The Sixers have lost a pair of road games to Portland and Phoenix to fall to one and two on their West Coast trip.

The three-point shooting has deserted them.

The defense has been struggling, and the bench play has been downright disastrous.

Are these long-term concerns or typical bumps in the road?

Let's talk about it.

All right, welcome everybody.

This is Derek Podner, joined by Rich Hoffman on the Sixers Beat, part of the Athletics Podcast Network.

Hey, doing, Rich.

I'm all right, man.

The team we cover is not that good anymore.

In the range from Joelle and Bide to the sixers bench you're somewhere

in the middle yeah all right yeah i would say so good good that's where that's i mean i would love for you

to be joel and bid oh we can't all do that though somewhere in the middle is okay so i guess i guess

that sort of shed some light on what we'll talk about today. Sixers have

lost two in a row, a game to the Portland Trailblazers, and then another one to the Sons

where the Sixers defense was shredded. Their bench was non-existent, and they wasted a pretty good

offensive showing. I think there's some things we can talk about defensively, but a really

good offensive showing from Joel and Bede, who happens to be pretty good at basketball.

Where do you want to begin, Rich? Where do we even begin on this one?

I guess I'll just start with my overall take on this situation.

I'm probably not as down as some people are on this.

This was a reality check that was coming for this team.

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