How the Sixers' Early Schedule Will Challenge Their Philosophies

When you have the premier offseason of any team in your sport, the price is that you're going to get everyone's best shot every single night.

Of course, when you sport a starting lineup of Tyrese Maxey, V.J. Edgecombe, Jaylen Brown, LeBron James and Joel Embiid, sometimes the talent will just win out, regardless of the opposition's best efforts.

When you add Brown and James to a team that already has Maxey, Edgecombe and, on some days, Embiid, most machinations of the regular-season schedule are going to seem less intimidating. It seems even less intimidating when you consider that they have 13 sets of back-to-backs and the fewest three-games-in-four-nights sets of any team in the NBA. Both features are very favorable to Philadelphia.

So when you add the level of talent and the favorable spacing between games together, you get a season set up for incredible success.

Make no mistake, there is adversity in there.

The Sixers' first 20 games of the season will be a good test of their philosophies.

15 of those 20 games are against teams that will be jockeying for postseason positioning in their respective conferences.

That is where Philadelphia will have to balance its historical philosophies with the formula its championship-winning stakeholders believe is necessary to achieve at the highest level.

"In order to see what we are, we've got to be on the floor. You have to have a consistent product on the floor. And you find out and maybe that's not good enough. Or maybe it is. But we got to figure out what are we, what can we stand on as a team. Some teams stand on both. But we got to be great at one of them at least. And we got to find out which one of those it is," Bob Myers said at Mike Gansey's introductory press conference back in June.

"And to get there, we have to have guys on the floor."

The talent level suggests this team will hang its hat on offense when all is said and done.

But there will be floor spots to figure out. Who goes where and when? There will be spacing configurations that everyone will have to get comfortable with. Who sprints ahead in transition and when? Who looks back for the outlet pass so that the ball doesn't sail out of bounds because the recipient kept running and never turned around? When do they push the pace and when do they pull it back and get into their halfcourt sets?

Success might not be immediate. But health is almost certainly the only thing that will hold this team back from an excellent season.

Yet, Brown has made it clear that this cast is a collection of paper tigers until they actually build sweat equity on the court. He doesn't want that to start when the season starts.

"Honestly, the journey kind of starts now. It doesn't happen over night, where you can just roll the ball out there and guys are going to be successful. It takes a lot of work," Jaylen Brown said in an interview with Anthony Anderson on Jimmy Kimmel Live on Thursday night.

"So I'm not losing sleep, but every single day another day goes by where I'm not thinking about how I can help my team and help my teammates and kind of make this thing work. We got a lot of talent. We got a great opportunity. I want to make it work."

The Sixers have met in subgroups. Brown alluded to meeting with James in Los Angeles during his conversation on the late-night talk show. There's footage of Maxey participating in workouts with James. There are pictures of Embiid and Maxey working out together at Villanova's practice facility circulating on social media.

They do not appear to be taking the opportunity in front of them for granted.

But there is a gift and a curse in building this supposed super team.

You add James on what is presumed to be his retirement tour over the next two seasons. You add Brown, who is going to have a chip on his shoulder over what he perceives as direspect at the end of his time in Boston. The Sixers are going to be a staple product of the league, evidenced by their receiving the maximum 34 nationally-televised games.

If you want your business to get off to a fast start, you're going to feature the Sixers early. As such, eight of their first 20 games will have national audiences. Four of those first 20 games feature back-to-backs, all of which include matchups against teams with intentions of making the playoffs.

Philadelphia's newest stakeholders seem aligned on the belief that development of this product begins in advance of the season.

Yet, Embiid has been managed to slow-play the regular season in recent years.

Of course, the caveat has always been that he was still in some phase of recovery from knee injuries to start each of the past two seasons. He is, by all accounts, healthy this summer. The photos of him that are publicly available show a slimmed yet strong Embiid.

Perhaps he's ready to go on day one and plays a vast majority of the team's early portion of the season. Perhaps the Sixers win a satisfactory share of those games and establish themselves as the beasts of the east. Perhaps they get good tape of themselves matching up with respectable teams and have a strong first step toward building this thing.

Could that best-case scenario lead to a false sense of security? Could it lead them to believe they have a cushion to manage Embiid and James, stalling the team's progress toward the end goal?

Or maybe Philadelphia is conservative with Embiid's early workload, giving themselves little early sample of this team in its full form. Maybe they lose some of those games.

Maybe they wake up a quarter of the way through the season realizing that they've just kicked the can down the road, falling behind where they want to be at that stage of the project.

Fortunately for the Sixers, if these are your problems, you're living the good life in the middle of August.

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