Jared McCain was not on the floor Wednesday night, but the Sixers sure could have used him. With Joel Embiid unavailable for Game 2, Philadelphia leaned so hard on its starters that Tyrese Maxey played 47 high-usage minutes, Paul George logged 43, and VJ Edgecombe and Kelly Oubre Jr. each went for 40 in a second-round playoff game the team had to have.
The problem was not just the workload. The Sixers shot 21% from the floor in the fourth quarter and never found a real release valve beyond Quentin Grimes, who was the de facto sixth man in the playoffs while averaging 22.4 minutes and 7.1 points per game. Nick Nurse did not bring another guard or wing off the bench, and when Andre Drummond and Adem Bona both wound up in foul trouble, Dominick Barlow had to play late and provide whatever glue minutes he could.
That is why McCain keeps coming back into the picture. Before the knee injury that cut into his postseason, he had given Philadelphia small but useful minutes: 15 in Game 1 against the Lakers and 21 across three games against the Suns. In the 2026 playoffs, he was averaging just 5.3 minutes and 3 points per game, but even that was more than what the Sixers had available when the rotation tightened against the Knicks in the conference semifinals.
The broader picture is hard to miss. Philadelphia decided to punt at the trade deadline and do nothing to improve the roster, then entered a second-round series with no way to go 10 deep. That left the Sixers asking far too much of their stars on a night when Embiid was out, and it left Nurse with a bench that barely existed once the game started to wear on. The Oklahoma City Thunder could turn to Cason Wallace, Alex Caruso, Jaylin Williams, Isaiah Joe, Aaron Wiggins and McCain in the playoffs. Philadelphia could not match that kind of depth.
That gap is why this series feels like a reckoning rather than a bad shooting night. The Sixers had a chance to get out of the second round for the first time since George W. Bush was a first-year president, and instead they were left searching for minutes they never built into the roster. McCain may not have changed everything, but on a night like Wednesday, he looked like exactly the extra body Philadelphia did not have.
