The Sixers' new starting five looked incredible on Saturday, and that proves almost nothing about the thing everyone actually wants to know.
At the Blue x White scrimmage inside Xfinity Mobile Arena on October 3, Philadelphia's projected starters got on the floor together in public for the first time: Tyrese Maxey, VJ Edgecombe, Jaylen Brown, LeBron James and Joel Embiid. They played on the blue team in the first of three 10-minute games. James caught a lob from Maxey and threw down a dunk a few possessions in, Maxey buried self-created threes, and Brown carved out isolation buckets. Fans in the building gasped. Five guys who can all explode offensively, moving the ball well together, is a beautiful thing to watch.
It's also the easiest part of the entire project. Scoring was never the worry. You could have written "this offense will be loaded" the day Mike Gansey, the new president of basketball operations, pulled off a trade for Brown and a free-agent signing for James. The vision sells itself on paper. A scrimmage where the defense is set to warmup speed doesn't add a thing to that case. Of course it looked like a highlight reel. That's what an intrasquad run with the brakes off is supposed to look like.
The real question is defense, and this group has a history of ducking it. Philadelphia finished 16th in defensive rating last season and allowed one of the worst shot qualities in the league, a number kept company mostly by teams that were openly tanking. Nobody on the current roster single-handedly flips that. Edgecombe and Brown can guard, and Maxey has gotten better, but the two players this team is built around, James and Embiid, are the two whose effort and availability on that end are open questions. James turns 42 in December. Embiid's defensive mobility has been a concern for years.
There were encouraging signs. Embiid looked slim and was hard hedging in pick-and-roll, something he barely bothered with last season. If that's genuine improvement from being healthier rather than a one-off good day in a meaningless game, it changes the math. But it was a scrimmage, against teammates, at a fraction of real intensity. You don't bank that as evidence any more than you bank the lob dunks.
Then there's the depth, which the glossy footage is designed to make you forget. Behind Embiid, the center spot is a live problem: Adem Bona sat out with a left foot sprain, and the backup minutes are an open competition. The front office funded this star collection by shipping out Paul George, Quentin Grimes, Kelly Oubre Jr. and letting Andre Drummond walk, and under Nick Nurse this team has lived in the bottom third of the league in rebounding every single year. Losing Drummond doesn't help that. Stack five stars on top of a thin, undersized bench and you've bought yourself a team that can win any shootout and get pushed around the moment the stars sit or someone tweaks an ankle.
Nurse isn't hiding from it. "Recently, I don't feel like I've been able to get into my bag of defensive stuff nearly as much as I would like to," he told reporters, before adding, "I think now we've got a little bit more depth, size, athleticism. And it may take us a minute, but I think I'm most excited about that." The honest part of that quote is the first sentence: defense has been missing from his toolkit. "It may take us a minute" is a coach telling you this is unresolved. He's right.
So enjoy the offense. It's real, and against live NBA defenses it'll still be a nightmare to deal with. Just don't let a 10-minute glorified layup line talk you into believing the hard questions got answered. They didn't. Gansey built a roster that will score on anyone. Whether it defends, rebounds and survives the nights its old stars can't carry it is the entire season, and a scrimmage is the one place you'll never find out.
