We did not forget about the Sixers, or the Flyers for that matter. It’s just been World Series madness around here these last few days. Shit, we didn’t even write anything about the 6-0 Eagles this week yet. There’s bandwidth for all, we just gotta come up for air.

The local basketball team started 0-3, and while people were calling for Doc Rivers to be fired, they went out and got their first win of the season against the Pacers on Monday night, with James Harden putting this dude in the Ninja blender:

Eh, okay, so he stepped on his foot and maybe got away with a forearm there, but no whistle, so play on. You take the calls you get and try to stack wins in any way, shape, or form.

“It’s a work in progress, it doesn’t happen overnight,” Harden said of the team’s first win. “We were 0-3. We just need to continue to work and build good habits and live with the results.”

We all knew that Joel Embiid was going to start relatively slow, which has been a pattern over the years. Maybe the MVP battles wore him out a bit. He also dealt with that plantar fasciitis over the summer and had hand surgery and didn’t experience a typical offseason.


Justified team gripes aside, the most positive thing is that Harden is playing really well. Through four games, he’s averaging 27 points and 10 assists while shooting 37.5% from three. It’s a small sample size, but he looks much healthier and he’s even added mid-range to his game after largely eschewing those kinds of looks in recent years. Look at all of the stuff he’s doing from the elbows and the nail here:

That’s not the Harden of Brooklyn or last season in Philadelphia, or even during his later years with the Rockets. His game was largely about shooting threes or getting to the rim, which was a very-analytics friendly approach and interfaced well with the modern NBA. Now he’s pulling up off the dribble and/or rounding the corner on those pick and rolls and taking these shots, where typically he’d go all the way to the rim or lob it up to the roller.

He’s also shooting midrange shots off iso sets:

“He’s been doing great,” Rivers said of Harden after the Indy win. “I’m happy for him. And we’re going to need it. We’re going to need it for him to be confident and really feel himself. And he’s been doing it. So, now we’ve just got to get everybody playing at the same level so we can win games. But he’s been great to see. He’s been playing at a high level and I know he’s been working so hard to be at this point. So, I’m happy for him.”

The Sixers are 1-3. It’s better than 0-4.