The Philadelphia 76ers have had a landmark month, one that could have occurred only on this particular timeline where nothing normal happens for this franchise. In the span of just 23 days, Philly made its most stunning, no-brainer trade for a star since acquiring hometown hero Wilt Chamberlain more than 60 years ago and its most consequential free agent signing since landing Julius Erving mere months after America’s bicentennial. In an instant, the Sixers have become the most compelling thought experiment in the league; whether they’ll be able to meld this newfound mélange of egos is its own Rorschach test. But amid all the newness, I’ve found myself thinking about the team’s longest-running constant.
The upcoming season will mark the 10-year anniversary of Joel Embiid’s first year playing in the NBA, after he was forced to sit out his first two seasons rehabbing back, foot, and knee injuries. His career to date has been a series of unfortunate events studded with occasional bursts of mind-numbing, all-time-great play. Making it to a full decade in the NBA is no small feat, never mind the journey that Embiid has endured to get here. And what is Embiid if not an archivist? He plays the game enshrouded by ghosts from a past that he chooses to memorialize. They’re present every time he steps onto the court. He embraced “the Process” as a nickname to acknowledge the faith and sacrifice of former team architect Sam Hinkie, who drafted him back in 2014 and was practically forced out of the organization two years later, before Embiid played his first NBA game. Embiid’s signature shooting motion has him leaning to the side, almost always landing on his left foot, avoiding any undue pressure on his right foot, which he broke before his rookie season—a navicular bone fracture, the same injury that severely compromised the careers of legendary centers like Bill Walton and Yao Ming. Everything Embiid has accomplished in his career has been in defiance of what’s felt like a generational curse.
At the end of a cathartic Game 7 victory against the Boston Celtics in the first round back in May, Tyrese Maxey looked over to Embiid in admiration during their joint postgame interview with NBC sideline reporter Zora Stephenson. “We can’t let the same stuff happen over and over and over and over again,” Maxey said. “At some point, we have to put a stop to it. And we did.”
Maxey was addressing lingering demons. It’s just unclear which in particular: the lulls that forced Philly into the position of needing to climb out of a 3-1 series deficit, the prospect of losing to the Boston Celtics in the postseason for the third time in six years, or the Sixers’ run of disastrous luck in Game 7s in 2019, 2021, and 2023. Maybe it was all of the above. Maybe Maxey was summarizing the past decade of Sixers basketball writ large—a bizarre word salad that includes exotic ingredients such as thoracic outlet syndrome, a near-fatal sesame allergy, “That is a normal collar,” and “Daryl Morey is a liar.” But no one could have known what lay on the other side of one of the most symbolic wins in franchise history: The team was roundly swept by the eventual champion New York Knicks, with Knicks fans commandeering Philly’s home court in the process. It was a deflating moment after such a meaningful series victory against Boston. The subsequent firing of Daryl Morey ought to have been a dispiriting moment. Instead, it somehow led to the greatest offseason haul in Sixers history.
What comes next is the thrilling, terrifying, clarifying part. Embiid was hand-selected to be the franchise savior, and for years, he pushed his body past its limits to try to live up to that standard. When healthy, he can be a destroyer of worlds or his own worst enemy, making ill-advised, passion-of-the-moment plays that seem to toss any notion of tomorrow out the window—or at least that’s how it feels watching a man that large, who carries so much of a franchise’s hopes, dive for a loose ball. Maybe it’s an innate competitive desire; maybe it’s a learned behavior from seldom being able to trust his running mates when it matters most. Embiid dominates yet has long yearned for a reprieve.
“Obviously over the years—there’s no shade toward anybody that has played in this organization—I’ve always taken the blame for everything that’s happened,” Embiid said after the Celtics series last May. “Sometimes I’ve been in those positions where I come up short, and that’s fine. But to be in a position where you know you can relax one or two possessions because you trust the guys, it means a lot. I’ve always said it: You can't win alone.”
He has said it often, never more desperately than after the Sixers’ Game 7 loss to the Celtics in the second round in 2023, during his MVP-winning season.
I can only imagine how much there is to … process for Embiid, who has spent most of his career in search of a stable and willing costar, only to now find himself with four of them. The Sixers are now a strange mosaic of past, present, and future. They are, at once, showcasing one of the most exciting young backcourt duos in the league, a vindictive prove-it crusade against analytics from one of the best wings in basketball, the swan song of one of the two best basketball players of all time, and a titan in repose, easing his way down from heights he had to reach largely by himself. The Sixers have the next three months and then 82 games to navigate the expectations that come with being what could be one of the last superteams of this era. They’ll also have to figure out how to sidestep whatever supernatural hexes invariably arise that threaten to derail their season. It’s all part of the process. But is it all part of the Process?
