The world you were born in no longer exists.
Allen Iverson is a faded memory, let alone any recollection of Moses Malone's Herculean run to a 1983 championship parade. It won't be long before Joel Embiid's windmill dunk against the Raptors back in 2019, the pinnacle of this era of wasted promise for the Sixers, has the same fate, a feeling of jubilation long in the rearview mirror.
Anger? Sadness? Utter apathy? All of the above feelings are justified when it comes to the current sorry state of the Philadelphia 76ers.
Joel Embiid is one of the most talented scorers to ever live. That's not hyperbole. That's a fact. Whenever he stepped on the court, he was better than anyone at dropping buckets, but the issue, of course, has always been how little he's been on the court, a situation that has only worsened this season. The talk of "alternative options" to help his knee woes over this weekend only heightens that, the thought that this may all be over, that he will never be counted on to be a consistent NBA contributor again.
That windmill slam was everyone's trust in the Process panning out. Embiid's 2023 thrashing MVP campaign was something to behold. For three years from 2021 through 2023, he averaged roughly 31-11-4, won two scoring titles, finished top two in MVP voting every season and won that award once. Those accolades were everything Sixers fans who had bought into the Embiid dream, who had defended him endlessly through his first two redshirt professional seasons and all the ensuing debates had hoped would come to fruition.
It never totally worked though.
All-Star running mates from Ben Simmons to Jimmy Butler to James Harden have all been jettisoned. An Embiid-led Sixers team has yet to and likely never will reach a conference finals, something the organization has none in 24 years. "The Mummy Returns" was the No. 1 movie in America when the Sixers were last there. It's pretty pathetic and that goes well beyond the Embiid years, to the wasted end of the Iverson era to the pre-Process wasteland of slop.
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What happened to this team? What happened to this sport overall that once dominated every waking moment for me, now a complete afterthought with the league worse than it's ever been in my life. Am I just old, is this the Sixers taking a toll or is the sport itself simply evaporating? Maybe it's all of those things.
The Sixers burned through top picks, but they brought in a literal superstar MVP, too. They hit a massive, Bryce Harper-level home run in nabbing Tyrese Maxey No. 21 overall in the 2020 NBA Draft. It's still left them in the same spot they've been in for nearly a quarter of a century: watching from the couch in late May while four other teams slug it out for a Finals appearance.
It sucks. It just sucks.
Maybe you just need a top-20 player ever to actually win a championship. That's always been the case in the NBA and that's what made the idea of the Process so tantalizing. Perhaps Embiid could've been that guy if not for the injury issues and the times where this team came up small in its biggest moments. Ugh.
The door has been closed on the Sixers' championship hopes for longer than anyone wants to admit, but it really truly feels like the final chapter on this era itself is being written in real time. What will Philadelphia remember it for? If it just makes you mad, that's fine. If you're in shambles after it felt like the basketball world was once in the palm of Embiid's hands, that makes sense, too. I think I'm just somewhere in between, wondering why I placed so much of myself into this organization while also desperately wanting to rip the Band-Aid off and start things over again.
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