The Recent History of the Philadelphia 76ers, or: The Basketball Gods are Real and they are Angry, part 3: Definitive Proof of a Curse
This is it. This is the big one. You know how I said randomness in basketball can at best put you over a closely matched opponent?
The Sixers had a disappointing result in the 2017-18 playoffs, but it was still a major turnaround for a team that had won only 10 games a few seasons before. The goal was clear: Get further into the playoffs. Win a championship. Their new GM, Elton Brand, moved piece after piece with the goal of assembling a true contender around Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons. He added Jimmy Butler, a worryingly intense wing whose game bloomed in the playoffs. He added bench depth and better players all around. This was it. This was a real competitive team, a team built to win, a team with no compromises.
His team made it to game seven of the Eastern Conference semifinals. Their opponents, the Raptors, had the best record in the NBA that year. This was a team that came out of nowhere to crush people, and they did it with brutal defense. Their best player, Kawhi Leonard, was the rare two-way star; a one-man offense who put in just as much value on defense. Their center, Marc Gasol, was a veteran with the rare combination of size, strength, and defensive know-how to actually contain Joel Embiid. The two teams have traded blows all series, and now here they are at the exhausting end of seven games of mauling each other.
Fourth quarter. Barely ten seconds left on the clock. Kawhi shooting free throws. He makes one; 90-88 Raptors. He bricks the second. Embiid taps the rebound to Tobias Harris, who hands it off to Butler, who streaks down the court and puts in a layup. Tie game with four seconds left to go.
And then this happens.
I cannot imagine watching this and not believing that the cold, unfeeling hand of some inhuman entity is manipulating events. Basketballs are not supposed to behave like this. A normal basketball, a basketball that can exist under god's light, has three modes when it is shot. You can swish it. You can brick it - the ball can hit the rim and carom off. Or you can hit the inside of the rim, at which point the ball might rattle into the net or rim out. Normal outcomes for a normal game.
This ball, presumably due to the demon inside it, instead chose to simply go straight up. It bounces on the rim four times before making up its mind to go in; as if it intends to prolong the agony as much as it can. You could watch hundreds of games and never see a bounce like this; for it to happen on this shot, at this time, creating the first-ever buzzer-beater on a game seven in the NBA playoffs, stretches belief. Mathematics is not yet ready for such problems.
These Raptors would go on to win the championship, and they would never be as close to elimination as they were against the Sixers. Kawhi Leonard would then immediately leave in free agency after just one year in Toronto and that entire championship team would unravel immediately. It's as if a perfect weapon was delivered to Toronto just in time to stymie the Sixers at the peak of their powers, and then lost immediately after.
As I write this, Joel Embiid and his Philadelphia 76ers have still not made it past the second round of the playoffs. Six years straight of making the playoffs without a conference finals appearance, let alone a championship. Nearly every Eastern Conference contender has taken their turn playing Gandalf to the Sixers' Balrog. The Celtics. The Raptors. The Celtics again. The Hawks. The Heat (featuring Jimmy Butler, whom the Sixers didn't commit to in 2019 in favor of decidedly-not-as-good Tobias Harris). The Celtics a third time. All they need to complete their loyalty card is to lose a series to the Bucks.
Did I mention that the Celtics' star, Jayson Tatum, was selected two picks after Markelle Fultz? That the Celtics were part of that trade to secure the first pick for Philadelphia? That the Sixers made that trade knowing that the Celtics wanted Tatum above all? Funny how things work out.
The entire premise of the Process was to take the team out of purgatory; to abolish mediocrity in favor of a championship-bound moon shot. But its ultimate result looks a lot like the penthouse of purgatory; a couple floors higher but just as stagnant.
If process matters more than results, then why do the results seem written, as if by a mean-spirited poet, to mock the process?