It’s been a chaotic year in Philadelphia. The 76ers entered the season as a dark horse competitor in the Eastern Conference, a talented team that just needed good fortune and good health to push the likes of the Pistons, Celtics, Knicks, and Cavaliers.
The health part, as always in Philadelphia, was the issue. Joel Embiid, because of his balky knee and an oblique injury, has been limited to 36 games. Paul George dealt with knee issues himself and then was dealt a 25-game suspension for violating the league’s anti-drug policy for taking what he said was medication for mental health.
Even the durable Tyrese Maxey missed 10 games with a pinkie injury. But they are all healthy in the final weeks of the season, with Embiid able to play after some time off and George returning from his suspension. They all came together for a comeback win last week at Charlotte, giving coach Nick Nurse a hint of what could be if the 76ers are whole.
No team would likely choose to play a team led by a healthy and motivated Embiid in the first round of the playoffs. The 76ers enter the final week of the season tied for the sixth seed with the Raptors, who come to Boston on Sunday. Locking in the sixth seed likely means a first-round matchup with the Knicks or Cavaliers and either could be a long, competitive series.
“I think we’re going to find out,” Nurse said about his team’s potential. “It’s pretty short, eight games to go. I’m glad we had to push the minutes out to see where they’re at. Hopefully we can all hit the floor and get as much time together as we can. It’s not a lot but we need to maximize it.”
George has averaged 28 points in the first four games since his return and could be a major X-factor during the postseason. He’s played in just 72 games since signing that four-year max contract with Philadelphia after the Clippers didn’t offer him a max deal, and he’s struggled to stay on the floor.
But the trio of George, Maxey, and Embiid does offer hope and the first task is to avoid the play-in tournament.
“We’re [6-7] in the seeding, this is where we have to pull away,” he said. “So there was definitely an emphasis to win [against Charlotte], for sure. If we do that and take care of business, we’ll be seeded right where we want to be. Again, flashes of everyone being excellent in those moments. We’ve all got to find our moments when to be aggressive, doing what we can to win games. It’s just those little, small, key things that all three hone in on. We can be special down the stretch.”
Maxey was determined to return as soon as possible from his torn tendon and said he wore a brace to speed up his rehabilitation. He returned to the lineup with a show-stopping lefthanded dunk on Miles Bridges.
“Tyrese, when we’re in a bind and we need a quick basket or if we need some tempo or pace, he’s there,” George said. “He makes big shots. But his ability to get the floor balance with speed in transition. I’m not the quickest guy, so it helps with him being able to attract so much attention on the floor. His presence on the floor is undeniable. He attracts attention.”
As for George, he’s trying to work himself back into basketball shape and the right frame of mind after that suspension. He has reiterated his regrets for taking a banned substance but said he feels refreshed and ready to contribute. Once upon a time, George missed all but six games of his fifth NBA season after breaking his leg playing for USA Basketball.
He returned from a catastrophic injury to enjoy a solid career, but said he hasn’t been asked much over the years from younger brethren about dealing with and flourishing after serious injury. Jayson Tatum is making a similar return after missing 10 months from an Achilles rupture. George and Tatum play similar positions and have expressed admiration for each over the years, but George said Tatum’s journey is something he has to experience for himself.
“I reached out to him when it initially happened to tell him I’m praying for him,” George said. “People go through their things. I told him I’m here if he needed anything. I wanted to leave the door open.
“People go through injuries. It’s almost something you have to figure out and learn on your own, what makes you. I’ve learned through injuries it could make you or break you. You’ve kind of got to go through it on your own to see what you’re made of. Because you’re going to come out a different player and there’s nothing I can tell you to prepare you for that because there’s going to be good days and bad days. That’s just the nature of the injury. That’s something you’ve got to get through on your own.”
GARZA’S FITNESS PLAN
Center making weight with Celtics
After his final season with the Timberwolves, Luka Garza weighed in at a svelte 236 pounds, 40 pounds lighter than his playing weight at the University of Iowa. Garza was advised in order to stay in the NBA and carve out a role, he needed to lose weight and get stronger.
