got meaning full minutes from 14 different players, with six of them scoring in double-digits.

Huh, so you’re telling me at (near) full strength the Sixers are still a very good team? I thought the season was over?

Milton made his triumphant return to the Sixth Man of the Year conversation with a 31(!) point performance, Harris put up a clean 18 on 54 percent shooting from the field, and Ben Simmons picked up his 30th double-double in only 228 games – the third-fastest any player has hit that mark in NBA history according to Sixers Stats.

But wait, if you can believe it – there’s more.

Because the Sixers had to play a week with the peripheral pieces of their roster, players like Isaiah Joe got a chance to prove their mettle in extended action, and that experiment continued even with everyone sans Steph Curry‘s brother back int the lineup. Joe finished out the game tied for the third-most points of any Sixers in the game at 13 and continued to perform like one of the most fearless shooters in the NBA – knocking down four of his team-high eight 3s while playing pretty good defense for all 19 of his minutes.

Hmm, maybe we’ll have to invest a little more time into Joe’s ever-expanding role on the Sixers in the not too distant future…

So, in summation, no, the Philadelphia 76ers’ season isn’t over. Regardless of how you feel about Ben Simmons – and based on our Twitter mentions, some of you really want him gone – it feels incredibly unlikely that this Sixers squad will be undergoing any sort of radical roster reconstruction mid-season with James Harden now a member of the Brooklyn Nets. For better or worse, this is your team, and if their two-game stretch against the Miami Heat is of any indication, it looks like they are still among the best squads in the NBA after all – even if this iteration of the Heat look a lot more like their G-League affiliate than the team that took LeBron James and company to six back in October.