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Tag Archives: Philadelphia 76ers

Promises, Promises

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June 18, 2024
America, Basketball, NBA
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It’s about Jaylen and Jayson, to be clear, but we’ll return to them. Everybody else involved with this Celtics run made it possible. To follow the blueprint for what the Spurs and Sixers were looking for in essence, and then pull it off as efficiently as they did, has to be maddening to detractors. Nevertheless, Boston was the best team in the league all season. It turns out: that means all season.

After seven years of will-they, won’t-they together, Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum finally put it together, albeit with the help of Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis, as well as mainstays returned or otherwise in Al Horford, Peyton Pritchard, Sam Hauser and Derrick White. Brad Stevens ran his game on the rest of the NBA. Now, finally, the Boston Celtics are the NBA champions.

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Where Is My Mind

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May 13, 2024
Basketball, Hockey, NBA, Sports
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There was no foreseeable way this would keep up, and indeed, the cracks are beginning to show. However: every other night in New York City, you can expect to catch a competitor. It’s been a decade since the Knicks and Rangers were so similarly relevant that they warranted the ice-to-hardwood changeover videos of Madison Square Garden to return. 

Last Tuesday, an exhaustingly frantic game down the stretch saw the Rangers blow the lead to the Carolina Hurricanes, favored in the series. Former number one overall pick Alexis Lafrenière, previously a scapegoat who just enjoyed his best season in the NHL, scored twice, but the night’s dough was only on the rise.

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All The Way

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April 20, 2024
Basketball, NBA
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“You’re doing it for your teammates, you’re doing it for the team, you’re doing it for the fans, and you’re doing it for yourself.” – Willis Reed

“We can’t deviate from the path. We all have to be on the same team, we all have to have the same mindset to continue to move forward together…To the fans: You make a difference for us. I just want to make that abundantly clear. Without you, the Knicks aren’t the Knicks.” – Jalen Brunson

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(Approximately) 30 Thoughts On 30 NBA Teams, 2022-’23 Edition

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October 18, 2022
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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Not so fast – To focus on the “sudden” rush to the bottom for Victor Wembanyama and, especially after their recent matchup on national TV, Scoot Henderson is to overlook what lies directly before us this NBA season. In what was bound to be a year of questions surrounding contenders, we’ve returned to another slate full of them. 

In any case, we return, steeled to run directly into the fire. Who knows what awaits this caravan? New stats, new players, a continuous flow of publicly-available scandals: it isn’t all here, but we’ll make do. Forget STOCKS, or AST:TO ratio. The new way to identify player efficacy is assists+steals+blocks divided by/turnovers. Get used to it, identify your new Point Gawd, and get ready for tip-off.

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Going The Distance

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May 5, 2022
America, Basketball, NBA, Politics, Religion, Sports
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William Hamilton

Over a week later, the question everyone was asking before the playoffs is now one that continues to lurk: what becomes of these Brooklyn Nets? Steve Nash’s team has lit itself aflame once again, but who threw the match? They, of the highly touted scoring tandem, once briefly of a threatening trifecta that no team could think about stopping, could shudder? They could seek fate?

A 116-112 Boston Celtics win on Monday night sent the Nets packing. While they were busy making love with their egos, Ime Udoka was leading his continually resurgent squad to a sweep over a team many once considered to be NBA Finals favorites. It’s worth asking of this iteration of the team: do they seek fate, or does fate become them?

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Man Is Always Prey To His Truths

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February 25, 2022
Sports
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The days are getting longer. They look short but continue for ages. At once, a new day will be upon you and gone almost before it happened. They pile up, the days, and the blurring of colors at dusk can just as easily be the memories of events that slip between the cracks, regardless of importance.

When we think about the things that are familiar, we can have a sense of present-nostalgia: yes, I know that deli; of course, I’ve seen that player many times; indeed, I fell out without ever actually falling in with a group of people during that game. We think we know who we are, and we assert that to the world, only for the world to remind us of a different reality.

For a time almost destined to be locked inside of itself, quarantined or otherwise, the Philadelphia 76ers are a perfect emblem. The sense of what the Sixers are, or were, or will be(?) has shifted in the various allegedly-conscious organs of fans and onlookers nearly by the minute ever since Ben Simmons essentially ruled himself AWOL. Joel Embiid is currently enjoying an MVP-caliber campaign, this time as earnest as ever, but – thanks to old pal Daryl Morey – here comes James Harden, and the bevy of his flavor in seeming full force.

