In John Smallwood’s column today, he reveals that Joel Embiid asked Matt Cord to announce him as “Joel ‘The Process’ Embiid” for his player introduction (Cord didn’t do it). This is the kind of cool anecdote that columnists and beat writers can get that makes them relevant. Unfortunately for us, Smallwood opened with that and then just kept writing.

In a column entitled “Embiid, Saric officially part of The Process,” he apparently forgets that Embiid and Saric were the main reason people like him hated the process for so long.  Those two are the MOST process of anyone ever involved with the team…other than JaVale McGee.

And even now that they’re here, at home, playing, he still can’t resist getting his jabs in. “If Dario Saric, the other lost-and-found member from the Sixers’ 2014 lottery class, wants to come up with his own moniker, that’s fine too,” Smallwood writes. “Anything would be better than what they had been affectionately known as the last two seasons – ‘The If Brothers.'”

No one called them that. A search for “The If Brothers” brings up only two pages of results. One is Smallwood’s column. Most have a quote mark or parenthesis between if and brother. One is a footnote on The Revised Statutes of British Columbia, 1897, which features a formatting issue. No one has ever uttered “The If Brothers” out loud. And if they did, it had absolutely nothing to do with the Sixers.

And Smallwood couldn’t help himself when suggesting that the Sixers were unsure Embiid and Saric would ever play here. “Still, while schedule adjustments such as that are made well in advance,” Smallwood smashed into his keyboard, “the club might have not have moved the game to UMass had it known Embiid and Saric definitely would play.” It’s true that Tuesday’s home but away game at UMass Amherst was a seemingly strange way to start the Embiid era. But it’s also true that the NBA pre-season is weird. In 2013, the Sixers played in Spain, England, and Newark, DE before stepping foot in the Wells Fargo Center. They’ve played at Syracuse twice in the last five years. In 2015 they played the Celtics in New Hampshire.


Smallwood is right in calling last night’s game the “biggest meaningless basketball game” in that building since Iverson’s debut in 1996, though the next 20-some will give that title a run for its money (and then Simmons returns…hopefully).

But here is where columns (and columnists) fail. Why was this written? Because it had to be. There has to be a column about Joel and Dario’s first home game. There had to be. So this is what came out. Hacky, empty, useless, and full of failed attempts at zings, quips, and intelligence. Two good points, a bunch of gibberish in between, and a byline. Those are the requirements I guess.