For the last month or so, there has been a distinct lack of on-court intrigue for the Philadelphia 76ers. Certainly, it correlates to the uptick in off-court consternation.
From about late February on — the win in Minnesota on Feb. 22, then the win over Miami at home on Feb. 26 in which Joel Embiid was injured — the Sixers followed a pattern. They beat the teams that aren’t trying to win basketball games and lost to the ones that are.
Sometimes they handled business against tanking teams with aplomb, other times with undue drama.
The losses to contenders yo-yoed between routs and occasionally competitive but ultimately fruitless outings. With one or two exceptions over about a 20-game stretch, maybe Portland at home was the only edge case, you knew by looking at the injury report and the teams’ records in an unusually stratified NBA if the 76ers were going to win or lose that night, and the result rarely disproved that.
In lieu of on-court complication, the main battle was on the trainer’s table or in the vibes department, after the trade of Jared McCain and the lack of reinforcements.
Saturday changed that.
By going into Charlotte and beating the streaking Hornets, 118-114, the 76ers not only won for the fourth time in five games and the seventh in 10, but they beat another playoff aspirant on their home court, a rare quality win in a sea of just plain wins.
With it comes a glimpse at maybe, just maybe, what this team could be.
Charlotte had won five straight, among them quality home victories over the Knicks, Heat and Magic. They entered Saturday 23-6 over their last 29 games, on pace to end a playoff drought that stretches to 2016.
With Kon Knueppel, Lamelo Ball, Brandon Miller and Moussa Diabate, hoops hope is springing in Charlotte for the first time in a decade. Coach Nick Nurse took great pains at Friday’s practice to vouch for the Hornets’ surge being for real and rooted in the fundamentals of their up-tempo play style and development of the talented assets they’ve accumulated through years of losing.
Saturday, in what both teams hope isn’t a play-in preview, the 76ers got the better of Charlotte. Paul George, looking good from the rest afforded him by 25 games off for a drug suspension, scored 26 points to go with 13 rebounds and four steals. His 3-pointer off an inbounds with 1:04 left put the 76ers up for good in a back-and-forth final quarter.
Tyrese Maxey, in his first game back after 10 out with a right pinkie tendon strain, had 26 points, seven rebounds and eight assists.
Joel Embiid, in his second game back after 13 out with a right oblique strain, posted 29 points, plus the game-sealing block of a Miller 3-point attempt with eight seconds left. It’s just the third time in two seasons that all three have scored 20 or more points in a game.
At the end of the night, that put the 76ers in seventh place in the East, a half-game behind fifth-place Toronto and sixth-place Atlanta. They’re two games clear of Miami and Charlotte in ninth and 10th, respectively. The 76ers own the head-to-head tiebreak over the Hornets and can earn the same over the Heat in Monday’s game in Miami.
For the last month or so, everything about the 76ers has been in the conditional tense: If everyone gets healthy, maybe this is what they can look like.
The reserves kept the team above water: 13-12 without George, 6-7 without Embiid, 4-3 in the games without George, Maxey, Embiid and Kelly Oubre. The team that won six of eight in early January or rattled off five straight wins around the trade deadline was in there somewhere, just needing a little healthy runway to get out.
They’re healthy at the right time. If they can bottle up a 20-game sample of that healthy, it could stretch past the first round of the playoffs. Perhaps no team would benefit from avoiding the play-in more than them.
“I think it excites the city,” Oubre said Friday, a day before his eight-game absence for a left elbow ligament strain ended. “It excites everybody in the organization, because this is the team that they put together, and we can finally go out there and show what we can do and find that rhythm and that groove in the right time of the season.
“Hats off to everybody that contributed this year, but we did a good job of, obviously, one making this year better than last year, that this wasn’t an abysmal season. And now we can only just continue to climb up and get better from here. But we’ve got to remember where we started. I think last year is where we started, and we can only go up from there.”
Eight games remain. Four are against playoff teams, including hosting Minnesota and Detroit. Three are against tankers. Miami is the most ambiguous of the bunch. The 76ers have a pathway to the fifth or sixth seed. A playoff series against the Knicks or Cavaliers won’t be easy.
But the 76ers cleared the first hurdle by avoiding a repeat of last year’s injury-riddled debacle. They will finish over .500 and in the play-in at worst. More, they’ll get the chance to test the assertion around which this team was built: that a Big 3 of Embiid, Maxey and George can win a playoff series.
Given what they’ve endured in the past, just getting this far is not to be taken for granted.
Contact Matthew De George at mdegeorge@delcotimes.com