To say Jared McCain plays like a veteran feels banal at this point. It doesn’t quite capture this unique feeling of watching him excel in the first 16 games of his NBA career. It could have been so different—he could have spent the entire year in Delaware, down in the G League (or, if this were still Doc Rivers’s team, in Siberia). Instead, he’s here: arguably the only ray of light, emerging from the ashes of expectation in a uniquely doomed Sixers season. There is something specific in the effect McCain has on the players around him, a delightful cognitive dissonance in watching him move. McCain’s game carries an uncanny sense of lag time, akin to the feeling of watching a star just fractionally past their athletic prime—where the mind seems to move at a greater velocity than the body, but they’re thankfully no worse off for it. How do you describe a player who plays like he’s still got it—who already inspires a sense of familiarity in his scoring outbursts—as a 20-year-old rookie? CJ McCollum meets Andre Miller—with the programming of a truly post-Curry youth. A young guard with command over leverage, body control, relocation, feints, and angles at such an advanced level. He’s full-tilt in his movements—his feet are just a little heavy. Ironically, his game is the sped-up TikTok aesthetic as reimagined by DJ Screw.
Over the past nine games, McCain has averaged 24.3 points per game on 46.2 percent shooting from the field—including 42 percent from 3 on nearly 10 attempts per contest. He has quickly emerged as the Sixers’ best off-ball player, best shooter, best classic facilitator—flashing the type of skill set that dynasties have been built around. The no. 16 pick is as left-field a Rookie of the Year front-runner as there’s been since Malcolm Brogdon won in 2016, and a little reminiscent of when Michael Carter-Williams won it in 2013, balling out in the all-consuming void of Philly’s Process years.
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I fear this is where that sense of familiarity stems from—the futile joy of watching a Sixer thrive in a rapidly deteriorating season, suffocated by a team context that subsumes even its brightest lights. The Sixers are fucking 3-13. Just half a game above the Washington Wizards for the worst record in the league. Joel Embiid’s left knee will not consent to bear the weight of a full season; nor has the left knee of star offseason acquisition Paul George, which has suffered two hyperextensions in just over a month. Tyrese Maxey, hindered by the lingering effects of a hamstring strain, is having his first truly inefficient season as a pro trying to right a capsizing boat. Philly’s big three of Embiid, Maxey, and George have played a grand total of six minutes together all season. The sky is falling. Nick Nurse is losing his shit. Yet, there McCain goes, wiggling through hell perfectly on beat, smiling through it all. I can’t believe this is his life. His teammates can’t, either.
“Jared’s been awesome. He’s been our most consistent player on our team so far,” George said on his podcast last week. “We definitely gotta step our shit up, because he can’t be our most consistent player.”
But should it be so shocking that the one player who has managed to carry on through these early-season disasters is the player unbeholden to history? McCain was 9 years old when former team architect Sam Hinkie traded Jrue Holiday to the New Orleans Pelicans for the draft rights to Nerlens Noel and a 2014 protected first-round pick, in a deal that would kick-start a movement to denature the concept of winning in the NBA, turning the spirit of competition inside out. McCain was an eighth-grader just getting serious about the sport when Kawhi Leonard and the Raptors erased the best shot the Sixers had of making the Eastern Conference finals in this entire era. He was born and raised in California—forgive him if none of the Process era means much to him, if none of the detritus of the past decade seems worth holding on to. It’s not just that McCain brings a vital element to whatever final form this Sixers offense takes on, it’s that he brings a completely different spirit to a team derailed by a sort of fatalism woven into the team’s fabric. It’s one thing to have the ability to create your own shot, another thing entirely to be able to find joy on your own terms—especially when you happen to play for a team like the Sixers, the NBA’s own Final Destination franchise.
