‘Sixers Extra’ season preview: What to expect from LeBron James and his new team this year

After a busy offseason, the 76ers are less than two weeks away from kicking off a heavily anticipated season.

Anchored by the big five of LeBron James, Tyrese Maxey, Jaylen Brown, Joel Embiid and VJ Edgecombe, the Sixers are expected to be compete for a title in the 2026-27 season.

The Inquirer’s Gina Mizell and Chris Hine sat down to discuss the team’s upcoming season on the latest episode of Sixers Extra. They touch on a number of issues, including the team’s transformative offseason, the arrival of LeBron, health of Embiid and maturation of Maxey. Here are a few excerpts from their conversation.

Watch the full interview below and subscribe to the Sixers Extra podcaston Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Gina Mizell: What have been your kind of first impressions of the hubbub surrounding this team, and what it’s going to be like to sort of be in the thick of this all day-to-day?

Chris Hine: Yeah, I think similar to you, I don’t think it really even hit me until Saturday afternoon when they were actually all on the floor at the Blue x White scrimmage together at the same time with the crowd, with Matt Cord, with all of it. It’s like, ‘Oh yeah, this is this is happening, and it’s going to start happening soon.’

We’re about two weeks away from opening night here, and I think the biggest takeaway I’ve had the last week is that they don’t seem to be under any illusions that this isn’t going to be difficult. Sacrifice has been a big word, and what that means in the context of this team, everybody’s kind of had their own take on what that means.

But I think they know that there is a pretty big challenge still ahead of them. That the process of gelling and coming together is not going to be an easy one. It’s going to be bumpy at times. There’s going to be stretches of the season where things aren’t going to be going well, or they may go through a 10-game stretch where they lose seven of them, or whatever what have you. And I think they they they’re coming into this clear-eyed.

GM: Joel Embiid’s health has been such a storyline for this team for the past few seasons, basically ever since he won MVP, and I will say that that has been a major storyline of this camp. It definitely has a different tone than has been around these parts the last couple of years when he was still fighting those kind of chronic knee issues and he obviously went through a lot of different injuries this past season.

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But it seems to be his sort of declaration at the end of the season last year when he said, ‘I think we’ve figured out how to manage my knee, and and we know how to move forward with that.’ That seems to at least initially — again, everything is a caveat with Embiid — but guys are going out of their way to say Embiid is participating in things in practice.

People have talked about just how happy he looks. I think that is a sign that he’s feeling better. We saw him in the scrimmage on Saturday. He dunked the basketball, which he has joked in the past that, ‘Oh, I can never dunk again’ or ‘I’m going to stop jumping, need to stop jumping for rebounds’. But if that really is a positive step in the right direction, and they sort of can track a plan for him, then that obviously unlocks the ceiling for this team, which is noticeably different than the last couple of years in regards to Embiid.

GM: With the stars that were added with LeBron and and Jaylen Brown, it’s sometimes easy to forget that when the season ended, we thought that the future of this franchise would be Tyrese Maxey and VJ Edgecombe. But what have you seen from both of those guys? What do you think of them off the court, and then obviously their potential while teaming up with this group of really established stars.

CH: I think it’s been really interesting to see just Tyrese kind of grabbing the leadership mantle, whatever you want to call it, the leader, the reins of the franchise of this team. And the way that the Sixers speak about him, whether it’s LeBron or Jaylen Brown, kind of being this connective tissue on and off the court. That is what leadership really looks like.

It’s not always the rah-rah kind of stuff that you see in movies or what have you, but this kind of leadership that he’s been displaying throughout this whole process, whether it’s been courting LeBron to come here, making sure Jaylen Brown is comfortable, making sure that the team is functioning well. I think it’s a pretty significant to see as somebody coming in from the outside that, ‘OK, this guy entering his seventh year seems to have a really good handle on it, and that doesn’t always come around in the NBA. That there are guys that that could be superstars in this league and can be really good players, but they maybe don’t have that leadership aspect, or they’re able to really positively affect a locker room the way that it seems that that Tyrese Maxey has here in Philadelphia.

And as for VJ, I think I was just struck by what everybody has said about his early leadership qualities and his voice, because that certainly is not something that you see out of second-year NBA players. I mean, having covered Anthony Edwards similarly, and you think of Anthony Edwards as maybe one of the more outspoken guys in the league. But in the locker room and things like that, it took a long time for Ant to really find his voice and develop his voice as a leader of the team, and maybe not the leader, but one of the leaders of the team. So to see VJ Edgecombe in year two on a team with Joel Embiid, Tyrese Maxey, Jaylen Brown, LeBron James, not be afraid to speak up and not say I’m just going to be chilling in the back seat.

GM: I think I’ll echo everything that you just said. And as someone who now has covered Maxey for five years, going into my sixth year consecutively, it’s been really interesting to watch that sort of transformation and evolution. And honestly, I know one of the big kind of viral moments from Saturday was when his young daughter, who was born over the summer or offseason, was there and like holding her and passing her over to LeBron and all that stuff. Like that just exemplifies that Tyrese Maxey has literally grown up in this organization. Like that he really has gone from a 19-year-old kid getting drafted during the COVID year to now being the guy who courted LeBron, the franchise player, to use Joel Embiid’s own you know nickname for him.

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GM: All right, well that’s going to do it for this first episode with you and I on Game Day Central Sixers Extra, Chris. Good stuff, and looking forward to doing this all season with you.

CH: It’s going to be great. Hopefully, everybody else follows along.

GM: Awesome, and that will do it for today’s edition of Gameday Central Sixers Extra. Please join us all throughout the season for what is going to be a very fascinating journey for the Sixers basketball team, and read our work in the Philadelphia Inquirer every day. Thank you so much. See you next time.