OK, initially this was supposed to be the final installment of our Process series, but of course it ran too long for a single email, so I had to break it up. If you missed the earlier pieces, Part I is here and Part II is here. I am almost sure Part IV will be the last one, and I will one day write about something else.
The Process died many times. It died when Sam Hinkie resigned. It died after the 76ers drafted Ben Simmons. It died when he and Joel Embiid lost their first playoff series. And it’s dying right now, as I type this…
The problem, as we saw last week, is that the idea of The Process has a way of lingering, even after all these deaths, as an ideal the team would always be compared to. By 2018 it was clear that The Process had left the 76ers with a lot of talent and a lot of assets to build a team around. But the ultimate vision was less clear. Because the initial phase of The Process was always supposed to involve so much losing, there was no way to tell if it was going awry. But now, if they were going to actually TRY, they would be judged according to the promise of The Process.
And this obviously hung over Bryan Colangelo, even before the Twitter implosion that led to his dismissal. Fans were constantly criticizing him for not executing The Process correctly. After Colangelo was let go, the team spent three months searching for his replacement. It was a tough job — the team had so much talent, but with that came impossible expectations. And now the mandate was clear. No longer could the 76ers just stockpile assets for the future. Now it was time to win.
All In
For years ahead of the 2018 off-season, the 76ers’ plan was obvious: They were going to get LeBron James. James was set to become a free agent for the third time, and Philadelphia was on a short list of teams with an inside track on signing him. They had the cap space, as well as a compelling pitch: James was entering his mid-30s, and the Sixers now had a young core, which set up a natural transition. First, they would be the talented supporting cast that LeBron didn’t have in Cleveland, where he had carried some pretty dreadful Cavaliers teams to four straight NBA Finals. Then, gradually, the burden would shift to Embiid and Simmons as they became stars and James aged gracefully. It was a perfect fit…
Ultimately, of course, James went to the Lakers instead. In retrospect, it feels kind of inevitable. Moving out west and playing for the Lakers at the end of a Hall of Fame career is just what NBA legends do (see also: Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bob McAdoo, Karl Malone, Steve Nash, etc.), plus James also had Hollywood aspirations. But at the time it seemed like Philadelphia had a good shot at signing him.
And trying to get LeBron James is never really a bad strategy, even if the odds are long. In some sense, The Process can be seen as a reaction to James’ dominance. After all, for eight straight seasons, the team that won the NBA’s Eastern Conference was whatever team had LeBron. So a plan that amounted to essentially, Bide time until you can either sign LeBron James, or he leaves the East wasn’t such a crazy idea.
Once LeBron did go west, the entire Eastern Conference opened up, and a bunch of teams on the cusp of title contention made big moves. Milwaukee signed Brook Lopez, and Toronto traded for Kawhi Leonard, but Philadelphia, having missed out on LeBron, mostly stood pat. At that point, they didn’t even have a GM — head coach Brett Brown was running the team while it searched for a permanent replacement for Colangelo.
That replacement was Elton Brand, who represented a decisive break from the kind of executive who launched The Process. As you might remember from Part I, The Process was representative of a new breed of front office, led by Ivy Leaguers with backgrounds in finance or consulting or law, who pored over spreadsheets and devised advanced new formulas. But Brand was a throwback to a different type of GM. He was a former player, only two seasons removed from suiting up for the Sixers himself — he hadn’t even officially turned in his retirement paperwork when he took the job — and never finished college, having jumped straight to the NBA when he was 20.
Brand had been with the Sixers for several years, having been brought in as a player under Hinkie and hired in the front office by Colangelo, so he was familiar with The Process. But as he understood it, his job was to “finish” that Process. This made sense — as a former player, he was not one to hoard potential the way previous GMs had. Within two months he made a huge move: He traded Dario Šarić, Robert Covington — both starters for the team — plus Jerryd Bayless and a second-round pick for Jimmy Butler.
Butler was unlike most of the stars Philadelphia added during The Process, who were generally highly regarded prospects for their whole careers. That was not Butler: At virtually every step of his career, he had been overlooked before willing himself to the next level. Butler was not heavily recruited in high school and ended up going to junior college for a year before transferring to Marquette. Then he was a largely unheralded prospect coming out of college, taken by the Bulls with the last pick in the first round. In Chicago, he spent the first few years coming off the bench, before winning the league’s Most Improved Player Award and becoming a perennial All-Star.
Over the course of this ascent, though, Butler developed a reputation as someone who was… difficult to work with. In Chicago, he clashed with head coach Fred Hoiberg, who Butler thought was too laid back. Then he went to Minnesota, where he reunited with his old coach Tom Thibodeau (who Butler initially also clashed with, before growing to love), but there he had trouble meshing with the team's young stars. The Timberwolves had been built, in a similar way to the 76ers, around two young lottery picks: Andrew Wiggins and Karl-Anthony Towns. But Butler felt they didn’t work hard enough, and demanded a trade after only a year with them.
