With or without Joel Embiid, the Sixers need more from his supporting cast. Jimmy Butler, in particular | David Murphy

It’s hard to know how much to worry about a result like Saturday’s. That’s one of the underrated effects of Joel Embiid’s ongoing absence. Look at it one way, and this was bound to be an uneven fight. Jusuf Nurkic and Enes Kanter might not be the best big men in the league, but they are versatile enough to cause Boban Marjanovic problems. The end result is that Mike Scott ended up playing almost 30 minutes, many of them at the five, and that’s all you really need to know, because Mike Scott hadn’t played more than 30 minutes in a game in 14 months. So, yeah, Nurkic scored 24 points and grabbed 10 rebounds in just 23 1/2 minutes of action, and Kanter chipped in 16 and eight, and the Sixers dropped another game in the Eastern Conference standings with a 130-115 defeat.

But, then, with Embiid on the sideline against a team like this, what else did you expect?

The flip side is that maybe expectations like that are a poor reflection of where this team should be even without its All-Star big man. Maybe those expectations fail to take into account the fact that the Sixers traded away three solid role players, one of them a rookie, and two first-round draft picks, one of them a potential future lottery choice, in order to round out the starting unit that took the court against Portland. Maybe, more than anything else, the expectations that say the Sixers are what they were on Saturday afternoon without Embiid dramatically undersell the team it is going to need to be in order to advance out of the second round of this year’s Eastern Conference playoffs.

No doubt, this is a work in progress. But that sort of caveat also needs to come with the disclaimer that the player whose role leaves the most to be desired is one who has been here since the middle of November. The most glaring part of the box score from Saturday’s loss was the part that showed Jimmy Butler attempting just nine shots from the field. That’s the same number of shots that T.J. McConnell attempted in 12 fewer minutes. And it’s par for the course.

In the six games since Tobias Harris’ arrival from the Clippers, Butler has averaged just 10 shot attempts per game. That’s a significant decrease from the 14 that he averaged in his first 32 games with the Sixers, which was already a drop off from the 16.1 attempts he averaged with the Timberwolves during the previous two regular seasons.

After the loss to Portland, Butler shrugged off concerns about the Sixers’ inability to match the Blazers’ scoring output.

“I don’t think offense was a problem,” he said. “We scored 115. On any given night, that’s enough to win.”

From an ends-based perspective, there is little to argue with there. Clearly, the Sixers defense was a problem against the Blazers, as it so often has been whenever Embiid is not on the court. But you’d at least like to see these guys scoring at a level that matches the resources that have been invested in them.

In 13 minutes of court time together on Saturday, the five starters were outscored 34-25. Things were ugliest on the defensive end of the court, no doubt. But on the offensive end, the first unit posted an offensive rating of just 92.6 and an effective field goal percentage of .386. Take Marjanovic out of the equation, and Butler-Harris-Simmons-Redick were outscored 52-39 with an offensive rating of just 95.1. They were better a couple of nights earlier against a much better defensive team in the Heat, with an O-Rating of 110.6 in 23 minutes together.

When news of Embiid’s knee soreness first broke last week, it was reasonable to assume that some of the offensive load would shift to Butler. Through two games, that has not been the case, which does little to dispel the question of whether Butler will ever fit into this offense at a level that matches the money the Sixers will need to invest in order to retain him this summer.

Like Butler, the Sixers’ other newcomer is still finding himself in his new role. When he arrived in Philadelphia, Harris was billed as one of the most efficient three-pointer shooters in the league. And he is. But he has never been a volume shooter from that distance. In 55 games with the Clippers this season, just 30.2 percent of his shot attempts came from downtown. In his first six games in Philly, 42.2 percent of his shot attempts have come from three-point range. In each of his last four games, Harris has attempted at least six three-pointers, the second longest streak of his career, and just one game behind his career-long streak of five games.

Clearly, the Sixers envision an offense that runs through Embiid and Simmons, with Harris spacing the floor with his shot and then creating from there. It’s a role that he is clearly suited for.

The big question is how they envision Butler’s role. In a perfect world, he’d provide some of the long-range catch-and-shoot dynamic that the Sixers once had in Robert Covington, while at the same time giving them the physical, downhill, get-a-bucket capabilities that he showed in scoring 22 points against the Celtics a couple of weeks ago.

The Sixers are still in the early stages of figuring out how to make all of these pieces fit. Progress is a spiral. Embiid’s absence probably does not help. Still, Saturday’s loss leaves one less benchmark to measure themselves against. There is a clock, here, and figuring out Butler is their most pressing matter.