How Dikembe Mutombo helped Allen Iverson and Sixers climb the mountain in 2001

When the 76ers traded for Dikembe Mutombo on Feb. 22, 2001, there was immediate buzz about the team’s potential to find a brand-new level of success.

“I’d be lying to you all if I didn’t say this guy could help us win a championship,” Allen Iverson said after the deal. “He’s a rebounder, he’s an intimidator, he can change the game all by himself, offensively and defensively.”

Three and a half months later, Iverson seemed prophetic. The Sixers were in the NBA Finals in no small part because of their new man in the middle, Mount Mutombo, and his transformative effect at both ends of the court — especially on defense. That run, still the Sixers’ most recent trip to the Finals, is on the minds of many Philadelphians this week after the news that Mutombo died of brain cancer at age 58 on Monday.

» READ MORE: Dikembe Mutombo, the most unappreciated Sixers great and Joel Embiid’s role model, dies at 58

The gentle giant was many things, from an iconic shot-blocker to the orchestrator of one of NBA history’s great upsets, and an incredible humanitarian in his native Democratic Republic of the Congo. But at least one chapter of the Mutombo story also involves his time in Philly, playing with Iverson for one of the most beloved teams in franchise history.

The Sixers of that era weren’t exactly short on defensive specialists next to A.I. The 1999 and 2000 iterations of the team had relied heavily on Theo Ratliff as a rim-protecting big man, part of a rotation that also featured rugged Tyrone Hill and defensive-minded George Lynch at forward and gritty guards Aaron McKie and Eric Snow on the perimeter. Philadelphia had tried Larry Hughes and Matt Geiger as complementary scorers to Iverson, and even traded for former Chicago Bulls All-Star Toni Kukoč to try to balance out the lineup. But none of the combinations were quite right in a pair of consecutive second-round losses to the Indiana Pacers.

Mutombo, however, offered the Sixers a better and more complete player than they’d experimented with before. The future Hall of Famer was every bit the rim protector as Ratliff, whose ill-timed wrist injury made him expendable for a team that had the Eastern Conference’s best record on the day of the trade and was looking to take advantage of Iverson’s MVP form. And Mutombo was more efficient than Ratliff on offense, scoring more points per 100 possessions while needing the ball less. (Mutombo’s usage rate for the 2001 Sixers was 16.2% in the regular season and 14.5% during the playoffs, well below Ratliff’s 17% rate from the previous season.)

Those Sixers were the apotheosis of the Iverson Era because they represented the perfect way to build around a player like A.I., whose role was to almost single-handedly carry the offense for a team whose other players were geared toward defense, rebounding and timely shooting, making the most of the opportunities Iverson created for them. A player like Mutombo, who led the league in rebound rate, ranked seventh in block rate and eighth in Defensive RAPTOR — and whose 1.15 points per possession on offense during his stint with Philly would have ranked fifth among all qualified centers — was tailor-made to make an Iverson team better without taking away what they did best.

Because basketball chemistry isn’t always easy to predict, Philadelphia did go just 15-12 down the stretch of the regular season after the trade. But the main goal was always the postseason, where Mutombo gave the Sixers a big man the likes of which no other contender in the East could boast — maybe even one who could tangle with Shaquille O’Neal, Tim Duncan, David Robinson, Kevin Garnett, Chris Webber, Karl Malone and the best of the West.

And in the playoffs, we can see the effect of having Mutombo around in how the Sixers did when he was on the court, versus when he sat. With Dikembe, Philly’s net rating was +1.5 points per 100 possessions, a figure that dropped to -10.1 without him in the game. Aside from hard-nosed (and relatively sparingly deployed) undrafted rookie Raja Bell, whose 8.3 minutes per game of court time coincided with a 19.3-point increase in the team’s net rating, and the even more lightly used Rodney Buford, no other Sixers player’s presence was associated with a better uptick in team play than Mutombo:

That 11.6-point boost in net rating was largely fueled on defense, where the Sixers improved by a staggering 14.1 points per 100 of defensive efficiency with Mutombo patrolling the paint. Perhaps a large part of this was because Mutombo — who’d just won his fourth career Defensive Player of the Year award — was the ultimate insurance policy to place behind Iverson, whose defensive tendency was to freelance and gamble around for steals. With a deterrent factor like Mutombo behind him, Iverson recorded a steal on 2.8% of opponent possessions in the 2001 playoffs, nearly double his 1.5% rate from the 2000 postseason.

Ultimately, the 2001 Sixers ran up against an all-timer of a Los Angeles Lakers team in the NBA Finals. Mutombo couldn’t really slow down O’Neal during that series, because there has never been a human alive who could slow down a healthy and motivated Shaq at that stage of his career. Philly lost in five games, extending a ringless drought that continues to this day.

» READ MORE: Dikembe Mutombo has died from brain cancer. Joel Embiid said the former Sixer ‘was a role model of mine.’

Statistically, that Shaq/Kobe Bryant L.A. squad is still probably the greatest the NBA playoffs have ever seen, with a 15-1 record and a +13.8 net rating in the postseason — the latter of which is still the best in modern NBA history. But that one loss was, of course, hung on the Lakers by the Sixers. And while Iverson was absolutely breathtaking in Game 1, with 48 points that included the iconic “step-over” shot on Tyronn Lue, the best plus-minus of the game belonged to none other than… you guessed it, Dikembe Mutombo, at +14 while he was on the court.

Mutombo’s Philly career lasted just one more season before he was traded to the New Jersey Nets, leaving his Sixers chapter short compared with his time in Denver, Atlanta and Houston, or his post-playing legacy as a global ambassador and philanthropist. The world lost a tremendous human first on Monday, and a basketball player second. But if a life is truly measured by the memories it leaves with others, Mutombo’s time in Philadelphia — and the Finals run he helped anchor next to Iverson, arguably the most beloved Philly athlete in history — meant everything to the city in retrospect.