BREAKING: The Philadelphia 76ers will not finish 82-0

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Good morning, friends!

The bad news?

The Sixers’ hopes of an undefeated season ended on Sunday night with a loss to the Detroit Pistons.

The good news?

They’ve already banked two top-of-résumé wins in the first week of the season.

The danger in not squishing a team like the Milwaukee Bucks, a team that has no chance to beat you so you get to decide how long the fight lasts, is that they hang around for too long. And then suddenly you’re not taking the fourth quarter off. You’re playing crunch time minutes on the first leg of a back-to-back, with the far superior team coming to town the next day.

Are you going to criticize the Sixers for not blowing the Bucks out of the building on Saturday night? No.

But I always wonder if there’s some level of disadvantage when you have a back-to-back with such starkly contrasting opponents.

There was no Embiid on Sunday night, but there was a LeBron James.

And the Pistons were without Jalen Duren and Ausar Thompson.

It was there for the Sixers to take on Sunday night. But that game could’ve been called about midway through the first quarter and the story wouldn’t have changed.

LeBron started at center. The Sixers lost the glass by seven. They were very flat in the first quarter, and they spent the rest of the night trying to make up ground.

I do wonder if LeBron at center contributed to a discombobulated start on offense on Sunday night. From the takeaways (which you can get in your inbox after every game by upgrading here):

The shooting has been rather miserable through this first week of the season. But I do wonder if this poor start was at all influenced by the players on the court not being used to LeBron functioning as the nominal center in the starting lineup. It’s impossible to say what causes missed shots. Could be legs on the second night of a back-to-back. Could be as simple as luck. But I do wonder if that wrinkle messed with their level of assurance in the shots they were getting.

“I think that I can recall some timeouts where we’d hit him out there on the perimeter and we were asking for a lot more cutting,” Nick Nurse explained after the game.

“You know, again, he’s an unbelievable passer, and I thought we stood and watched him a little bit. And they just kind of shrunk their defense and shrunk the paint on us and we need multiple cutters, at least two when he’s got the ball. And, again, that’s just stuff we got to organize a little better.”

I don’t know how much credit you want to offer to the guy who said he can do everything on the basketball court, but LeBron did try to jump-start the stuck offense by doing simple things as the big in the two-man game. There was real effort to get the ball popping from side to side. He set real picks and opened up as a spacer. He kept the ball moving, although his passing did basically nothing to progress actions toward the basket.

So, yeah, the dream 82-0 season ain’t happening.

But there is a lot of good to build on in the first week. For instance, the Sixers have yet to allow an opposing offense break 90 points per 100 halfcourt plays.

That is made even more impressive by the fact that they are allowing the opposition to rebound 33.3% of their own misses, per Cleaning The Glass.

They have bent at times, but they haven’t really broken.

The other good is that they’re 3-1 despite shooting just 30.1% from three. The Sixers are last in the league in effective field goal percentage, and yet they’ve racked up a win over the reigning champions (who remain winless, themselves) and a 29-point comeback and win over another supposed Eastern Conference contender.

In other words, they’ve impressed through one week and still have so much upside left to tap.

I mean, duh. A team with this degree of firepower in the starting five and depth (at every position except center, apparently) obviously has a high ceiling. But they’ve shown that they already possess problem-solving skills. They can adjust when things aren’t going well.

Those are remarkable characteristics demonstrate just one week into a season, especially when the pieces are still so unfamiliar with one another.

Now, they’ll get off their feet for a day before preparing to visit the Indiana Pacers on Wednesday.

But that doesn’t mean Vertical 76 will be off.

The content stays fresh around here.

Happy Monday.