An hour before the Sixers played the Bulls on Monday night, Chicago center Nikola Vucevic, clad in black sweats, headed to the court in the Wells Fargo Center to test what had been described by coach Billy Donovan as a balky calf muscle.
Vucevic, the leading remaining scorer on a team that had shed Zach LaVine at the trade deadline, tried a few left-handed hooks from the right block, then the left. He went around the horn while shooting mid-range jumpers, then three-pointers.
Finally he huddled with the trainers, and when game time rolled around, he was in street clothes.
Chicago, 22-35 coming in and already without four other guys, then went out and whipped the Sixers, 142-110.
That’s right — 142-110.
And yes, it was far worse than that. Chicago led by 50 at one point in the second half.
Clearly the Bulls don’t understand the assignment this time of year. Clearly they need a tanking TED talk.
The home team, not so much. En route to dropping their eighth straight game, the 20-37 Sixers were down nine after one and by 17 at the half, having surrendered 75 points. That is Chicago’s highest-scoring first half of the season.
The boos started in the second quarter. The “E-A-G-L-E-S” chants came in the third, after Chicago went up 30.
And on and on it went. Josh Giddey made like Magic Johnson, with 25 points, 16 rebounds, six assists and three blocks. Kevin Huerter bombed in seven 3-pointers and scored 23. Zach Collins, Vucevic’s stand-in, generated 19 and was a team-best plus-41. Somebody named Dalen Terry came off the bench to score 17.
It was so bad that it appeared the Ghosts of Tanks Past had shown up in the arena. There was a guy seated in the lower bowl wearing a No. 47 Sixers jersey. That’s similar to the one Andrei Kirilenko would have donned, had he ever reported after a December 2014 trade with Brooklyn, at the height of The Process.
Alas, the jersey had the fan’s name on the back.
By the end the few fans who remained were reduced to chanting the name of the recently acquired David Roddy, who emerged as the king of garbage time, with 12 points.
Believe it or not, it’s better this way.
Seriously, it is.
Better that there are no illusions of the playoffs or the play-in tournament. Better that the Sixers take a Zippo to a season already in the dumpster. Better, in a practical sense, that they increase the possibility of retaining that top-six-protected first-round draft pick they dealt to Oklahoma City with Al Horford in December 2020.
Sure, keep telling yourself that.
Twenty-five games remain, 11 of them at home. You really want to watch that, again and again and again?
Just spitballing here, but guessing Nick Nurse would not.
“Obviously just the overall vibe was really poor from the start,” he said. “The first quarter just set the tone for the game, and there just didn’t seem to be a lot of energy or life or vibe tonight from our guys.”
He attributed that to “not handling the situations that are going on with guys in and out.” Speaking of which, the uncertainty continues to swirl around Joel Embiid and his left knee, with the Inquirer reporting that “radical” surgeries are a possibility. When asked about shutting his center down for the season, Nurse said the Sixers “are not there yet as an organization.”
And the team, meanwhile, is going nowhere.
“There are a lot of games left,” Nurse said. “We’ve got to be professional. We’ve got to go out and play. First of all everybody needs to look at themselves – what they can do better, and look at what they can do better for the team. And do our jobs. Be professional.”
Donovan offered something of a tanking tutorial before the game. His own team is in a situation similar to that of the Sixers, in that the Bulls stand to gain by losing. They gave up this year’s first-round pick to San Antonio in an August 2021 trade for DeMar DeRozan, but it is top-10-protected.
First, Donovan mentioned the integrity-of-the-game issues that accompany tanking.
“I really respect this responsibility we have organizationally to people, to go out there and compete and do our very, very best,” he said. “And I get the other side. I do. But that’s kind of the stance we’ve taken.”
He also questioned what kind of message tanking sends to a young team. And finally, he mentioned how the draft offers no guarantees.
“There’s been some guys that have obviously skyrocketed and taken off right away,” he said. “And there’s been some other guys that really haven’t panned out. … So sometimes, like in the draft, you can sit there and say, we’re going to do all this stuff, and then you don’t even know maybe what you’re going to get.”
The Process-era Sixers spent high draft picks on Nerlens Noel, Michael Carter-Williams and Jahlil Okafor, in addition to Embiid. On the other hand, they took Tyrese Maxey at No. 21 in 2020 and Jared McCain at No. 16 last year. So you just never know.
Still, the argument for tanking has a great deal of merit. A team wants to give itself as many bites of the high-first-round apple as it can. It’s just that you’d rather not watch the, ya know, process — that you would prefer the Sixers, as Nurse said, “keep trying to fight.”
“I’ve got to get them back on track, gotta get ‘em together,” he said, when asked about the argument for pulling the plug on the season. “I don’t really have time to analyze what outsiders are saying. We’ve gotta look at ourselves in the mirror and get to work and like I said, be more professional, and go out there and give some effort and energy and play hard.”
He ended his presser by again mentioning the negative vibe hovering over the club.
“Things that are going on are tough,” he said. “We just couldn’t respond tonight, but we will next game.”
There will be those seated in the stands, whether wearing an Andrei Kirilenko jersey or not, hoping otherwise. But even if they do, certainly they don’t want to watch too many games like the one they witnessed Monday. Certainly they’d rather not witness the sausage being made in quite that fashion.