The 76ers’ season hit the halfway point Sunday night in Milwaukee. It did so with a whimper. The effort – stop me if you’ve heard this before – was good. Not good enough to beat a Milwaukee team that is 22-9 since a 2-8 start to the season, but good enough to make you wonder how a team featuring 24 minutes of Pete Nance managed to stay within seven points of the Bucks deep into the fourth quarter of a 123-109 setback. The halfway point came and went like so many other junctures in the 76ers season: Without Joel Embiid, missing his 28th game out of 41. It transpired without Paul George, without Guerschon Yabusele, without Kyle Lowry, without either Martin, KJ or Caleb. And so, at the 41-game mark, with a record of 15-26 and losses in nine of the last 11 and six straight, the 76ers are where exactly? The answer is precisely nowhere, and not just because they’ve reverted to the 11 games under .500 at which they were marooned after a 3-14 start. This is a Schrodinger’s cat of a team with flaws in composition and horrific injury luck. In that dual nature, the 76ers have found something worse than the dreaded mediocrity they tried to Process their way out of. They are both a good team and a bad team at the same time, and the identity crisis leaves no clear direction forward short of waiting for next season. The injury-related upheaval has been massive. The Sixers have used 26 different starting lineups in 41 games, the last featuring rookie Adem Bona. They’ve suffered only one season-ending injury (Jared McCain) but endured a constant churn of in-and-out among a half-dozen guys, behind the usual obfuscation that is NBA injury reporting. Yabusele’s knee injury made him the last Sixer to miss a game this year, the streak ending at 39 on Saturday in Indiana. The team has used 430 five-man lineup combinations, the fourth-most in the league and one of only six teams to top 400. At the other extreme, Minnesota has used just 117 combinations, the Knicks 168. Their anticipated starting lineup entering the season – Tyrese Maxey, George, Kelly Oubre, Caleb Martin and Embiid – has played together for 54 minutes. The second-choice lineup, with Yabusele in for Embiid, has logged 72 minutes. Looking at the Timberwolves, their top five-man combination has been on the court together for 459 minutes; the Knicks’ five starters have played 688 minutes together. That has created a difficult reality, the Sixers mired in 11th place in the Eastern Conference standings through Sunday. They’re one game behind Chicago in the loss column for the final play-in tournament spot and seven behind Atlanta for the sixth seed. But even worse is the fantasy that haunts that reality. When healthy, these Sixers are good enough to win in Boston. Without Embiid, they’re good enough to give Orlando a run for its money in Florida or push the Knicks to overtime. Without George and Embiid, they can push the Bucks away from home. With none of the Big 3, they can give the Thunder a scare. That idealized version of the 76ers may be destined to forever remain an illusion. It all depends on the health of Embiid, and of George, whose bingo card of injured lower body parts is alarmingly full. Embiid’s absences this season mean that the one-time MVP has played 446 out of a possible 842 regular-season games in his career, including his first two zero-game seasons. That’s a tidy 53 percent. If he doesn’t play again this season, he’d stay above the 50 percent mark by a scant nine games. It’s been enough of a predicament for coach Nick Nurse to be asked on Friday, when Embiid was ruled out for the current three-game road trip, to be asked if the idea of shutting the center down has been broached. Nurse answered with a flat no, but even more it’s fair to wonder if the long-term plan this season is to abandon the idea of Embiid coming in to save the day and double-down on surviving without his services. “For the most part, I’ve got a microfocus for what’s there,” Nurse said. “I think it’s a little bit of a puzzle when you know that one big piece of it’s going to be gone, but the other pieces have been scattered so much. That’s been difficult enough.” Embiid will return at some point in the back half of the season, and one of two things will happen. He will get hurt again, in the way that his knee issues begat foot problems and the ill luck of a forearm to the face against Indiana. Or the support system that has propped the team up will break down. Maxey, averaging nearly 38 minutes per game, is the most likely victim of that. His 37 points, seven assists and six rebounds wasn’t enough to beat the Bucks; the massive responsibility on his shoulders has already weighed him down this year, his assists total down and his 3-point shooting percentage trimmed a full 10 percentage points from his 2022-23 highs. Things will get worse before they get better. The 76ers visit Denver late Tuesday, then return home to face East-leading Cleveland. Boston, Dallas, Miami and Denver (again) are on the docket on a make-or-break six-game homestand that delivers them to the Feb. 6 trade deadline. It’ll provide a verdict on the season. Whatever that happens to be, it’ll be superior to the current state of limbo. Contact Matthew De George at [email protected]