In Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons, the Sixers have a dystopic duo that the NBA’s bubble should fear | David Murphy

One of them has been spotted bass fishing. The other, wearing a hazmat suit.

Basketball is about to get weird, baby, and Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid are leaning in. I’m sure they can hear the scoffs all the way down there in Orlando, which actually isn’t Orlando but a place called Lake Buena Vista, which itself really isn’t a town so much as a giant, sprawling Stepford community that feels like an immensely sad person’s rendering of the way the world should look through a happy person’s eyes.

If you’ve ever been to Disney World for anything other than vacation, you might have picked up on this vibe. It’s the happiest place on Earth right up until you break for lunch and try to navigate through a throng of camera-wielding tourists crowding around a sophomore hospitality management major who is spending his summer in a foam mouse costume. At that point, it becomes just another piece of paved-over swampland with $15 chicken fingers.

In other words, it’s the perfect place for a twosome like Embiid and Simmons, and for the NBA in general. In a place that was built for the express purpose of monetizing happiness, it makes perfect sense to go full dystopia and cordon off one section of the park for a bunch of basketball players so that they can do their civic duty and sacrifice their summers and potentially their lungs to provide the rest of us with some badly needed sports programming.

Even better if the park is owned and operated by the parent company of the NBA’s most important television partner. From the visionaries behind Animal Kingdom and Polynesian Village, it’s Disney’s Company Town!

Given that the world is already well on its way to becoming a loose confederation of people living in separate realities, I’m all for it. The first rule of happiness is: Don’t think too much.

» READ MORE: Life inside the bubble: Sixers enjoying ‘best Disney life’ before NBA season restart

Over the next few months, you will be able to incorporate into your daily reading any of a number of grave examinations by earnest people who question the propriety of playing basketball in the midst of a pandemic. All the while, the Jersey Shore will be packed and the Pony Leaguers will be playing baseball and life as we knew it in previous summers will more or less roll on.

Whether any of this is justified from within some grand moral or ethical framework is more or less irrelevant, because it is justified from within the framework of our society, and any attempt to argue that there is some grave voice of God “shouldn’t” about staging sports events in -- again, voice of God -- times like these is an attempt to argue that our society shouldn’t be the way that it is.

And, well, maybe it shouldn’t. But it is. And as long there are players willing to play, and bosses willing to pay them to do so, and people willing to watch, and none of them are putting the rest of us at jeopardy against our will, I can’t see an argument that the NBA’s attempt to proceed is a violation of the social compact in our little section of the universe. As long as everyone is there on their own volition, volit away.

I’ll gladly reexamine this sentiment if the bubble’s inhabitants end up exposed to more danger than they’d encounter if the league remained shut and they spent their summers in the real world. But the fact of the matter is the NBA’s corner of Orlando/Lake Buena Vista/wherever might be the safest corner of the country for the next three months, given that all of these players and coaches and staff and television crew members will have unfettered access to test kits and will be surrounded almost exclusively by people who are secure enough in their personhood and individual agency that they are unlikely to walk into a crowded grocery store without wearing a mask because it makes them feel like less of a pawn.

Really, the people most to blame for the NBA desire to carry on are the people who desire to watch it. Here in Philadelphia, at least, that desire should be just as strong as it was at the moment that sports went away.

I’ve talked myself into thinking that these next three months will offer the Sixers a chance that they never would have gotten had the playoffs proceeded as normal.

There are two reasons for this. The first is the fisherman. The second is the guy in the hazmat suit.

Granted, you’ve heard this before, but now is a better time than any to think that it’s true. For a young tandem like Simmons and Embiid, the next three months are essentially a bonus year tacked onto their careers.

They are coming off a layoff that was the length of a normal offseason, with the usual chance to work on their bodies and their games and their mentalities. Yet they are returning to a team and coaching staff and situation that are exactly the same as before the break. And, at most, they’ll be playing three months of hoops.

It’s an unprecedented situation, and it can’t help but bolster the Sixers’ chances to have their two young stars four months healthier and fresher and more mature.

Everyone assumed Embiid would come back with the physique of the Nutty Professor, but, it turns out, he looks like Embiid, if not better. Meanwhile, Simmons has recovered from the back injury that had threatened to sideline him for the rest of the regular season if not longer.

Brett Brown and his coaches have had four months to figure out how to best use the two. That will likely involve a lot more of Simmons’ playing off the ball, which should allow him to get into better scoring position than he is capable of when he spends the first four seconds of every possession after a make dribbling the ball up the court.

At the very least, Embiid and Simmons are a good reason to approach the NBA’s restart with fresh eyes and full hearts. Besides, wouldn’t it be a fitting end to the Process if the Sixers ended up winning their championship in a year where they won’t be allowed to have a parade?