The Sixers have one chance to salvage this horrible season. Another franchise already showed them how.
The 1996-97 Spurs were terrible, too, just for one year. They ended up with Tim Duncan. These Sixers might have to follow a similar path.
The 76ers are approaching the point of desperation, of the consideration of extreme measures to salvage what is shaping up to be an 82-game, six-month, slow-moving nightmare. They are 2-12. They have not won a game in regulation yet. Eight of their losses have been by 10 points or more. Joel Embiid’s work ethic and habitual tardiness were the topics during a team meeting; that development would be troubling even if Embiid weren’t hobbling around on a bad knee, which he is. Paul George injured himself, returned to play, and injured himself again. Tyrese Maxey started poorly, injured himself, and returned to play — probably too soon. The public reaction to this horror show has been a mixture of indifference and exasperation. People are tired of waiting, tired of hoping, tired of caring.
The word unprecedented gets thrown around a lot these days. The Sixers’ last decade certainly qualifies in some respects, if by unprecedented, you mean uniquely weird and controversial and disappointing. The Process … two No. 1 overall picks who couldn’t shoot … a general manager who operated and criticized his own players from burner Twitter accounts … important players who simply refused to play … the whole thing could be a Hunter S. Thompson-style gonzo-journalism book or a cynical Adam McKay comedy.
At its most basic, though, this era of Sixers basketball — a seven-year stretch during which the team won 63% of its regular-season games and 0% of its second-round playoff series — is comparable to another era of another franchise. And the circumstances that allowed that franchise to end that era and begin anew could align for the Sixers. If they’re lucky.
Déjà vu
Ahead of the 1996-97 season, the San Antonio Spurs weren’t quite as frustrating and chaotic as the Sixers have been lately, but they made a good-faith effort. The similarities between the two franchises — San Antonio then, Philadelphia now — are eerie.
The Spurs had selected David Robinson with the No. 1 pick in the 1987 draft, then had to wait two years while he fulfilled his service obligations in the U.S. Navy. Upon his debut, they immediately became one of the NBA’s best teams. They averaged 55 victories over Robinson’s first seven seasons but advanced as far as the Western Conference Finals just once, losing to the Houston Rockets in 1995 — the same year Robinson was named the league’s MVP. They cycled through accomplished veterans in fruitless attempts to build the right roster around him: Terry Cummings, Dale Ellis, Chuck Person, even Dennis Rodman.
Things weren’t great. Things got worse. Playing for Team USA at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Robinson suffered a back injury. He missed the season’s first 18 games, suited up six times, then broke his left foot. In December, Gregg Popovich, the team’s GM at the time, fired coach Bob Hill and replaced him with … Gregg Popovich. Dealing with knee tendinitis, small forward Sean Elliott played just 39 games. Avery Johnson and Vinny Del Negro, the starting backcourt, were among the few regulars who were healthy all season. The Spurs lost 12 of their first 14 games and finished 20-62.
Sounds familiar, right? Sounds miserable, doesn’t it? It was.
“We could have been up by 20 points, and the better teams always beat us,” Johnson, now an analyst for CBS Sports, said in a phone interview Wednesday. “There was a lot of frustration.”
There was one source of hope: The team that ended up with the first pick in the 1997 draft would have the chance to select Tim Duncan, who had been a three-time All-America selection and the national player of the year at Wake Forest.
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“We were resigned to the idea that if we won the game, we won, and if we lost the game, we still won,” Johnson said. “We were trying to win, but if we came up short, obviously the organization would be in a better position to get somebody who everybody in the world knew was going first in the draft. That would be a game-changer for any franchise.”
The Spurs won the draft lottery despite having the league’s third-worst record. They took Duncan. Two years later, they won the first of their five championships with him. “It lit a fire under all of us,” said Johnson, who was the point guard on that ’99 title team and coached the Dallas Mavericks to the 2006 Finals. “That’s why the Spurs went on an incredible run. Tim was inserted into a veteran team. We were ready to go.”
Compare and contrast
You can see where we’re going here. Even if the Sixers were to rally and earn a postseason berth, an achievement just six of the 92 teams in NBA history that started 2-12 have managed to pull off, one could argue it would damage them more than it would help them in the long term. They traded their 2025 first-round pick to the Oklahoma City Thunder in 2020, part of the price of getting Al Horford out of town and off their books, but the pick is protected: The Sixers retain it if it’s among the top six in the draft. So if they’re lousy enough — and the odds break in their favor at the lottery — they could insert a young stud into a veteran team, just like the Spurs did.
Are the Spurs/Sixers situations perfectly aligned? Of course not. San Antonio wasn’t bearing the karmic burden of being a franchise that had tanked for three years and gotten nowhere for it. As talented as Duke’s Cooper Flagg (the prospective No. 1 pick) might be, it’s a reach to think he or anyone else in the ’25 draft will turn out to be as great as Duncan was. And the Spurs’ foundation was firmer with Robinson than the Sixers’ is with Embiid. Johnson, in fact, bristled at the notion that Robinson’s and Embiid’s careers were in any way analogous.
“One,” he said, “it’s kind of irresponsible for anybody to compare them. David Robinson was in a different situation. David Robinson was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. He came out of college as a seriously finished product. Joel Embiid has a long way to go in his career, even though the MVP is there. He hasn’t been in the Finals yet. So when you’re talking about guys like David or Tim Duncan, I think that’s not fair to Joel Embiid.
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“Two,” Johnson continued, “whether it’s Joel Embiid or anybody, especially a superstar — because I’ve coached one in Dirk Nowitzki and been teammates with David and Tim — there’s really no excuse to ever be late. Tim and David and Dirk: I’ve never seen them late for practice or a plane or a meeting or a film session. Whatever team you’re talking about — football, baseball, basketball, I’m not singling out anybody — that’s part of what can disrupt a culture.”
Johnson’s points are well taken. But what choices do the Sixers have here? Embiid, George, and Maxey are signed to gigantic contracts that run through at least the 2026-27 season. (George has a player option for 2027-28.) Good luck trading any of them in the name of starting over. Besides, Maxey is just 24. Jared McCain, the lone ray of light in the darkness of these 14 games, is just 20. Add the right top-six pick to that mix, and maybe it sparks a new fire. At this point, after all these years and so much absurdity, the alternatives are too exhausting to contemplate.