Doc Rivers has Joel Embiid, James Harden, and the stable Sixers cooking down the playoff stretch

This time it feels different. This time, it seems real.

This time, the Sixers seem like a known quantity. This is the first time in a decade that the team they have in March looks almost exactly like the team they had in October. No big trades. No big injuries. No big problems.

Entering the weekend, they had just churned through a wicked road trip and gone 18-6 in their last 24 games. With 17 games left before hosting the Trail Blazers and Wizards, and facing a wide-open playoff field with no dominant team in the East, this team seems … solid.

More so than their best team, when they lost Game 7 of the Eastern Conference semifinal to a quadruple-doink Canadian miracle.

More so than their best-seeded team, when a 72-game, COVID-shortened schedule found them on top of the East.

Those teams had obvious flaws. The biggest: Ben Simmons’ debilitating limitations on offense. Second-biggest: Joel Embiid’s immaturity and softness.

Other issues existed, such as Brett Brown’s coaching inexperience and the team’s chronic lack of depth. You can argue that current coach Doc Rivers has postseason problems, and you can still wonder about the bench, but the biggest problems are solved.

James Harden has replaced Simmons, and, at 33, he’s an old dog learning new tricks. Once a ball-dominant gunner, Harden has developed into the the closest thing to a real point guard since Josh Harris traded Jrue Holiday and, disastrously, began The Process in 2013.

Embiid, nine years into a maddeningly inconsistent career, is a matured leader.

This seems very, very different.

Recency bias

They just went 4-1 on what was supposed to be a dangerous road trip, getting big W’s against the big M’s: Miami, Milwaukee, and Minnesota, all playoff teams at this moment. They went 4-1 despite never using the same five starters in any of those games. Astounding.

This team isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty damned good. Predictably so. No matter what lineup Rivers presents, you kind of know what you’re going to get. They are generally playing hard, and smart, and peaking as the playoffs approach.

Perfect.

Entering Friday night against Portland, the Sixers hadn’t lost to a non-playoff team in 16 games, dating back to a Jan. 30 loss to the Magic.

Embiid averaged 32.4 points in that span, just below his league-high 33.3 points, and did so efficiently. He shot 54.4% from the field, made 37.8% of his three-pointers, 87.4% from the free-throw line, and pulled 10.3 rebounds, all slightly better than his season averages.

Perhaps most significantly, despite facing a variety of defensive schemes designed to stop him, he averaged just 2.9 turnovers, far better than the 3.7 he’d averaged to that point and better too than his career average of 3.4.

OK, maybe the turnovers aren’t the most significant aspect of the run. This is: Embiid, once the poster child for the fallacy of “Load Management,” played 15 of those 16 games. Bad foot, bad ankle, bad back? These days, he’s a bad mamma jamma.

Harden’s efficiency has been similarly outstanding, and, like Embiid, he’s generally been better in the last 16 games. Harden’s overall body of work this season is impressive in its variance from the player he used to be.

Harden entered Friday leading the league with 10.8 assists, tied for his second-best average in his 14 seasons. He was hitting 40.1% of his 3-pointers, more than 25 points better than his previous best since becoming a starter 11 years ago. Again, perhaps most significantly, Harden was averaging just 3.4 turnovers, also his best in the last 11 seasons.

Two stars are playing symbiotic, complementary basketball. Satellite players like Tobias Harris and Tyrese Maxey are filling whatever role they’re asked to fill.

“We all got better as a team and [we’re] just sticking together,” Embiid explained after the win over the Timberwolves on Tuesday put bow on the trip. “We know what works and what doesn’t.”

This feels different, indeed.

That was then

There was no plan in 2019. There really couldn’t be. Everything was, as always, too fluid.

In November, they’d traded their depth to the Timberwolves for Jimmy Butler, an established alpha who never quite fit with would-be alphas like Embiid and Simmons. Then, in February, they’d traded their their future for Harris, a volume shooter and a go-to scorer who didn’t get enough shots and whom they refused to go to.

There was no real system, per se. They’d stagnate late. Embiid, unable to handle double-teams, would turn the ball over. Ultimately, they would pass the ball to Butler and hope he could break down his defender one-on-one … or, more accurately, one-on-two, because Simmons’ defender usually was unoccupied.

As for 2021, that was always a mirage. The Sixers traded for George Hill, who was damaged goods, instead of Kyle Lowry, who was aged and expensive goods, and so got nothing of relevance to help. Despite the Sixers holding the No. 1 seed, both the Nets and Bucks entered the playoffs with better odds to win the title, which Milwaukee eventually won.

There were plenty of reasons why the Sixers weren’t built to win in 2021, but the lingering image from that postseason always will be Simmons’ refusal to dunk what might have been a decisive basket in Game 7 against a very mediocre Hawks team.

That series — that postseason — was the worst period in Rivers’ Hall of Fame career.

That night also turned out to be Simmons’ final game as a Sixer, as his descent into petulance off the court led to regression on the court, which, in turn, brought Harden to Philly last winter.

He’s been here all season. There have been no big changes. Pretty much everyone is healthy. Rivers, who is a good coach, knows his players’ abilities and limitations. None of this has been true in more than a decade.

Which is why, finally, this all feels so different.

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