The numbers say Embiid, Simmons and the Sixers are the best they’ve been ... since their first year together | David Murphy

Arbitrary end points are a heck of a thing. So is recency bias. Combine the two and you get the notion that Doc Rivers and Daryl Morey have discovered a formula that had consistently eluded their predecessors. At 24-12, the Sixers are off to their best 36-game start since Allen Iverson led them to the NBA Finals in 2000-01. They entered the All-Star break as the Eastern Conference’s No. 1 seed, the first time in the post-process era that they’ve been better than fourth at the midway point. Joel Embiid is an MVP candidate. Ben Simmons is a Defensive Player of the Year candidate. The salad days are here.

Right?

Potentially. But take a quick jaunt backward through time and you’ll notice something funny. The closer you look at the Sixers’ performance this season, and the harder you try to make the case that we’re witnessing something unprecedented, the more you find yourself returning to the year it all began.

It was way back yonder in 2017-18. Embiid and Simmons were in Year 1 of their partnership. In the minutes that the duo was together on the court, the Sixers were one of the most prolific teams in the league, outscoring opponents by an average of 15.3 points per 100 possessions. They would finish the season ranked fourth in the league in defensive efficiency.

» READ MORE: How the Sixers match up against the Eastern Conference’s best in the season’s second half

More pertinent for our purposes is the fact that those 2017-18 Sixers closed out the regular season with a 28-8 record over their last 36 games. During that stretch, they posted an offensive rating of 112.9 and a defensive rating of 104.5, meaning they outscored opponents by an average of 8.4 points per 100 possessions. They bombed it from long range: 35% of their field goal attempts were from three-point range, and 37.4 percent of those attempts went in. They would finish that 36-game stretch with an effective field goal percentage of .545, while holding their opponents to .492.

If you’re the kind of person who prefers their newspaper with less numbers, all you need to know is this: each of those marks is better than the ones that the Sixers have posted during the first 36 games of this season.

But wait . . . there’s more.

In each of the previous three seasons, the Sixers have had a 36-game stretch that is similar to the one they carried into this year’s All-Star break. In 2018-19, they went 25-11 between Games 17-52. Last year, they started the season 23-13 and had a slightly better average point differential than they have this season.

At the very least, these numbers give us some interesting things to consider. From there, you can easily use them as the foundation of an argument that says the Sixers will need to be as aggressive on the trade market as they were in 2018-19, when the additions of Jimmy Butler and Tobias Harris helped bring them to the precipice of the Eastern Conference finals.

It’s the similarities between this year’s team and the 2017-18 squad that warrants closer inspection. From a standpoint of roster composition, the personnel is pretty close to apples to apples. JJ Redick was the elite shooter on that year’s team the way Seth Curry is for this year’s bunch. Robert Covington filled a role similar to the one Danny Green currently occupies. In 2017-18, the Sixers had a stretch four in Dario Saric, who shot .393 from three-point range. This year, they have Tobias Harris, who is shooting .402.

» READ MORE: Doc Rivers looks to keep the Sixers healthy through a grueling second half of the season

By no means are the rosters replicas of each other. But they are close enough that Morey and Rivers would both be wise to consider the lessons of that 2017-18 postseason, when the Celtics packed the paint against Embiid and Simmons and walked away with a 4-1 victory in the Eastern Conference semifinals. That team found itself in desperate need of a player who was capable of attacking Boston’s sweltering defense off the dribble. In recent weeks, we’ve seen that same need crystalize for this year’s Sixers team, most acutely during a two-game series against the Raptors.

Can the Sixers get by without the addition of such a player? You can certainly argue that they have a better chance at it this year than they did in 2017-18. Simmons is a much better defender now than he was then -- although his defense was undervalued then -- and Embiid is a better offensive player. When they are together on the court, the Sixers are outscoring opponents by 14.9 points per 100 possessions. That’s a dramatic improvement over the last couple of years -- last year, the Sixers were more than five net points better when Embiid or Simmons was on the court alone, and they barely outscored opponents when they were together.

Add Seth Curry into the mix, and the Embiid-Simmons margin moves to 16.1 points per 100 possessions. To put that in perspective, the Nets’ point differential when Kevin Durant, James Harden, and Kyrie Irving are on the court together is +8.8 points per 100 possessions (though it jumps up to +16.8 when you add Joe Harris).

Again, though, we find ourselves back in 2017-18. That year, the Sixers were +15.3 points per 100 possessions with the Embiid-Simmons pairing. And that year’s starters outscored opponents by an average of 20.3 points. This year, that number is 12.1

There’s a heck of a lot of noise baked into lineup stats, so take all of that for what it’s worth. As we saw in 2017-18, the eyes can often tell you what the numbers can’t. This year, they tell us that the Sixers are more functional than they were last season. They tell us that Embiid and Simmons are better together than they have been in a couple of years. But they also tell us that the Sixers haven’t played many games against the teams they’ll need to beat on the road to the Finals. Challenge the eyes with the numbers, and you’re left with a strong possibility that this year’s team is closer to what that 2017-18 squad was at the end of the regular season than it is to a championship.

The good news is, there is a lot of basketball left to be played, and thus, a lot of improvements that might yet be made. That’s true both internally and externally. Plenty can change between now and the March 25 trade deadline. Question is, if nothing does, do the Sixers really have enough?