Is there any precedent for this disastrous Sixers season?
The Philadelphia 76ers are, as the headline says, a disaster.
They’re With 25 games remaining in their season, the Sixers are just 20-37. They're in 12th place in the Eastern Conference, having recently dropped behind the Brooklyn Nets thanks to a pair of embarrassing losses — including a 32-point drubbing at the hands of the Chicago Bulls in a game where the deficit got north of 50 points.
Philly is 23rd in offensive rating and 26th in defensive rating, which works its way out to a net rating that checks in 24th. Adjusted for for pace and strength of opponent, the Sixers are worse, checking in 25th in Basketball-Reference's SRS.
They don’t do very much well on either side of the ball. They can’t shoot and they can’t stop their opponents from making shots. They don’t grab rebounds on either end of the court. They get to the free-throw line, but they constantly send their opponents to the stripe as well. They do a decent job of taking care of the ball and they force a lot of turnovers themselves. That’s about it.
Ordinarily, a team being a run-of-the-mill bad squad like this wouldn’t be all that notable. (It’s not like they’re as bad as the Wizards.) The reason it is notable in this case, is that we thought the Sixers would be really freaking good.
After having arguably the best offseason of any team in the NBA, the Sixers were expected to be a real contender. Instead, they’re … this. Which got me wondering if there’s any precedent for a team disappointing as much as this group has. And it turns out, there is. Kind of.
The Sixers had a preseason over-under of 50.5 wins, according to the preseason odds at Basketball-Reference, and they’re on pace to win 29 games. That’s a full-season plus-minus of -21.5 wins. Out of the 775 team-seasons since 2000, that ranks sixth-worst. (BBall-Ref only has preseason over-unders going back to 2000; otherwise, I would have gone back further.)
Amazingly, there’s another team this season on track to do even worse in the New Orleans Pelicans, who are working on the third-worst plus-minus among those aforementioned 775 teams. (There are some extenuating circumstances with the massive, 2024-Grizzlies-esque volume of injuries there.)
Among the 20 worst teams in plus-minus, though, only two of them — the 2006 Rockets and the 2022 Lakers — were projected for more wins coming into the season than were these Sixers. And those teams underperformed their preseason over-unders by 19 and 19.5 wins, respectively. The 2008 Bulls had the same projection of 50.5 wins, and they underperformed by 17.5 wins. So, among the teams expected to win 50-plus games, this group appears to be the most disappointing.
And among the six teams with a plus-minus of -20 or worse, these Sixers were the only team projected for 50-plus wins. So, among the very worst teams relative to expectations, the Sixers were expected to be the best among that group.
They might not reach the incredible depths of the 2008 Heat team that lost Dwyane Wade and Shaquille O'Neal for long stretches and traded Shaq at the deadline, nor the 2020 Warriors squad that was already without Klay Thompson and then saw Stephen Curry go down as well. They’re a decent ways off from being quite that disappointing. But those teams also weren’t expected to be as good as this year’s Sixers.
So, whether there’s any precedent for a team being this disappointing, relative to expectations, really depends on how you want to view it.
