For the Sixers, game against the Bucks is one last test before a defining month | David Murphy

The arc of an NBA season is a weird thing when you are on this side of the wave. Last year, the Sixers were somewhere else, mired in the same sort of four-team rat race that is currently unfolding at the bottom of the playoff field.

There are two categories of contenders in professional basketball, and the space between them is wider than that which exists in any other of the major sports. There are the real ones, and then there is everybody else. (If you want to get technical, there is probably a third category, and that is the Warriors. But May is too pretty a month for nihilism, so let’s just pretend there are two categories and maintain some level of drama.)

Last year, the Sixers were on the other side of the divide. No doubt, they were more interesting than teams like the Pistons and Heat and Magic, teams that find themselves in the very same place that the Process was initiated to avoid, teams whose primary purpose in life is to provide the real contenders with opponents to face.

I did not include the Nets in this group because I find the Nets interesting, and the rest of the NBA should, too. But there is a big difference between “interesting” and “contending.” Which, now that I mention it, is kind of the point. Last year at this time, the Sixers were the same sort of interesting team, in that they entered the first round of the playoffs with something to prove. They just were not contenders. Through 78 games, they could take nothing for granted.

One year later, here we are. With more than a week remaining in the regular season, the Sixers decided to give Joel Embiid a break. Jimmy Butler, too. The result -- a blowout loss to the Mavericks -- might not have been pretty, but it was also pretty irrelevant. After Wednesday night’s loss in Atlanta they still need just two wins in their last four games to lock down the No. 3 seed in the East, and that was assuming the Celtics would win out the rest of their schedule (which, if you’d been paying attention to the Celtics, was an unlikely notion).

All of which is to say, the Sixers can now definitively count themselves among the teams that have very little use for the end of the regular season. At least, that’s true from an ends-based perspective. They have nothing to prove that we do not already know. All that matters at this point is how they measure up with the Bucks or the Raptors or the Celtics over a seven-game series. You can include the Pacers, if you’d like, if it heightens the drama.

From a standpoint of process? Sure, every game they play with each other offers another unit of value, given the lack of familiarity enjoyed by the current crop of starters. In a perfect world, Embiid would be a 7-foot-whatever human being whose supernatural frame does not come saddled with a variety of health concerns. But that’s not reality, and it probably never will be. And even if it was, is it rational to think that a couple of extra games against a couple of moribund tankers would tip the scale from defeat to victory?

It is not, I would argue. The only meaningful game remaining on the schedule is the one that is scheduled for Thursday night. It’s as close to a dress rehearsal as you can get this time of year. You’d like to see a lot of things, and you’d like to see them first and foremost on the defensive end of the court. In their two games against the Bucks this season, the Sixers have allowed 123 and 125 points, with that second total coming on an afternoon when Milwaukee made just 16 of its 50 attempts from three-point range. Clearly, you’d like to see Embiid play, and Butler too. And you’d like to see them figure out some way to slow down Giannis Antetokounmpo.

Whatever happens, it will not change the reality that the Sixers will have to figure this out on the fly. I’d challenge you to comb back through recent NBA history and identify a team that has accomplished what the Sixers are attempting to do. Heck, find me a team that has even tried it: adding a couple of All-Star-caliber players in-season while subtracting a trio of valuable role players, and expecting them to learn how to play together in time to make a legitimate run at the Finals.

To get there, the Sixers will need to go through at least one team that has at least twice as much court time playing together. It could be the Celtics. It could be the Raptors. Or, it could be the Bucks.

Throughout the last couple of months, there have been plenty of flashes of what it might look like if it all comes together. More than anything else, that’s what I’ll be looking for on Thursday night. It is hardly a must-win game. For at least a couple of weeks, though, it will be as good of a preview as we’re going to get.