How a loss in Game 7 could kick-start The Process 2.0, or begin a wave of winning Sixers
It was 11 years ago, in a Game 7 loss against the same team in the same building that sent the Sixers into a spiral. A loss Sunday could set the franchise back a decade or start an era of success.
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What the Sixers look like in two months depends on what happens Sunday in Game 7 of their Eastern Conference semifinal series.
If they beat the Celtics, Doc Rivers will remain the Sixers’ coach. James Harden will either opt in to the second year of his contract or the Sixers will make him theirs for the rest of his career. Joel Embiid won’t hint (again) that he wants to be reunited with Heat star Jimmy Butler.
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But it they lose in Boston? Doc gets fired. Harden probably will opt out of the final year of his contract. Embiid almost surely will take his talents to South Beach.
And, 10 years after its conception, Josh Harris and the Sixers will start rebuilding all over again: The Process, 2.0.
Déjà vu
It has been fashionable to compare these 2023 Sixers to 2001 team, which Allen Iverson led to the NBA Finals, which also was the last time they got past the conference semis. Don’t confuse fashion with fact.
The better comparison is the 2012 team.
Jrue Holiday, Andre Iguodala, and Elton Brand faced the same Celtics in the same building, also in a Game 7 in the conference semis. They fell to a trio of fading future Hall of Famers: Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, and Ray Allen. The Celtics’ coach might ring a bell. It was current Sixers coach Doc Rivers.
Don’t laugh. That Game 7 was imminently winnable. With 4 minutes, 30 seconds to play in the fourth quarter, Lou Williams and Iguodala had cut an eight-point Celtics lead to three points. Then Rajon Rondo, of all people, scored seven points in a row, and that was pretty much that ... for more than a decade.
Imagine what might have been had the Sixers won that Game 7.
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The rabbit hole
Convinced that Holiday and Iguodala could not be the foundation of a winning team, näive new owner Josh Harris let uninterested coach Doug Collins trade Iguodala and three other first-round picks for Andrew Bynum. It was Collins’ retirement gift. Halfway through the next season, Bynum was bowling his way out of the NBA, Collins decided to quit on the team at Christmas, and the Sixers looked like idiots. But they were just getting started.
Harris initiated The Process, a specious strategy of losing on purpose for years and accepting expensive expiring contracts to stockpile top-five draft picks.
And so, over the next 10 years, Harris oversaw the trade of Holiday for the rights to draft Nerlens Noel in a 2013 draft in which Sam Hinkie missed picking Giannis Antetokounmpo — twice. Hinkie and his successors used top-five picks on such notorious busts as Jahlil Okafor, Markelle Fultz, and Ben Simmons, and traded away Mikal Bridges just 38 minutes after drafting him themselves in 2018.
Plenty of other travesties unfolded since the Sixers lost Game 7 in Boston in 2012, including the ultra-bizarre Burnergate — Bryan Colangelo’s Twitter Waterloo — but the chapters of this book took 11 years to write. If the Sixers lose Game 7 on Sunday, they could be looking at another decade of irrelevance and rebuilding.
What might have been
It’s fashionable to clown on the 2012 Sixers, but the facts are, they were probably better than Collins and Harris realized. Here are some facts.
The Sixers were a No. 8 seed, and yes, they benefited from Derrick Rose blowing out a knee in their first-round matchup against top-seeded Chicago. Still, that Sixers team beat the remaining Bulls in six games. And, again, that Sixers team took the Celtics to seven games.
That Celtics team then took the Miami Heat, featuring prime LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh, to seven games before losing in the conference finals.
And, in the NBA Finals, that Heat team rolled an Oklahoma City Thunder team in five games that featured Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook.
That Thunder team also got 12.4 points off the bench that series from its superb sixth man, which were the last five games it would ever get from him since. It would trade him in the offseason so he could lead a team of his own.
The Thunder never made it back to the NBA Finals after that sixth man left.
That sixth man: James Harden.