PHILADELPHIA — Tuesday’s 118-102 loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder may ultimately be relegated to the dust bin of the 76ers season as merely another — albeit comically shorthanded — oddity. But it may serve as a sign for Nick Nurse. The veterans that the 76ers have brought in this season to surround their Big 3 have not worked. The talk of veteran savvy and hunger for a late-career title has fallen flat, and when support players have been depended upon to win games in the absence of stars, they’ve mostly fallen flat. Tuesday, the 76ers took that to its logical extreme. With eight players out, Nurse had nine players to choose from, five of them having played in the G League this season. That group had no business battling within four points of the Western Conference-leading Thunder later into the fourth quarter. But if some of that fight can be bottled up and deployed alongside the presumptive starters once in a while, then this whole experiment might be in better shape, both in 2025 and beyond. Justin Edwards scored 25 points Tuesday. Jeff Dowtin added 18. And while Springfield isn’t calling for either anytime soon — someone had to score the points, right? — there’s at least something in their game that could be useful to a 76ers team looking for answers. Nurse couched it as a personnel question. Maybe, he offered, in crafting lineup combinations, some mixture of old and young might help. Maybe a spark plug from the young corps could pair with the addition by subtraction of an older figure. The veteran ballast that the 76ers acquired in the offseason to surround Joel Embiid, Tyrese Maxey and Paul George has not worked out, even if they’ve gotten precious few minutes with that injured trio. Tuesday bore it out again. Reggie Jackson managed just 17 minutes, with four points and five turnovers. Eric Gordon scored 10 points and still might have value as a spot-up shooter around real floor spacers, but his shooting regression, over nearly half a season, is real and seems irrecoverable. Kyle Lowry turns 39 on March 25. The odds indicate he’s likely to be inactive that night, with his nagging hip issue and other ailments. You could add in Andre Drummond, who is the 76ers’ worst plus/minus performer. The return from those three guards will only diminish as time goes on, and only Gordon is under contract for next year. When everyone is healthy, there will be backcourt minutes to be had, and the 76ers can cut their losses by blooding the younger options. Edwards, Dowtin and Ricky Council are not now the players that that older trio was at their peaks. But then again, those players are a shadow of their former selves. The younger guys can grow into dependable reserve, a commodity the club is perennially in search of. If this season, with Embiid never quite healthy and the 76ers mired in 11th place in a very mediocre East, is lost and the priority shifts to championship-readiness next year, then it’s worth investing time to improve those players into the passable second-unit players they could become. It’s only a handful of games. But Edwards has looked like an NBA player. Nurse sees the Imhotep Charter product making the right decision more often than not. “He is making the right plays, and that means he’s drifting and shifting and relocating to where the ball can find him,” Nurse said. “When he’s got the space, he’ll rhythm into a 3. When he’s got to closeout coming at him, he’ll get by them and get into the paint, sometimes all the way to the rim. He’s making the right decisions.” Dowtin, who is straining the capacity of the G League with his dominance in Delaware, has as well. Neither has looked lost on the court, which is more than can be said for some of the older guys. “Just playing with confidence,” Dowtin said. “At the end of the day, it’s a great opportunity. Guys are down, so we have a next-man-up mentality, just play aggressive, just play basketball. At the end of the day, that’s really all it is.” They have room to grow, and they are the most likely to replace something close to the intensity off the bench that Jared McCain supplied before he was lost for the season with a knee injury. That will have a benefit in the present, in addition to potential dividends down the road. By season’s end, the roster composition could shift. Given the outlay of funds and term to Embiid, George and Tyrese Maxey, the pillars of the plan will remain the same. Improvements will have to be at the margins, and the 76ers already have flexibility with an open roster spot. They also need help in the present. “I hope we make decisions that are going to make our team better,” Nurse said. “I hope we think like that all the time, and every opportunity you’ve got, whether it’s the draft, whether it’s free-agent signings, whether it’s the trade deadline, whether it’s the buyout market. There’s kind of these markers that that you can possibly improve your team.” Nurse admitted as the preamble that he’s just the coach, with no control over the roster composition. But he can make his team better from within with who he puts on the court nightly. Contact Matthew De George at [email protected].