He did both, but at 236 and 7 percent body fat, Garza realized he was a little too light, that he would get pushed around in the paint, shoved under the basket chasing rebounds. So after signing with the Celtics and being told he would get backup center minutes, Garza has to physically become a center again. The goal: build up to 255 pounds without increasing his body fat.
“It was a long process,” Garza told the Globe. “Losing weight, gaining it back. Knowing the opportunity I was coming into, I just had the mind-set of I really wanted to gain back some weight. It was a good process this summer of making sure I was hitting the weight room, eating enough, and putting on muscle instead of putting on fat.”
That final point is the most difficult part. Most people, including athletes, have little issue gaining weight, but the difficult part is keeping agility and staying in world-class shape. Garza was on a mission.
“I was tracking all of my calories and I had a specific number every day I wanted to eat in protein,” he said. “You’ve got to stay disciplined. It’s hard to eat that much, especially in the offseason when I’m working out. It was a huge priority to make sure I was getting all my meals in, hitting all my numbers.”
Garza said being back at home last summer with his mother helped the weight-gain process.
“That really helped, she always makes a large quantity of food,” he said. “But I wanted to do it the right way, a lot of chicken, a lot of fish, a lot of steak. Making sure I had the right numbers.”
That magic number was 250 grams of protein per day and a surplus of 800 calories per day over his normal intake.
“I had to really track it,” he said. “Getting dialed in on that was important. I’ve done it on feel before and struggled but me getting into it with the numbers actually helped.”
So what’s the on-court difference between 236 pounds and 255 pounds?
“I feel stronger,” Garza said. “It’s actually helped me on the glass, also just defensively being able to take some bumps, when guys are trying to go into my chest. When I got to 236, I felt like I was moving a lot better and that was the point of [losing weight] was to be able to move laterally a little bit better than I have, but I feel like adding the muscle on didn’t really inhibit that too much, so it’s the best of both worlds.”
ETC.
Tanking teams getting creative
It seems one third of the NBA teams are tanking this season, and trying to lose for the benefit of a higher draft pick has become rampant. It takes away from the enjoyment of the last few weeks of the regular season when 10 teams are not trying to win.
And tanking has become more creative. Gone are the days when teams are just benching healthy players. Now they have shifted to playing top players the first three quarters and then resting them in the fourth, such as what the Wizards did last week when they had a legitimate chance to beat the Warriors in San Francisco. Or there’s the Memphis route, offering season-ending surgery to any player interested, even for minor injuries or ailments that may cost them a few weeks, or shutting down players with injuries and sending needless updates on their rehabilitation, knowing full well the team has no plans to bring said player back even if the season lasted all summer.
The league has devised three undisclosed ways to cure tanking and it’s uncertain if any will actually work. As long as the worst teams are in line for the top draft picks and there is such an emphasis on having inexpensive stars because of escalating salaries, teams are going to tank. Cities such as Memphis, Washington, Salt Lake City, and Indianapolis are not premium free agent destinations, meaning they have to find ways to retain top talent, and that starts with drafting players and controlling their contracts for as many as nine years.
“One of the difficulties when trying to revise a new system is the team that finishes 30th, are they that much worse than the team that finishes 28th or 26th or 24th or 22nd, for that matter?” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said. “It’s my view that we have ample talent to field 32 competitive teams.
“Just by one point of comparison, when we last had a two-team expansion roughly 30 years ago, to Canada, 6 percent of the players in the NBA were international. That’s now 30 percent. Obviously, some of our very best players. Increasingly we have MVPs coming from outside the United States.
“Tanking is a confusing one and something we study because it perverts the outcome. The very essence of tanking is, it’s unclear what quality teams really have.”