Sports are a way of telling and metabolizing the passage of time. We’re made abundantly aware of shot clocks, game clocks, dates, seasons, historical leaderboards. But sometimes the numbers feel wrong. Sometimes they don’t quite align with the impact felt at a particular moment. The Daryl Morey era of Sixers basketball lasted exactly twice as long as the Hinkie era. Can you believe that? In three years, Hinkie managed to rewrite an entire fan base’s DNA, nudging one of the most rabid fan communities into seeing the longer view of team building, finding the victories encased in defeat; in six years as Sixers president, Morey largely swapped out old bandages for newer ones, trying to make the most of Embiid’s prime.
It’s been more than a decade since Hinkie, the disgraced-slash-venerated former Philadelphia 76ers president of basketball operations, sent in his resignation letter–slash–manifesto in an ouster instigated by the league itself. The Sixers have instated four front office regimes since. “The NBA can be a league of desperation, those that are in it and those that can avoid it,” Hinkie wrote in his 2016 letter addressed to both Sixers brass and faithful, its words ringing clearer now than back then. “So many find themselves caught in the zugzwang, the point in the game where all possible moves make you worse off. Your positioning is now the opposite of that.”
Hinkie’s parting gift to Philadelphia was the 2016 no. 1 pick, which turned into Ben Simmons, who nearly six years later turned into James Harden, who turned into Paul George, who, earlier this month, turned into Jaylen Brown. Something tells me Hinkie will be paying particular attention to this season—not because he’s entitled to any retroactive credit (though one could easily make the argument) but because, in spite of everything, he’s a Sixers fan. Hinkie captured the imagination of a fan base with his commitment to making the team worse in order to make it better. He was kicked out before he could see his vision through, but for all of the hard-line analytics that went into it, he was a romantic at heart. This feeling that Sixers fans are feeling right now—the joy and expectation of rooting for arguably the most talented team in franchise history—is what Hinkie had always hoped to deliver himself.
“How people view their team and their tribe and their city and their community and make lifelong memories that would end up being in your top five,” Hinkie told The Ringer in 2018. “Some day, when you’re at the end of your life, and you think back on something, that magical season. You were there. And that moment when you went with your kids. That’s meaningful to me. It’s worth spending your time on.”
The Process has died a thousand deaths over the past decade, but it remains a friendly spectral presence, one that reemerged on X out of the blue to celebrate the Sixers beating the Celtics in the playoffs for the first time since 1982. For years, longtime Sixers PA announcer Matt Cord introduced Philly’s franchise big man as Joel “The Process” Embiid; in May, Cord retired from the position after 28 years with the team. It’s fair to wonder whether the team would rather leave that moniker in the past. Maybe it dies here. Or maybe it dies when Embiid’s jersey is hung up in the rafters. Or maybe it’s unkillable, reanimating itself through new branches in a trade tree and subsuming even the arguable GOAT into the lore and mythology of the Process’s ouroboros. But for now, the Process remains in the stewardship of Joel Embiid, the one who was promised in those dire years of struggle.
“You can be right for the wrong reasons,” Hinkie wrote in his resignation letter. “In our business, you’re often lionized for it. You can be wrong for the right reasons. This may well prove to be Joel Embiid. There is signal everywhere that Joel is unique, from the practice gyms in Lawrence, Kansas to Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania to Doha, Qatar where he does something awe inspiring far too regularly. We remain hopeful (and optimistic) about his long-term playing career, but we don’t yet know exactly how it will turn out.”
In a sense, we still don’t. Embiid has been given everything he’s ever asked for in a starting lineup, to the point where it’s fair to wonder whether this is still even his team. And if the team is no longer built around accommodating the big man, what does that mean for his future? It’s hard to imagine the Sixers letting go of Embiid after his remarkable performance against the Celtics mere weeks after an emergency appendectomy. At his best, he remains one of the most dominant offensive forces at the center position. But trade ideas nonetheless are being thrown out into the universe. Perhaps the unsavory reality of upholding the Process is believing yourself to be the savior when you’ve always been destined to be the martyr.
