There’s something to be said for a guy that just has impeccable vibes.
After an enjoyable four months back in 2021-22, the Sixers brought back Andre Drummond in the 2024 offseason to be the Joel Embiid backup capable of eating a lot of regular season innings to help the workload. It got off to a disastrous start, with Drummond looking just as injured and slow as the broken down Embiid he was meant to alleviate.
A player option all but guaranteed the Sixers would be stuck with Drummond for another season,
but like the franchise itself, Drummond’s 2025-26 campaign was a refreshing bounce back. Important numbers for him like his rebounds per game jumped from 7.8 to 8.4 a night and he got his block percentage back up to two percent. He looked competent again in matchups that weren’t able to put him into too much space.
While his scoring continued to decrease, dropping from 7.3 to 6.4 points per game, the only big addition to his game came on the offensive end of the floor. After flirting with it in the preseason a year prior, Drummond started taking and making corner threes.
As a career 48% free throw shooter, the big man slowly tweaked his form over his career to at least shoot a respectable mark from the stripe. It turned out he put in enough work to step out to the corner and drill the occasional three when the defense left him alone.
It went about as well as it possibly could. Drummond making 35% of his 1.4 threes a game helped him make more three-pointers this season than all of his previous years in the NBA combined. In fact he blew past that number in December.
On top of just being a more productive player than a season ago, there seemed to be a big lift in spirit from the fact that Andre Drummond is making threes now. Fittingly, it cultivated with him blowing the roof of Xfinity Mobile Arena in a postseason game as he drilled a dagger three to seal a win over the Orlando Magic in the first round of the Play-In tournament. It didn’t even matter that his three at the finish of the third quarter in Game 6 against Boston didn’t beat the buzzer — the building was once again deafening as the Sixers were storming towards another big win.
Always a pretty jovial guy, Drummond started to bring his dog, Bob Marley, to the podium for his postgame press conferences. As the year went on, he requested the Sixers DJ to play “Buffalo Soldier” after a made basket of his.
The energy Drummond brings to the game combined with the importance of his role decreasing made the second season of his contract a lot more enjoyable. The contributions he put up made you smile, and going into his second year, Adem Bona was supposed to be the more serious option as the backup center. For those reasons it was a lot easier to stomach the nights he couldn’t keep up with the competition any more.
Drummond’s inability to hang in tough matchups did become a problem for the Sixers. Both he and Bona had their struggles in the playoffs against Boston before being woefully outmatched by the New York Knicks. It’d be a tough sell to try to bring Drummond back as the Sixers desperately need to nail the back end of the roster with not a lot of cap space to do so.
If Drummond has played his last game as a Sixer, his tenure should be remembered fondly. Simply by being able to hit a corner three now and again, he still contributed way more than many of those who came before and technically after him as Embiid’s primary backup. Odds are, he probably put a smile on your face in the process.
