Last season, the Philadelphia 76ers finished with a 49-23 record in the Eastern Conference, good for the best in the conference.
But now there are two words: Ben Simmons.
Where is Simmons going? How will this drama unfold? Only time will tell what is going to happen with Simmons moving forward.
For now, we can just look at the rest of the team and predict how well Philadelphia will be entering this season.
Philadelphia 76ers 2021-2022 Season Preview
Offseason Changes
During the off-season, the Philadelphia 76ers tried their best to bolster their roster.
Despite losing Dwight Howard, the 76ers added Andre Drummond to essentially play his role. On top of that, they added players like George Niang, Aaron Henry, and re-signed players like Danny Green and Furkan Korkmaz.
The biggest success for the 76er this offseason was re-signing their best player in Joel Embiid to a super-max contract. By doing this, it locks them in as a consistent playoff team for many years.
Unfortunately for Philadelphia, that probably isn’t enough to put their team over the top. Especially with this Simmons drama, it’s difficult to predict how to think of this team.
Simmons is the primary ball-handler. He was supposed to be the leader of this team, and now he’s not even reporting to pre-season games.
He doesn’t even plan on doing so. As far the Philadelphia 76ers are concerned, they only want to trade Simmons for the right package and they just haven’t found anything that has satisfied them yet.
Philadelphia 76ers – Expectations For This Season
In terms of the expectations this season for the 76ers, they’re just expected to be in the post-season once again with Embiid having an MVP-caliber season.
Nobody expects them to defeat top-notch teams in the conference like the Brooklyn Nets and Milwaukee Bucks so to expect them only in the playoffs and nothing more is relatively fair.
Unfortunately for Philadelphia, they did not do enough with this roster. With or without Simmons, this team isn’t better than some of the teams in the conference. There are too many issues with this team and we can’t call them a legitimate contender until they resolve these issues.
Can Joel Embiid stay healthy? Can Doc Rivers lead them to the finals? Is Philadelphia’s depth good enough? Is Tobias Harris ready to take the next step?
The bad thing about asking those questions is how one could probably say no to most of those. Philadelphia has tried their best in terms of making their much better, but their hands are kind of tied at the moment.
In all fairness, Simmons isn’t acting in an ideal manner and isn’t helping this organization out by any means. In terms of an actual projection/expectation, one can expect the 76ers to range from the fourth to sixth seed this season.
Given how much better the conference got, it’s fair to say that they’ll range around those seeds. The conference got much better and Philadelphia did not. There are both external and internal issues with this team so it will be interesting to see how they go about it.
Main Image: Embed from Getty Images
