The Sixers have spent the offseason collecting stars. Now comes the harder part: getting them to play like a team. LeBron James, Joel Embiid, Jaylen Brown, and Tyrese Maxey have spent much of their careers being trusted to create offense. It is an enviable problem, but it is still a problem. There are only so many possessions in a game, and only one player can have the ball at any given moment. The question is no longer whether they have enough talent. It is whether the talent can coexist and collectively encounter success.
Which is why the language coming out of the Sixers has been about sacrifice. When asked about identifying the team’s alpha, Brown chose not to answer. Meanwhile, James has spoken about sacrificing possessions not necessarily as a reduction in responsibility, but as a way of preserving energy for the moments when his impact matters most. The parsing is evident, particularly for outsized personalities who have spent years measuring their influence through touches, shots, and usage.
James’ projected role illustrates the change. Head coach Nick Nurse envisions him not simply as another scorer, but as an offensive creator who can operate from the wing, make decisions on the fly, and continually put other players in advantageous positions. It is a familiar version of the all-time-great, but under vastly different circumstances. At 41, the Sixers do not need him to reproduce the workload of his prime. They want him to recognize what each possession requires, whether that means initiating the offense, making the second pass, or simply occupying enough defensive attention to open space for somebody else.
The same adjustment applies to those around James. None of them needs to prove that he can carry a team by himself. The challenge is figuring out how much of that individual responsibility should remain when the roster provides alternatives. Maxey has already proven to be a high-level offensive engine. Brown has been an All-Star and a primary option. That said, Embiid has long been the center of the Sixers’ offense when healthy, and title ambitions in the City of Brotherly Love still depend heavily on the latter’s availability.
The irony is not lost to all and sundry. The Sixers may have assembled their most talented group in years, but there can be no going around the dilemma of when they give way and whether they all understand that the possession they do not control can be just as important as the one they do. Great teams have always required some version of the bargain, and their particular challenge is that most everyone in the starting lineup has spent a career being the player for whom the bargain was usually made by somebody else. In short, they will ultimately have to accept that, with the red, white and blue, their importance cannot always be measured by how often the ball is in their hands.
Anthony L. Cuaycong has been writing Courtside since BusinessWorld introduced a Sports section in 1994. He is a consultant on strategic planning, operations and human resources management, corporate communications, and business development.