The Philadelphia 76ers aren’t contenders, yet
One of the NBA media’s favorite past times is declaring who is a contender and who isn’t. In a sport infatuated with championships the exercise makes sense, people want to know who has what it takes to be the last team standing. Unfortunately, the conversation tends to veer into the lazy exercise of pointing out what the current standings are. A four-game win streak or a four-game losing streak can bounce a team in or out of the contender conversation.
Conversations over who is a contender early in the season are in general silly exercises. First, teams add or lose players as the season goes on so who has the best team when it matters is fluid. Second, schedules don’t evenly distribute opponents. Third, wins and loses are not the best metric for determining how well a team will play in the future, and that is in essence what the conversation is about.
After 21 games the Philadelphia 76ers are first in the Eastern Conference with a 15-6 record and are tied for the league’s third-best win percentage. In other words, people are labeling them a contender. The Sixers are definitely a good team but calling them a contender right now is premature.
On the surface, the Sixers look like a championship team. They have the best record in their conference, an MVP candidate in Joel Embiid, Doc Rivers is a championship-winning coach and it is all supported by a strong supporting cast. Superficially the Sixers check all the contender boxes but is that really the case.
Yes, the Sixers have had an excellent start to the season but championships are won by what you do in the future and not what you have done in the past. In the metrics that portend future success, the Sixers aren’t quite up to the billing of a contender.
One of the best metrics to determine who is a contender is simply a team’s net-rating. To win you need to outscore your opponent and net rating answers, on a per 100 possession basis, how much you’ll do that by. The Sixers’ net rating currently stands at +4.1, which ranks seventh in the league and is behind two Eastern Conference teams.
The Sixers have won more games than the Milwaukee Bucks and the Brooklyn Nets but in the perfect world of mathematics, they shouldn’t have. Does having the seventh-best net rating make you a contender? Sure, in the sense that it wouldn’t be ridiculous if you made the NBA Finals but it hardly gives you the inside track.
Not to heap more criticism onto the Sixers but even their net rating is likely inflating their true talent level. The Sixers have played the second easiest schedule this season according to basketball-references’ metric. This isn’t to say that the Sixers are not one of the best teams in the Eastern Conference, but if they had played a more even schedule there is a real chance they wouldn’t be in pole position for the one seed.
Another great metric that basketball-reference provides is the simple rating system. Essentially it takes a team’s strength of schedule and their average margin of victory and spits out either a positive or negative number to tell us how good a team truly is. The Sixers’ SRS of 2.98 is eighth in the NBA. If SRS is the gold standard for ranking NBA teams, and I’m inclined to believe that it is, the Sixers fall from contender to merely a good team.
The top team in SRS, currently and unsurprisingly, are the Los Angeles Lakers at 7.56. The next three teams are the Utah Jazz (7.5), the Clippers (6.55), and the Bucks (6.33). After the top four, there is a large drop off at number five with the Denver Nuggets at 4.81. What SRS says is that there are four real contenders in the Lakers, Jazz, Clippers, and Bucks and then everyone else. The difference between the Sixers in eighth and the Bucks at four is 3.35, which is the difference between the Sixers and the 17th place Dallas Mavericks (-0.3).
The Sixers are definitely better this season than they were last season but they don’t look like a real contender. They look like a team that has fattened up on a weak early schedule who will slide out of the top spot in the East as the season goes on. However, that doesn’t have to be the Sixers' destiny. The team brought in a new head coach and supporting players and then didn’t have a typical offseason to integrate them. This team could and should improve as the season goes on.
Unfortunately, going from the eighth-best team to a top-four team is a monumental task. It would require players playing at unseen levels, which Joel Embiid is already doing, or bringing in a franchise-altering superstar, like Bradley Beal. The Sixers could conceivably pull this off but it is a lot to ask in a season devoid of practice time. Being a very good team that has a chance to reach the Conference Finals is not a bad place to reside.
The Sixers aren’t real contenders right now and the gap between them and the elite teams in the NBA looks to be too large to close. There is a road map for the Sixers to make the finals but it would require them to shock an actual contender. This season is a step in the right direction for the franchise but their chances at the championship are in the future. Sixers fans should relish their status as a contender this season because it doesn’t look built to last.