Better Know Your Philadelphia 76ers

The Philadelphia 76ers are an opaque and ambitious "Process" in excruciating action, and a symbol of all manner of things good and bad about the state of the NBA at this moment. They also are, and have been, an actual basketball team. They play 82 games a year against other NBA teams, and the results of those games count in the NBA standings.

As a real NBA team, the 76ers games are televised, and you can watch them if you're so inclined. They might even travel to your nearest metropolitan area to visit the local NBA team to play a game that you are more than likely to get a free ticket to courtesy of your buddy's dickhead season-ticket-owning boss. My point being, the Sixers are a current NBA team. They've got uniforms and everything. It's really great!

Even though they are not a very good NBA team—even though, in fact, their win-loss record qualifies them as one of the very worst NBA teams of all time—the Sixers are not the least interesting NBA team to watch. They're doing weird things out there. The ultimatum of the Sixers' "Process," which is basically buy-low/sell-high but with basketball-playing humans and draft picks that become them instead of bonds, has left the Philadelphia roster full of strange players of no identifiable archetype. Guys who are, say, really really good at very specific things like stealing the basketball after somebody's already dribbled it past them, but really, really bad at other seemingly basic things like dribbling in a straight line. They're like the Dudley Heinsbergens of basketball.

In any given Sixers game, these buy-low basketball mutants will all be out there trying to be a semi-cohesive basketball team, and it's fascinating to watch. Consider them an extremely well-funded "pure research" science foundation, where, instead of solving actual practical problems such as getting the ball in the hoop, researchers wrestle with higher-level theoretical questions like "what even is a basketball?"

Let's meet the projects this institution currently has underway.

Isaiah Canaan, Point Guard

Canaan is a short, fast, shoot-first point guard whose un-super power is an unspectacular shooting percentage. He plays hard, too, like a young Ben Gordon who played defense instead of making an average amount of his three-pointers. Canaan is in the game on the off chance that he'll get hot, and also to push the general pace in a way that benefits the Sixers and their young legs. If you're looking for a reason to love Isaiah Canaan, he's from Biloxi, Mississippi, and was on that 2011-2012 Murray State Racers squad that went 30-1 in the regular season before getting bounced by Marquette in the second round. I'm sure we all treasure that memory. Some great Murray State memories there.

T.J. McConnell, Point Guard

McConnell would be the overpraised "gritty" type of little pissant white-guy floor general if not for the fact that he plays for the Sixers, has actually got some handles and a decent eye for passing, and exhibits a tiny-baby amount of swagger. He was, as you have probably already surmised, an awesome college basketball player at Arizona.

His signature move as a NBA player is being left totally alone at the three-point line because he can't shoot, driving to and finally past the basket without picking up his dribble or even really thinking about trying to finish at the rim, and then curling back around to the opposite elbow and resetting the half court offense. He's an undrafted rookie currently earning minutes because, unlike Canaan, he's always trying to get the ball to the big guys.

Kendall Marshall, Point Guard

Kendall Marshall, though only 24 years old, is quantum: he plays for every NBA team simultaneously until either he actually enters a game for a particular team or you actually check a given roster and see he's not on it. Am I getting him confused with Donyell Marshall? Yes. He's that quantum. Also decent on Twitter.

Tony Wroten, Guard

Wroten may hold the unofficial all-time record for Philadelphia professional athlete whose name is funniest to say with a Philly accent. I don't even know how you'd beat him—there would have to be a Philadelphia Flyer named Bo Hoagie. Wroten has just returned from a torn ACL, which is good news for the 76ers, because as a player he's like if Isaiah Canaan and T.J. McConnell had a baby and then that baby grew six inches taller than either of his parents and also was pretty good at basketball.

Nik Stauskas, Shooting Guard

Stauskas is a three-point specialist currently shooting 28 percent from beyond the arc, which is not ideal. He's on the Sixers because the Sacramento Kings famously drafted him in a fit of erroneous half-cocked Malcolm Gladwell-esque successthink, and then the Sixers were like, "Ummmm yummy yummy we eat your mistakes for draft picks." There are certain players in the NBA that you watch when they check into games, confidently tucking their jerseys into their shorts and pointing out defensive assignments, and you just think, "You, sir, are a hilarious fraud playing dress-up in daddy's basketball clothes." Stauskas is one of the best in the league at this.

