Well, Sixers fans, we made it.
The regular season has ended, the dust has settled, and 72 games for each NBA team sit either comfortable or ruefully in the rearview mirror.
Some teams (eight, to be exact) will participate in this week’s play-in tournament. Others are strengthening their connection to the cosmic, hoping against hope that the lottery gods will bless them with good fortune this July.
Read the full piece here.
On Tuesday, I had the pleasure of speaking with Bleacher Report’s Jake Fischer. In addition to the notoriety he’s gained through his excellent reporting on various outlets for nearly a decade now, Jake is especially well known in these parts for being a once-and-forever Liberty Baller. The impetus for our conversation was the release of Jake’s first book: Built to Lose: How the NBA’s Tanking Era Changed the League Forever, which was released on May 5.
Read the full piece here.
Today, the Sixers sit atop the Eastern Conference at 43-21, winners of four straight.
The team holds a 0.5-game lead over second-seeded Brooklyn, but Philadelphia also possesses the all-important tiebreaker. If the Sixers and Nets finish the season with identical records, Philly gets the first overall seed in the East.
Read the full piece here.
This is not a painstaking clap-back against the mainstream media and prospective voters who seem to have all but penciled in Nikola Jokic as this year’s MVP. I care not to spend a thousand words pounding the table for Joel Embiid’s candidacy, his defense, his gargantuan impact on the court. I won’t be delving into how we ought to actually define “valuable” in present-day basketball.
Read the full piece here.
There’s only so much stock that one can (and should) put into regular season performance. Sometimes, the regular season serves as an accurate predictor of the teams most prepared to wreak havoc in the playoffs. In other seasons, it’s viewed as a lengthy but altogether hollow appetizer for the real tournament. Oftentimes the league’s best teams pre-playoffs and post-playoffs are quite different. LeBron James’ Cavaliers, of course, would famously take it easy during the 82-game marathon, worried more about maintaining a healthy roster than climbing in the Eastern Conference standings. By the same token, teams like the 2019-20 Milwaukee Bucks or the Lowry-DeRozan Toronto Raptors ran roughshod through the regular season, only to be exposed in the playoffs at the hands of a lower-seeded team with a bigger and more prepared star.
Read the full piece here.