Silver said he is not promising a plan that will prevent tanking and restore pride throughout every organization. But it’s obvious tanking devalues the league, and teams aren’t lowering their ticket prices in March and April even though its apparent they’re not trying to win, so the fan eventually gets the shaft.
“I want to be careful about what you may be suggesting or people may be hearing from me as a ‘forever fix,’” Silver said. “The world changes, behavior changes. I don’t necessarily think the changes we made over the last 40 years or so were necessarily wrong. I think in some cases they worked for a period of time. When we make those changes and change odds, you know exactly statistically where you’re going to come out. What’s changed is behavior around those odds. It may be as the value of franchises has gone up, as the analytics have gotten more sophisticated, as pressure has come from fan bases to engage in behavior that even team ownership or GMs are not proud of, that’s where we find ourselves.”
Even Silver acknowledged that determining tanking is not that simple. Tanking teams have an end game. They want to eventually improve. They want to win. They want home-grown draft picks to turn into franchise cornerstones. Everybody wants to be Oklahoma City, a team stacked with talent and assets from fruitful drafts and astute trades.
But many tanking teams are historically poorly mismanaged. They have missed on draft picks. Sacramento took Marvin Bagley ahead of Luka Doncic and Trae Young. Philadelphia took Markelle Fultz ahead of Jayson Tatum. Washington took Johnny Davis ahead of Jalen Williams and Jalen Duren. James Bouknight, Joshua Primo, and Chris Duarte were taken ahead of Alperen Sengun.
These moves put franchises back years, especially when they can’t attract major free agents.
“The problem we’re having these days is it’s become almost impossible to distinguish between a tank and a rebuild,” Silver said. “We fined two teams right before All-Star [Utah and Indiana]. That behavior I think rose to a level, and I think the teams understood, that required a response from the league office. But there’s such a subtlety to this, when incentives don’t match. We’re now into it with coaches’ decisions on lineups and when players come in and out of the game. Injuries, doctors going back and forth with each other. Pain levels of players.”
Layups
Coaching hot seats usually don’t warm up for playoff teams as the regular season concludes, but the future of Jamahl Mosley could be in jeopardy if the Magic are bounced in the play-in tournament or first round. The Magic slipped to the ninth seed after a blowout home loss to the Hawks on Wednesday and that came three days after the Magic were trounced at Toronto by 52 points, yielding a 31-0 run during that defeat. The Magic have been one of the most disappointing teams in the league, expected to compete in the top four in the Eastern Conference with Paolo Banchero, Franz Wagner, and offseason acquisition Desmond Bane. Instead, the Magic have dealt with injuries while Banchero has not taken the expected step forward into All-NBA status. Bane has been a solid addition but the Magic are still 26th in the NBA in 3-point shooting and haven’t found a capable point guard. They acquired Tyus Jones in the offseason but he was ineffective and eventually moved to the Hornets. The Magic lost in a physical first-round matchup to the Celtics in last year’s playoffs and promised to take the necessary step forward with Banchero and Wagner as anchors, but they are clinging to a play-in spot and could be in a position to have to win two road games just to qualify for the postseason. Mosley, a one-time promising coaching prospect as an assistant under Rick Carlisle in Dallas, has built a solid defensive team that has trouble scoring. The Magic have slipped defensively this season and are going through stretches of incompetency, trailing by as many as 31 points at home to the Hawks. … The Celtics will get support in the final week of the season as G League Maine was eliminated in the first round of the playoffs by the Greensboro Swarm, finishing 18-18. Max Shulga, John Tonje, and Amari Williams all played in that first-round loss. Williams was coming off 13 minutes for the Celtics in Monday’s loss to the Hawks. Coach Joe Mazzulla is expected to find games to rest Jaylen Brown, Derrick White, and Jayson Tatum with five games left and the No. 2 seed nearly sealed. Shulga and Williams are signed to standard NBA deals and are eligible for the playoff roster. Tonje is on a two-way contract and are not playoff eligible.
Gary Washburn is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at gary.washburn@globe.com. Follow him @GwashburnGlobe.