Marreese Speights Out 6-8 Weeks: Is There Silver Lining for the Sixers?

About an hour before the Eagles took the field against the Chargers (and proceeded to make Philadelphia fans want to gargle battery acid on Sunday night), Philly basketball fans were dealing with their own special kind of stomach punch .

The Philadelphia 76ers' best player (per-minute) this season, Marreese Speights , partially tore his medial collateral ligament in the fourth quarter of Philly's 94-88 loss to the Chicago Bulls on Saturday night, and will miss the next six-to-eight weeks recovering.

For Sixers fans staring at a 4-6 start to the season, this news might have them already counting down towards baseball spring training, and understandably so. The 76ers have looked out of sync on offense so far, mostly as a result of new head coach Eddie Jordan implementing his pass-heavy Princeton offense.  

Worse yet, Elton Brand has done nothing to prove that he's back from two season-ending injuries thus far; instead, he's looking more and more like the Sixers' newest albatross contract (collecting nearly $15 million this season, nearly $16 million next season, $17 million in 2011-12 and $18 million in 2012-13). His season average of 9.8 points and 5.3 rebounds has now reportedly threatened his role in the starting lineup (tune in Wednesday to see?), even with Speights' injury.  

With that said, I do see some silver lining in Speights' injury (or, really, I'm just trying to convince myself that there's some speck of hope for the Sixers this season). Here are three possibilities that could unfold:

1) The Sixers' other big men get a chance to develop...quickly.

The 76ers' current starting front-court of Brand ($79.795 million ) and Samuel Dalembert ($66.732 million ) constitutes nearly half the team's salary for the next two years, and will understandably get their minutes because of the team's heavy investment in them.  

Yet with Speights, the first big off the bench, now injured for possibly upwards of two months, the Sixers' other big men (namely, Jason Smith and Primoz Brezec ) get a chance to earn some meaningful minutes in the lineup.  

Brezec, a 7'1" first-rounder, drafted by Indiana in 2000, has been mainly a backup during his 10-year NBA career, only earning meaningful starting minutes during a three-year stint in Charlotte from 2004-06. His career averages of 7.6 points and 4.1 rebounds certainly don't jump off the screen, but remember that he only averaged 19.0 minutes of play—extrapolate those stats to 40 minutes/game and he averages close to 16 points and over eight rebounds. Not great, but not terrible.

And Smith is another 7-footer for the Sixers that could provide some much needed depth, if he remains healthy this season. After coming to the Sixers in a draft-day trade in 2007, he averaged 4.5 points and 3.0 rebounds in 14.6 minutes in the 2007-08 season, but a torn ACL derailed Smith's season last year before it even started.

Smith provides the Sixers with a young, white, poor-man's Rasheed Wallace at the 5, as he has demonstrated his ability to step back and hit an open three-pointer time and time again. Size plus range equals hope...? 

I'm not trying to convince myself that the combination of Smith/Brezec will completely replace Speights (statistically speaking, it would be almost impossible to replace his production per-minute). But, at the very least, Jordan has more of an excuse to tinker with his lineups and find effective combinations of bigs, which should only help the Sixers in the long run when Speights returns.

2) Elton Brand and Samuel Dalembert have the opportunity to live up to their massive contracts.

If the Sixers' management wants to pay two players nearly half of the team's salary (just over $26 million of the team's nearly $62 million payroll this year), then they damn well better get some playing time. Speights' injury opens the window for both to keep their minutes intact, despite their slow starts (and the Inquirer's report of a potential Brand-benching in the works for Wednesday).

Besides Brand and Dalembert, the Sixers have Smith, Brezec, and three-point specialist Jason Kapono as their only big men (although Thaddeus Young has seen some time at the four before). Even if Smith and Brezec do perform as well as I hope, please God within reason, they could each see 15 minutes per game and leave nearly 35 per game for both Brand and Dalembert.

Even if Brand moves into the second unit, giving Smith his starting power forward position, Jordan's lineup switch doesn't automatically necessitate more minutes for Smith. If Brand can retain his 20/10 form while playing with the down-tempo second unit (dare I say, a very early dark horse for the NBA Sixth Man of the Year?), he'll get his minutes, regardless of Smith's starting (Think of guys like J.R. Smith on Denver, Manu Ginobili on San Antonio, etc.).

For what it's worth, Brand's comments on Monday suggest a change brewing: "Today, [coach Jordan] was talking about me working with the second group, getting some more center touches and stuff like that rather than playing with the fast-paced tempo of the first group, so definitely something is going to happen."

3) If all else fails...Brand and Dalembert's extra minutes mean extra time to increase their trade value each game.

It's no secret around the NBA that the Sixers are trying to toss Dalembert to another team like a hot potato. John Hollinger addressed the Sixers' desperation in his Weekend PER Diem on ESPN.com on Friday (where he also labelled Brand and Dalembert as two of his biggest early season disappointments).

Meanwhile, Dalembert might have company on the hot seat, as rumors have been abound since the summer that Brand had made his way to the Sixers' trading block after the first year of his five-year deal. While general manager Ed Stefanski publicly denies shopping Brand , one would imagine that Brand could be had for the right price. This is, after all, the franchise that traded Allen Iverson for Andre Miller and change.

With a potential for each guy racking 35 minutes a night, one could only hope that the two would capitalize on their opportunity and start stuffing a box score. Hopefully, Stefanski is sitting by his GM phone from now until the trade deadline, fielding offers of either of the Sixers' big men to every team in the league in exchange for...well, anything but this. 

If not...only 106 days until the Phillies kick off spring training.