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“Look at the owl on me”

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May 14, 2019
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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Jesse D. Garrabrant/Getty Images

In the grand scheme of these playoffs, it is a singular moment that, taken to any other end, wouldn’t have mattered. The capital-A Adult Jimmy Butler shot just preceding it had tied the game at 90 apiece, meaning it would have gone to overtime anyway. Like the Damian Lillard shot against Oklahoma City before it – but also, so very unlike the Damian Lillard shot against Oklahoma City before it – the fortune of the shooter’s team would, at the very least, have been no worse in the moment after had he missed.

When Kawhi’s moonshot clinked-clanked-clunked-and-clinked-again before dropping in, sealing the Toronto Raptors’ 92-90 victory and sending the representatives of the lone Canadian outpost in the NBA to the Eastern Conference Finals, the basketball world stopped, if only for a brief respite. Now, with that ball through the hoop and the Raptors on to a date with the Milwaukee Bucks, as many questions have arisen as were answered.

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How Do You Solve a Problem Like Markelle?

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November 30, 2018
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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Bill Streicher/USA TODAY Sports

Last Sunday in Brooklyn, after having been down by as much as 20 points, the Philadelphia 76ers found themselves with the ball, down a single point, with less than ten seconds remaining. On the floor were, predictably, four Sixers regulars – Joel Embiid, Ben Simmons, JJ Redick and Wilson Chandler – as well as the recently-acquired Jimmy Butler. In an eerily similar sequence to one that had played out the weekend before in Charlotte, Butler shook free on the right wing and hit a step back three-pointer to give his team the lead, leaving under a second on the clock for his opponents. The Sixers won, 127-125.

Notably absent from the proceedings, yet again, was Philadelphia’s first #1 overall draft pick to actually play in his first year since Allen Iverson, a 20-year-old who has amassed a total of 680 minutes in 33 games over his two seasons in the NBA and who has not played since November 19th, in which he logged seven minutes against the lowly Phoenix Suns (more on them momentarily). Butler’s arrival, insertion into the starting lineup ahead of Fultz and evident, immediate impact has all but rendered Markelle Fultz a redundancy, so to speak, if not yet a flat-out bust. The undrafted T.J. McConnell is now soaking up minutes left behind by a former #1 overall pick, with the latter left in limbo.

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Brand Ambassador

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September 19, 2018
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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Associated Press

Elton Brand was last an active NBA player less than two years ago. He put up 4.1 points, 3.7 rebounds and 1.1 assists in seventeen games, including one start, with the 2015-’16 Philadelphia 76ers, which won exactly 10 games, only one ahead of the all-time NBA record for fewest victories in an 82-game season, held by the 1972-’73 Sixers[1]. He wasn’t especially good, but neither was anybody else on that team. Shout out to leading scorer, then-rookie and soon-to-be journeyman Jahlil Okafor, for throwing up 17.5 points and seven rebounds a night; your efforts were well-regarded in Manayunk, I’m sure[2].

A native of Peekskill, New York, and well-traveled otherwise via his not-quite-journeyman-like career in the NBA, Brand would qualify as the Wooderson-like guy who has seen some things, if the NBA were a teen sex comedy. Following his retirement, the second and final he would announce, he was immediately appointed to various player development positions within the Sixers organization before, on Tuesday, being announced as Bryan Colangelo’s non-burner account replacement as Philadelphia’s general manager. By bringing in a relative veteran of The Process, this puts the fittingly weird cap on a strange but bountiful summer for a team on the cusp of Eastern Conference pre-eminence.

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The Young And The Restless

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May 4, 2018
Basketball, NBA
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AP Photo/Michael Dwyer

It all feels pretty much normal now, doesn’t it? It’s the first week of May, and we have: LeBron treating the Air Canada Centre like a rental property; the Warriors strutting out to a 2-0 series lead over New Orleans, thanks in part to the return of Steph Curry and despite the ongoing dominance of Anthony Davis; the Wizards watching from home by the second round; and the Rockets having decimated the league’s best defensive team of the second half of the season (and subsequently falling in Game 2, calling into question Houston’s bona fides).

By most accounts, even after one of the most exciting first rounds in recent NBA playoff memory, everything is pretty much going according to plan[1]. Everything, that is, except for the other Eastern Conference Semifinal, featuring two young-ish teams boasting a wealth of talent and assets. It wouldn’t have been totally unreasonable to expect either the Philadelphia 76ers or the Boston Celtics to be in their current positions, but to have done it like this, each in their own, singular ways, is as impressive as it is foreboding.

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