Philadelphia did exactly what it should do against one of the NBA’s poverty franchises on Tuesday night at Xfinity Mobile Arena. The Sixers dispatched of the Washington Wizards 121-102 in a game they led by double digits at halftime and by 24 after three quarters. More importantly, the significant margin of victory allowed for Tyrese Maxey and VJ Edgecombe to get much-needed rest time as the two young guards played just 29 and 24 minutes, respectively. Additionally, Jared McCain looked pretty comfortable in 25 minutes off the bench and Jabari Walker gave Philly a double-double in a reserve role.
The Sixers are now 11-9 at the quarter turn of the 2025-26 season. When you look back on the first 25% of the campaign, you won’t find a ton of surprises. On the good nights, Philadelphia is a fun team that gets on the backs of its two young guards in Maxey and Edgecombe and usually gets enough from 2-3 of its role players to win. On the bad nights, those two guards tend to get worn down, McCain still looks like someone working his way back from a major knee injury and not immediately up to speed, and the collection of role players perform a lot like they did during last year’s debacle. When it comes to Joel Embiid and Paul George, the two are blending in far more than their salaries would indicate they should be, but at this stage in their careers — and given their injury histories — that should come as no surprise to anyone.
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So, how should we feel about this team? Truthfully, the answer should be no different than how you felt before the season started. For what it’s worth, I’m not sure anyone thought Maxey would be THIS good out of the gate. The 25-year-old looks like an MVP candidate and if he ends up missing 30 games like he did last season, you can kiss this season goodbye. Edgecombe has slowed down a little bit in recent games — a recent calf injury didn’t help — but he has still been fun to watch and seems to have been undoubtedly the right pick at third overall in this past summer’s draft. Between the additions of Edgecombe, Walker, Dominick Barlow, McCain continuing to work his way back and another year of Adem Bona, the Sixers are at least younger this season, which gives them a bit more intrigue on a nightly basis even if they’re not going to contend this year.
But it’s that C word that is understandably what a lot of fans are going to cling to. For more than a decade now, Sixers fans have been fixated on figuring out ways to build a championship-caliber team around Embiid. Several executives and head coaches have tried with a slew of different supporting casts placed around the big man, but we still haven’t seen the Sixers reach the Eastern Conference Finals since 2001. From that standpoint, this looks like just another season in Sixers country.
Even with Maxey being as elite as he’s been, Philadelphia is just two games over .500 nearly two months into the season. The doubts surrounding any sort of significant bounce back in both the health and performance of Embiid and George have proved to be warranted as both guys have blended in so far to start the season more than they’ve stood out. Most of the aforementioned young role players are just that — they are nice complementary pieces that can round out a rotation on a team that already has ample high-end talent.
So if star-level performances aren’t going to come from Embiid and George, and it doesn’t seem like anyone’s holding their breath at this point there, can Maxey get enough help? Could the Sixers be launched into contention thanks to Maxey’s ascent to superstardom and allow their other two max players to sit in the backseat of the car and see where the ride takes them? There are a couple of paths for that to happen. Either Edgecombe needs to play above his age and become a No. 2 option on a contending team right away or McCain needs to look like he did before his knee injury last season at the very least.
Is anyone super confident in either of those things happening? Edgecombe may well become a superstar, but remember you draft in the top five because you had a bad season and you don’t have a lot on your roster to begin with. I’m not suggesting this current roster for the Sixers is anywhere close to as bad as last year’s, but I do think it should provide proper context for why Edgecombe probably isn’t ready to immediately be Robin to Maxey’s Batman. As far as McCain goes, sure, maybe by January or February he’s looking more like the version of himself we saw early last season. But this season sure has the makings of an acclimating one for McCain, who not only needs to get up to speed, but is doing so while trying to handle the rigors of a full 82-game schedule for the first time in his NBA career.
The problems we’ve laid out here are hard ones to fix. Philadelphia looks like a team that will hover around .500 most of the year, probably end up in the play-in tournament in the Eastern Conference, and the chances of a deep playoff run are slim. Questions will remain about how the franchise can support Maxey more, but it will be difficult to answer those questions for as long as Embiid and George’s contracts are weighing them down from a salary cap perspective.
So maybe Edgecombe or McCain can blossom enough for the final 62 games of the regular season to give the fanbase some more hope. Heck, perhaps we even get a tease along the way from Embiid or George. But this looks like a 45-win team at best right now, which isn’t going to get a lot of fans all that excited about the remainder of the season.