JaKarr Sampson, Shooting Guard

Sampson, like most of the Sixers, excels at being both quite young and available for playing basketball.

Hollis Thompson, Guard/Forward

The Sixers do this great thing where they hoist a bunch of three-pointers, but none of their players are actually all that good at shooting three-pointers. It's as if there's some Steve Jobsian "ideas man" in the Sixers front office going, "But what if we shot a lot of three-pointers anyway?" A hard-bitten scout says, "We shouldn't be shooting three pointers," and this Steve Jobs guy goes "BUT WHAT IF WE DID!?" It turns out the answer to that question is "We'd have eleven totally interchangeable guys who can play defense, run the floor, haul in a non-embarrassing number of rebounds, and just absolutely brick the shit out of some three-point shots."

Robert Covington, Small Forward

Covington is emerging as a force who appears willing almost to be reckoned with in the NBA. He's great at a lot of things on both sides of the ball; his only fatal flaw is dribbling. His handles are just this side of a toddler with a laundromat coin machine super ball. He's actually not that bad, because he is in fact a highly athletic adult, it's just that he dribbles too high. It leads to turnovers. Confession time: it's fun to use hyperbole when writing about Robert Covington's handles.

Jerami Grant, Small Forward

Grant reminds me of a younger Al-Farouq Aminu, in that he is a space alien from the Planet Basketball. (If you're unfamiliar with the mythology of Planet Basketball, it's the planet where all of the inhabitants are perfect basketball specimens, but there's ironically no such thing as basketball, so they don't quite know what they're doing when they play basketball here on Planet Earth. Other famous Basketballians include Stromile Swift, JaVale McGee, Tyrus Thomas, Joe Alexander, and Kwame Brown.) Also because he's a springy small forward with long arms who's good at defense, and springy long-armed things like rebounds and blocks and dunks and very much not any kind of shooting.

Carl Landry, Power Forward

Carl Landry is the oldest 76er by eight years even though he's only 32. Imagine how much of a bummer it must be to go to work every day and all your coworkers are 19 to 24 years old. I bet he spends a lot of time sighing at the mess somebody just made in the break room microwave. He's one of the people on this team that is recognizably a NBA player, and will probably be traded before the season ends.

Richaun Holmes/Christian Wood, Power Forward

If you think I'm going to actually talk about either of these guys individually, you are out of your mind. I'm not THAT serious about getting to know a Sixer. These guys are both young and presumably somewhat promising at some kind of basketball-related activity, such as maybe being very tall and good at running around. Christian Wood is playing nine minutes per game but actually has the highest PER of any Sixer, which I assume is a statistical anomaly. If he is actually the best Sixer, he will play even less.

Nerlens Noel, Forward/Center

I firmly believe that Noel would be the best player in the NBA if the league instituted a new rule under which no player would be allowed to manipulate the ball's trajectory through any means more direct than a series of elaborate karate chops. He's probably the current best bavolleysketball player in the world.

Jahlil Okafor, Center

Jahlil Okafor is a rookie for the 1974 Memphis Tams whose locker is actually a basketball time machine. That's why he does so many 1974 ABA things, like post people up and drive 100 miles an hour and get in bar fights. I feel bad for Okafor. He won a national championship less than a year ago, and now he's losing every night and can't even go out and be a 19-year-old idiot in public without dickheads heckling him and waving guns in his face. His life was honestly better at Duke, which is basically a Young Republicans chapter that somehow became a highly respected university with sports teams. At least he's getting paid like it's 2015 instead of 1974.

Joel Embiid, Center

The Sixers' plan is just to Embiid their time. I know that's not a great joke or anything, or even a pun that scans relative to the pronunciation of his name, but I'm very happy to be done with this. A person can only get to know a Sixer to a certain extent before that person is ready to get to know anything else.