At this time 10 years ago, we were getting ready for a season that came very close to being historic.
The 2015-16 Philadelphia 76ers went 10-72, and nearly joined the 1972-73 Sixers, who went 9-73, atop the list of most losses in one NBA season. We all know what happened in the spring of 2016. Just prior to the end of that dreadful 2015-16 campaign, Sam Hinkie “resigned” from his post as General Manager. I put quotation marks around resigned because many understandably feel he was forced out by ownership
who caved under the pressure from Adam Silver that “The Process” had simply become too brazen of a tank job.
We’re not writing this post to relitigate The Process or point out how many other teams in the NBA have also lost games on purpose, but we are pointing out that Hinkie’s ousting by the powers that be left a lot of Sixers fans angered. For many of them, Hinkie’s arrival in May 2013 brought about a glimmer of hope for a franchise that was trapped in NBA purgatory. Hinkie had a plan and we were all denied being able to see how he would have carried it out.
Some of that hope would quickly return on opening night in 2016-17 though when Joel Embiid played his first NBA game and finished with 20 points and seven rebounds in just 22 minutes of action against Oklahoma City. Fast forward one more year to 2017-18 and the Sixers won 52 regular season games and a playoff round. It was their first playoff series win since 2012, and before that they hadn’t advanced out of the first round since 2003. I bring up 2003 because everyone knows that the Derrick Rose knee injury in that 2012 series against Chicago is the only reason the Sixers even won that series and so it very easily could have been 15 years from 2003 to 2018 without the franchise winning a round in the postseason.
How could we ever forget what happened shortly after the 2017-18 season concluded? In late May, The Ringer reported that Hinkie’s replacement, Bryan Colangelo and others in Colangelo’s circle were linked to burner accounts on Twitter. Many of the accounts were smearing Hinkie and defending Colangelo, who was widely viewed as a nepotistic hire due to his father working for the Sixers during the 2015-16 season prior to Hinkie’s ouster, and no real search for a new General Manager conducted by ownership. Let’s also not forget the accounts that defended Colangelo’s unusually large collars on his dress shirts. At this point, I think many Sixers fans were simply laughing at the entire fiasco. The laughter stemmed from Colangelo’s sensitivity and the fact that many fans could simply say “The NBA orchestrated Hinkie’s removal…FOR THIS?!?!”
Colangelo stepped down as a result of the scandal and perplexed is probably the best adjective to describe the emotions of the fanbase after that. Philadelphia went the entire offseason without a general manager which left coach Brett Brown in charge of player personnel for about four months. Granted, Colangelo did not officially tender his resignation until June 7, 2018 and at that point the NBA Draft was only a couple weeks away so the franchise was in a bit of a tough spot. But once everyone found out in September 2018 that Elton Brand was the permanent replacement for Colangelo, I think a lot of Sixers fans were likely wondering why Brand, whose previous title was GM of the team’s G-League affiliate in Delaware, wasn’t promoted immediately in June. If Brand was running the team in the 2018 offseason, the infamous Mikal Bridges-Zhaire Smith trade made by Brown on draft night may not have happened.
The Kawhi shot to end the 2018-19 season is probably still the biggest source of disappointment and sadness over the last 10 years. Philadelphia had the eventual NBA Champions on the precipice of overtime in a Game 7 in the second round. Of course, we can’t guarantee that if Leonard’s jump shot rimmed out, the Sixers would have won the game in overtime. Even if they did pull through on that Sunday night in Toronto, there would have still been eight more wins to get to reach the top of the mountain.
From 2019 to 2022 I think nervous and edgy were the words to describe the emotions felt by a lot of fans. After back-to-back trips to the second round, fans began to wonder if the franchise could take the appropriate steps to go from good to great. Jimmy Butler sure didn’t think so as he bailed on Philadelphia in the 2019 offseason which caused Brand, an inexperienced executive, to panic and drastically overpay Tobias Harris. Was Ben Simmons ever going to develop a jump shot? Would Doc Rivers prove he wasn’t a playoff choke artist carried by a loaded 2007-08 Celtics team to his one ring? Could Daryl Morey’s management experience balance out Brand’s inexperience and bring some stability to a front office that desperately needed some? Unfortunately, the answer to a lot of the above questions was no.
But that hope that existed when Hinkie was hired and briefly during the Toronto series in 2019 would return in 2023. Ben Simmons was gone and James Harden, who arrived in the Simmons trade with Brooklyn, had a huge Game 1 and a huge Game 4 against Boston and the Sixers were deadlocked at 2-2 with a Celtics team that seemed to own them and had eliminated them from the postseason in 2018 and 2020. They then played a riveting Game 5 in Boston in which they thoroughly outplayed the Celtics on their homecourt and suddenly had the chance to advance to the Eastern Conference Finals for the first time in nearly a quarter century at home in Game 6 … we all know how that ended.
Rivers was fired after the Celtics choke job and by then fans probably felt pretty frustrated. The team’s two best chances at a deep playoff run were ended by a couple of bounces on a Kawhi Leonard jump shot in 2019 and a choke job that started on their home floor in Game 6 in 2023 and ended with a Mother’s Day Game 7 blowout loss in Boston. The team’s chances to win with Joel Embiid as the franchise’s centerpiece appeared to be dwindling.
Nick Nurse’s hire may have cheered up some fans as it was unlikely they could have hired a better replacement. But with Embiid’s knee injury in January 2024 and another playoff exit at the hands of the Knicks, another Atlantic division rival, at that point, many Sixers fans probably felt resignation — and last season’s disaster surely had many fans feeling completely defeated.
So as we prepare for 2025-26, I don’t know how you should feel, Sixers fans, because you’ve felt just about everything you can feel during the last 10 years and change. Sure, there hasn’t been that pure jubilation that comes with winning a championship, and I’m not about to tell you that’s an appropriate emotion now, but there’s really nothing else you haven’t felt. If you’re holding out hope that Embiid has a few more healthy years in him, go for it. If you’re fed up to the point of barely caring, I certainly can’t blame you. If you’re one of those fans that can never bring yourself not to care but are going into the season pessimistically, that’s definitely an understandable feeling. Fans might disagree on how to feel about the 2025-26 Sixers, but I think everyone can agree that this fanbase is burned out.