Before a trade was worked out, though, Butler decided to scorch the Earth behind him. After holding out for most of the off-season, Butler showed up to a practice and refused to play alongside the Timberwolves’ other starters. Instead, he teamed up with, not the backups, but the team’s third-stringers, a ragtag bunch of G-Leaguers and fringe pros, for a scrimmage against the starters, which Butler’s team dominated while he taunted the rest of the team and the GM, telling them “You fucking need me. You can’t win without me” and eventually removing his warmups to reveal a jersey in which he’d cut out the team’s logo. Then Butler left the practice early to do an interview with ESPN’s Rachel Nichols, in which he called out the team for not appreciating him. The story, which has been told many times in various interviews and podcasts and forums, became a legend almost instantly.
So there were some obvious concerns about how Butler would fit in with his teammates. Beyond Butler’s swagger, there were real basketball concerns with how he would mesh with the 76ers. For one, Butler was not a great three-point shooter, and Philly really needed outside shooting. For another, Butler liked to play with the ball in his hands, but the Sixers had committed to Ben Simmons as their point guard. But Butler gave the team a killer instinct they’d lacked in previous years, and this set them up for another possible playoff run.
Then, a few months later, Brand made another big move showing how urgent it was to win now: The Sixers traded three rotation guys and two future first-round picks to the Clippers for Tobias Harris. Harris wasn’t an All-Star, but he seemed like a perfect complementary piece: a power forward who presented lots of matchup problems for the other defense and could shoot from outside. He was a so-so defender, but in a way that could be balanced out by Simmons and Butler.
With these two midseason trades, Brand gave up a lot of depth and spent down a bunch of the draft capital that had been built up in the Hinkie era, but he ended up with a formidable starting five of Simmons-JJ Redick-Butler-Harris-Embiid. There was much potential in this roster, but it took a while to get there: The Sixers had 20 different guys start games, and 22 play at least 100 minutes over the course of the 2018-19 season, and acclimating to all these changes during the season was tough. Even once the final starting five was assembled, Embiid was dealing with knee tendinitis which kept him out of the lineup for several games in the season’s second half. In the end, the team won 51 games, which was one fewer than the year before, and finished third in the East, behind both Toronto and Milwaukee.
The Shot
The Sixers actually lost their first playoff game, dropping Game 1 to an obviously less talented Brooklyn team at home. But before anyone could panic, they ripped off four straight to win the series easily, even with Joel Embiid playing limited minutes. His knee injury actually kept him out completely for Game 3 — but Philadelphia won by 16 anyway. In the next game Embiid came back and put up a crazy stat line of 31 points-16 rebounds-7 assists-6 blocks-2 steals in a comeback victory in Brooklyn. It was a look at just how good this team could be when they were all playing together.
Round Two would present a more formidable challenge, though, as Philadelphia faced off against Toronto. The Raptors won Game 1 behind a 45-point effort from Kawhi Leonard, but then Philadelphia took the next two games thanks to breakthrough games by first Jimmy Butler, then Joel Embiid. The Sixers had not figured out an answer for Leonard — who averaged nearly 38 points per game over the first three games — but they were able to shut down the rest of the Raptors, holding Toronto, a team that averaged over 114 points per game that year, to under 96 in each of their two wins.
Then Embiid got sick. A mysterious virus kept him up all night the night before Game 4, to the point that he needed an IV at six in the morning. Embiid had already dealt with gastroenteritis during Game 2, as well as lingering issues with his knee, and he was able to play through it again, but it was clear he wasn’t the same. He finished with only 11 points, and nobody else picked up his slack on offense: Ben Simmons had only 10, while Tobias Harris went only 2-for-13 from beyond the arc. Jimmy Butler scored 29, but it wasn’t enough; even though they once again held Toronto well below their season average, Philadelphia dropped Game 4, evening the series.
In Game 5, the Raptors blew out the 76ers, winning by 36 as Philly once again struggled to find any offense beyond Butler. By then, Embiid had been diagnosed with a respiratory illness, and while he was getting treatment, it was clear he was diminished, at least offensively. Finally, in Game 6, the rest of the roster stepped up: Butler still led the team in scoring, but he got help from Simmons (21 points), Harris (16), Redick (11), and Mike Scott (11), allowing them to force a seventh game.
Game 7 was a classic, a hard-fought defensive struggle that left everyone drained. All five Sixer starters played more than 40 minutes; the Raptors only played seven guys total. Toronto led for most of the first half. Then, midway through the third quarter, Philadelphia went on a 16-0 run to turn a nine-point deficit into a seven-point lead. But the Raptors responded, and from there on out, neither team led by more than five. The game was tied at 80, then again at 85, and then with just four seconds left, Jimmy Butler — who’d carried the team offensively while Embiid dealt with his illness — tied the game again at 90.
