Too often, fans view sports through a binary lens. To some extent, it’s fair as every game has a winner and a loser. In basketball, every field goal attempt is either going to go in or it will not. But when this mindset broadens to things like awards and championships, the waters get muddied for unnecessary reasons.
Saying things like “Joel Embiid will either win the NBA MVP or he will not” and “The Sixers will either win the NBA Championship or they will not” are not the same binary views as the team
winning one game or Tyrese Maxey making a jump shot. In the former scenario, Embiid is competing against a myriad of MVP candidates and the Sixers are competing against a handful of other NBA title contenders. In the latter scenario, the Sixers are only competing against one team on the given night fans want them to win and Maxey and no one else control most of the fate of his jump shot.
In other words, it’s understandable to be frustrated if the Sixers let a game slip away and giftwrap a win for their opponent or to be annoyed if Maxey missed an open jumper. But, only one candidate can win the MVP award and only one team can win the NBA Championship each year. That does not mean all the MVP candidates that did not receive enough votes for the award had bad seasons nor does it mean the other title contenders that fell short should be viewed as choke artists.
Simply put, if you believe that in a 30-team league, there is one successful team each season and 29 failures, you’re going to deprive yourself of enjoying a lot of fun moments in every sport created by those 29 teams that did not win the championship. The 2000-01 Philadelphia 76ers are one of those teams that did not win a title, but gave their fans a ton to remember and deserve to still be talked about a quarter century later.
Much has been made of that 2000-01 season still being the last one in which Philadelphia advanced to the Eastern Conference Finals. By now, the franchise’s history post Allen Iverson is well documented. It’s a mixture of being a mediocre team no one outside of Philadelphia cared about, being one of the worst teams in the NBA and being a national punchline for continuous early exits in the playoffs.
But, it’s also worth noting that 2001 was also Philadelphia’s first time in the Eastern Conference Finals since 1985. So that means that any Sixers fan under the age of 40 has only seen the team make the NBA’s final four one time, and it happened in 2001. That’s nearly two generations of Sixers fans who never got more hope than they did in 2001 and were never prouder of a Sixers team than the one that made it all the way to the NBA Finals and held a 1-0 lead over the dynastic Lakers in the NBA Finals.
We mentioned awards earlier. Did you know that the Sixers won four of the NBA’s major awards in that 2000-01 season? Iverson was the league MVP, Aaron McKie took home Sixth Man of the Year honors, Dikembe Mutumbo was the Defensive Player of the Year and Larry Brown was the Coach of the Year. There’s an underdog mentality that gets applied to this team because of how heavy of a favorite the Lakers were in the NBA Finals and Iverson was the little guy who ripped the hearts out of the bigger guys chests all the time. McKie also being the willing sixth man who grew up in Philly, went to Temple and found his way back to the City of Brotherly Love in the middle of his career for a team that made such a deep playoff run is another one of those cute little stories that eats at anyone. Don’t forget Mutumbo coming in at the trade deadline as the thought-to-be missing piece in a move that saw the well-liked Theo Ratliff shipped south to Atlanta.
But you don’t clean up all those awards like that by accident. The 56-26 record in the regular season is still the best record for any Sixers team in the 21st century. The team finished first in the East by a four-game margin over the next closest team which was Milwaukee. Had some of their regular season dominance carried over in a bigger way to the postseason, perhaps the Sixers would have had a real chance to beat the Lakers. Instead, they had to play four out of a then-possible five games in the first round against Indiana and three of the four games were decided by five points or less. Then it was back-to-back seven-game series against Toronto and Milwaukee to get out of the East. They definitely ran out of gas when they got to the Lakers.
The Sixers lost to the Pacers in the 2000 and 1999 NBA playoffs which made getting over the hump in 2001 mean a lot for a first-round series. It felt like Toronto and Milwaukee threw everything at the Sixers and the Sixers survived a 12-round boxing fight each time. All of these twists and turns in the playoffs made the Sixers more likable and we certainly haven’t seen a Sixers team connect with the city of Philadelphia the way this one did.
We mentioned that there’s essentially two generations that haven’t seen a deeper playoff run than 2001 from the Sixers. There’s the group of people who are now in their mid 40s and therefore not quite old enough to remember the franchise’s glory days in the early 80s. Then there’s the fans in their late 20s and early 30s who have seen every other Philadelphia sports franchise have more success overall in the 21st century than the Sixers have had.
But it’s that second generation of fans in their late 20s and early 30s that I want to highlight to wrap things up because I’m part of it. I was born in December 1994. I wasn’t alive for the Buddy Ryan Eagles teams and I certainly don’t remember the Flyers teams in the 90s that were led by the Legion of Doom. If you’re my age, the 2000-01 Sixers were the first Philadelphia sports team you really fell in love with. Sure, the Eagles made five NFC Championship appearances under Andy Reid and played in a Super Bowl. We all know about the Phillies winning five straight NL East titles from 2007-11 and making it to the World Series twice in those five seasons and winning it all in 2008. I’ll even include the Flyers’ magical playoff run in 2010. But, if you’re old enough to have those other Philly sports memories of the first decade of the 21st century, you probably have at least some from the 2000-01 Sixers it was those Sixers memories that came first.
Two years ago, a documentary called “Everything But the Chip” was released to chronicle the 2000-01 season. There are championship winners every year and there aren’t documentaries made about all of them. This team fell three wins shy of a championship and about a quarter century later we’re still talking about them. I’m not implying the documentary belongs in the pantheon of sports documentaries, but it certainly speaks to the impact that the 2000-01 Sixers had on Philadelphia sports and the NBA. Between all of the awards the team won, finishing first in the Eastern Conference by a comfortable margin, and simply galvanizing the city by having such a huge cultural impact in Philadelphia, it’s going to take a lot for another Sixers team to do the same thing. It’s been 25 years and we haven’t seen any Sixers team get close since. So, yeah, they did fall short of the ultimate goal, but let’s remember the heck out of the 2000-01 Sixers this season.
