For banged-up Sixers, now is time to produce wins and emerge from last place in the East

LOS ANGELES — The NBA regular season is a long, 82-game affair.

But there comes a time when teams must produce positive results. For the 76ers, that time is now.

Wednesday’s 110-98 loss to the Los Angeles Clippers dropped the Sixers (1-6) to last place in the Eastern Conference standings

“I’ve said this a couple of times, we’ve got to play better,” coach Nick Nurse said. “We played really well in Phoenix [Monday], but we [get] the short end of a tough ending of the game. … You are hoping to take the step in the right direction, but you kind of take two forward and two back tonight. So we have to develop some consistency and play better.”

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The Sixers are tied with the Milwaukee Bucks and the Western Conference’s Utah Jazz for the NBA’s worst record. The Bucks hold the tiebreaker in the East standings after toppling the Sixers, 124-109, in the season opener at the Wells Fargo Center.

This is an awful start for a squad that entered this season hyped as a legitimate championship contender. Daryl Morey, the team’s president of basketball operations, was praised for assembling what was believed to be Philly’s best roster in decades.

But as we’re learning, the Sixers’ success is fully dependent on the availability of the All-Star trio of Joel Embiid, Paul George and Tyrese Maxey. And that’s a problem when their long list of injuries is considered.

George missed the first five games with a bone bruise in his left knee, and Embiid has yet to touch the floor. The Sixers center missed the entire preseason and the first six games for what the team called left knee injury management. Wednesday served as the first absence in a three-game suspension the 2023 NBA MVP was hit with after a locker room altercation with Inquirer columnist Marcus Hayes. He’ll also miss matchups against the Lakers (Friday) at Crypto.com Arena and Charlotte Hornets (Sunday) at the Wells Fargo Center.

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But playing without Embiid will become the norm for the Sixers, who occasionally will rest him as part of their load-management plan. George also is expected to sit out the second game of some back-to-back sets.

As a result, the Sixers have had to rely heavily on Maxey — and even his availability is now an issue. The All-Star point guard didn’t play in the fourth quarter of Friday’s game because of right hamstring tightness. Nurse said he didn’t return for precautionary reasons. However, sources confirmed that the expectation is for Maxey to miss a couple of weeks. He will be evaluated later Thursday.

Being sidelined a couple of weeks usually indicates that the hamstring is strained. If that turns out to be the case, the Sixers will be a world of trouble. The team already has had its fair share of problems with Maxey in the lineup during the season‘s opening games. With him as the only legitimate scoring option, the Sixers offense was clunky. That improved since George returned, but major challenges persist. Defensively, they’ve played well in spurts, but opponents have gone on large second-half runs to put games out of reach.

So how do they get out of this funk?

“Good question,” Kyle Lowry said. “Good question. How do we get out of it? There’s no magical words to say we’ve got to do this or do that. But it’s just the one old verbiage where you keep saying, ‘You’ve got to keep getting at it, keep working at it, and keep trying to find the solution.’ I mean put the habit in, put the work in.”

Lowry, a six-time All-Star in his 19th season, realizes the Sixers must continue to trust what they worked on all summer and what the coaches want them to do.

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“But our effort could be a little bit better,” he said. “We just have to try to get better and grow and take it day by day. It’s really dark right now, in terms of us and how we’re playing and not winning. And it’s really down and not great, but all we can do is continue to try to work at it.”

Embiid could be that magic answer the Sixers need. He’s expected to make his season debut Tuesday night against the New York Knicks at the Wells Fargo Center. Once he returns, the expectation is that Embiid’s presence would provide a considerable lift. The 7-foot-2 center arguably is the most dominant player in the league. His ability to draw double and triple teams should open opportunities for teammates, and it also should allow them to shift into roles for which they’re better suited.

Aside from the second half of their 118-114 overtime win against the Indiana Pacers, the Sixers have struggled without Embiid and George. But Lowry doesn’t want to use their absences as an excuse for poor play.

“That definitely [stinks] not to have them,” Lowry said. “But our effort and energy and consistency and habits can be better. And you get to that point, that helps a lot.”

The Sixers know the NBA is about stacking days. Like Nurse said, they put together a really good performance in their loss to the Suns.

But …

“We laid an egg tonight,” Lowry said. “We’ve got to get better. We can’t have those. It [stinks]. It’s not disappointing. It [stinks]. We can get better.”