We’ve seen this team besieged by injury before. We’ve seen passive-aggressive side comments from Embiid. We’ve seen a player pass up an open dunk in a pivotal playoff game and get so thoroughly chastised for it as to turn that crisis of judgment into his entire personality. We’ve seen the franchise unintentionally derail a player’s career because of a sesame allergy. We’ve seen internet sleuthing lead to some strange questions about who is steering the ship. But whatever this is—this chimera of a failed season just one month old—is new. We are only four months removed from Sixers managing partner Josh Harris declaring this team as potentially “the best team we’ve had.” Talent-wise, maybe, but the plan going into the season was a bet on the health and stability of Embiid and George, two of the most snakebitten stars of their generation. Since then, Embiid has gone snitch hunting for “a real piece of shit.” George is deep in the content mines with his mic plugged in as the Sixers’ season is caving in. Aging veterans who signed on to be the finishing touches on a contender are being asked to play far above their pay grade for a team in an awkward holding pattern, waiting for a version of Embiid that isn’t likely to appear any time soon (he’s shooting a career-worst 37.9 percent in the four games that he has made it through). We’ve never seen this team, positioned as a potential champion, find its way, full-circle, back into earnest conversations about tanking the season for everyone’s sake.
Fortunately to some, unfortunately for others, that’s a task easier proposed than done. One of the most diabolical subplots of the Sixers season is that their 2025 first-round pick has a distinct possibility of being shipped to Oklahoma City unless the Sixers are both lucky and legitimately terrible for the rest of the season. The pick, top-six protected, was included in a trade that sent Al Horford (a failed Sixers free-agent signing they were hoping to absolve themselves of) to Oklahoma City back in 2020, and has finally come home to roost—the final parting shot of Horford’s short-lived Boston double-agent era in Philly. According to the NBA’s flattened lottery odds, the Sixers will have to finish the season as one of the two worst teams in the league to guarantee that they will keep their first-round pick. As things stand, that sounds easy enough. Just do what’s gotten you this far in the first place. But however dire things appear, tanking discussions don’t quite make sense yet.
In spite of themselves, there is plenty of hope left to scrounge for those traumatized by the Hinkie era. Having the second-worst record doesn’t help, but in the atrocious Eastern Conference, the Sixers are only three games out of the final play-in spot. Simply wanting to make the postseason gives the Sixers an advantage over several teams ahead of them in the standings. “We can still compete for a championship,” Embiid told reporters last week. “But this is going to take time. A lot of our issues are coming from us not being on the same page. We have a lot of talent, but we still have to go out and actually do it. We have a pretty good chance; it would be a pretty good story if we did win. It’s just hard. You get a player back and then you potentially lose one. But whatever my body allows me to do, I’m going to go out and do it.”
I’ve twisted myself into knots thinking about Embiid’s legacy over the years and I’m not about to relitigate myself, but this feels like the Sixers thought they had more time. Before managing Embiid’s body became untenable, before they’d have to seriously consider what a future without him would look like. This start has been an all-out living nightmare, revealing just how tenuous the Sixers’ plan was entering the season. But there is too much talent on the roster to truly bottom out, even if the team’s perceived ceiling feels more and more out of reach. “It’s certainly not ideal and not that easy to manage, but it is part of the gig, right?” Nurse said before Sunday’s 125-99 loss to the Clippers, a team—still being led by ex-Sixer James Harden, of all people!—that has figured out how to regroup and move past the lingering absence of a star player. “Continuity doesn’t come with constant in-and-out and constant injuries and things like that. But we got to keep working for it.”
Where does this 3-13 start rank among the team’s worst of the past decade? The question depends on how the weight of expectations factor into balancing the equation. To be hovering around the league’s worst record with one-fifth of the season in the rearview is a colossal failure in the Embiid era, but is it worse than going 0-17 in 2014-15? Or following that up with an 0-18 start to a 2015-16 campaign that hit its absolute nadir with a 1-30 record just before Christmas? Embiid’s current will-he-won’t-he-play saga (not to be confused with previous sagas born of the same tension) is the kind of slow and steady erosion of hope that leads to landslides. Having that same predicament with George’s availability play out concurrently is a new psychic anguish for the fan base. But is it any more or less crushing than the compounding toll over the years from the lost rookie seasons of Noel, Embiid, Ben Simmons, Markelle Fultz, and Zhaire Smith? Just as there are no degrees of uniqueness—something is either unique or it isn’t, there can be no most—perhaps there is no way to truly stratify Sixers suffering. It’s always sunny, and then it gets worse. In one way or another, it gets worse.