The Raptors had one more chance, and it was clear who would get the ball. Kawhi Leonard had led the team all series — all season, really — but he’d missed two jump shots and a free throw in the final minute, allowing the 76ers to come back. Now he had to redeem himself. Ben Simmons was guarding Leonard on the baseline before he came up to receive the inbounds pass from Marc Gasol. As soon as the ball touched Kawhi’s hands, though, Embiid peeled off his man to help. Simmons slowed down, presumably to cut off Leonard’s path to the basket, so instead Kawhi raced to the corner. Embiid chased him there, but Leonard was quicker. Embiid was able to get a hand up, but the shot was clean, getting off milliseconds before the buzzer sounded. The ball clanked against the front of the rim, bounced high in the air, and then rattled around every part of the iron, hanging there for what seemed like five whole minutes, before falling in and sending the 76ers home.
The Shot was a pivotal moment in the history of The Process, ending what would be the franchise’s best shot to return to the Conference Finals. It was the first time the Sixers had really gone all-in on a season, and they came up empty.
Now they had some hard choices: Both Butler and Harris were free agents, and while Elton Brand had initially made statements about intending to keep both of them, doing so would have been pretty tough on Philadelphia’s cap situation. So they re-signed Harris, but sent Butler to Miami in a sign-and-trade.
Choosing Harris over Butler made some sense: Butler had, as was his way, clashed with the powers that be in Philadelphia. He fought with coach Brown in a film session, and at one point refused to attend future sessions. He later went on JJ Redick’s podcast and told his former teammate: “I didn’t know who the fuck was in charge. I think that was the biggest thing. I didn’t know what the fuck to expect whenever I’d go into the gym, whenever I’m going to the game. … I think I was as lost as the next motherfucker.”
Perhaps more significantly, Butler was not an obvious fit on the court. In his brief time in Philly, his numbers, specifically his scoring, were down from where they had been in Chicago and Minnesota, largely because the Sixers’ offense ran mainly through Simmons and Embiid. In the playoffs, Philadelphia had changed things up slightly, letting Butler run point, and he’d been their best player against Toronto. But even Butler acknowledged this was unfair to Simmons, who’d been their point guard all season and looked lost in the new offense.
So going with Harris, who was a more natural complementary player, made some sense… but losing Butler meant losing a killer instinct the team obviously needed. Brand also let Redick go, bringing in veteran forward Al Horford and young shooter Josh Richardson. While these moves made sense on paper, the team never really congealed the next year; they were sputtering in sixth place when the season was suspended by Covid-19. When play resumed in the bubble, Ben Simmons got hurt, and the Sixers were quickly swept by the Celtics in the first round.
Jimmy Butler, for his part, would not let the Sixers forget the choice they made. Three years later, when the Miami Heat bounced Philadelphia from the playoffs, he ran off the court cursing and yelling, “Tobias Harris over me?”
An Alternate Path…
Before we move to the post-bubble iteration of The Process, though, it is worth spending a little time on the Toronto team that foiled Philadelphia’s best shot at a deep playoff run. In many ways the Raptors were a version of What Could Have Been for the 76ers — an alternate story of how to build a basketball team.
As mentioned back in Part I, The Process was supposedly a way to avoid NBA “purgatory,” or the state of being too bad for a deep playoff run but too good to acquire elite talent in the draft. And no team had spent more time in purgatory than the Toronto Raptors: From the franchise’s beginning in 1995 through 2015, it only won a single playoff series; and yet, in all that time, they were rarely terrible. Since the turn of the century, they only drafted in the top five three times (and two of those players, Andrea Barngani and Jonas Valančiūnas, never amounted to much more than role player status).
If the theory behind The Process was right, then the Raptors should have been trapped in a prison of mediocrity. And yet here they were, beating the 76ers. Indeed, Toronto was not only on the way to its first NBA championship, it was in the middle of a much more impressive run than Philadelphia’s. The Raptors had made the playoffs six years in a row; this would be their second Conference Finals. The only team to beat them in the playoffs over the previous four seasons was LeBron James’ Cavs.
And they had not built this team by tanking. Indeed, in the season before The Process began, 2012-13, Philadelphia and Toronto had the exact same record: 34-48. The Sixers decided the only way to get better was to be terrible for three years; the Raptors just decided to get good right away by making the most of what they had. And it totally worked! They turned Kyle Lowry, who was then going into his eighth season, into a perennial All-Star. They found valuable role players like Lou Williams and Bismack Biyombo. They used the 26th pick in the 2016 draft to take a future All-Star in Pascal Siakam. And when a superstar like Kawhi Leonard became available, they were willing to take a big risk and trade their best player and fan favorite, DeMar DeRozan, for the chance to go from good to great.
To put it simply, the Raptors had rejected the idea on which the whole Process was based, that the only way to be good was to first be really bad. And now they were champions, while Philadelphia was looking to retool…