October 08, 2026
Bill Streicher/IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect
LeBron James is good to go for Thursday night's preseason game.
NEW YORK – Barring any late scratches, LeBron James, Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey will make their preseason debuts on Thursday night when the Sixers face the Brooklyn Nets – and the team will get a look at its full projected starting lineup, with VJ Edgecombe and Jaylen Brown also available to play, Sixers head coach Nick Nurse said before Thursday’s game.
The only Sixers sidelined on Thursday, Nurse projected: Anfernee Simons, Dominick Barlow, Adem Bona, Ariel Hukporti and Tacko Fall.
“We should be able to get a majority of the guys out there tomorrow,” Nurse said after the team's Wednesday practice. "...It's usually first-half type stuff, and then if you can in one of them, you try and get them through the halftime routine and kind of start the engines again as well."
Earlier this week, Nurse indicated his goal was to see each of his key players in two or three of the team's four exhibitions – and that Hukporti's season-ending torn Achilles would not change the team's plans:
"I think it's such an interesting topic, not only across our sport, but I'm sure you guys follow the NFL a little bit, and they're talking about this like crazy about these guys not playing preseason, how clunky everything looks for the first month of the year. And then guys are getting hurt anyway and they're like, ‘Wait, are they getting hurt because they didn't condition themselves in the [preseason]?’ So it's interesting, because everybody's talking about it across multiple sports. And I think that it doesn't make much sense to me that you sit out all the games and all of a sudden it's going 100 miles an hour in Game 1, because the pace is even over 100 early in the year. It seems like the pace to start the year is always way up there. So I think trying to find the right balance, trying to get collaboration with the guys about how they're feeling, where they are in their conditioning, are they ready to take some contact? All those things weigh on what we're doing. So I think we try to get them out there, get something going conditioning-wise and handling the physicality and then be a little bit, I guess the word is cautious. Err on the side of being cautious a little bit.”
After Thursday's game in Brooklyn, the Sixers have two more tune-up games, both against the Boston Celtics. The first is on Saturday in Boston; the second is next Friday in Philadelphia.
