This month, our sports staff at PhillyVoice will be taking a look back at the best and worst lineups in the last decade. Naturally, the worst units are up first, and there is an endless number of options for the Sixers given what the organization has gone through over the last 10 years.
However, one game felt unavoidable here. The date was Dec. 7, 2015, and the 1-20 Sixers (yes, 1-20) played host to the San Antonio Spurs.
On this day, the Sixers had just introduced Jerry Colangelo as the newest member of the team's brass, signaling the beginning of the end for General Manager Sam Hinkie. On this day, the Spurs elected to sit out Tim Duncan, Kawhi Leonard and Manu Ginóbili.
And on this day, with three future Hall of Famers in street clothes, the Spurs obliterated the Sixers in Philadelphia, 119-68, the most embarrassing 48-minute showing in an era of Sixers basketball full of them.
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Starters: T.J. McConnell, Isaiah Canaan, Robert Covington, Jerami Grant, Nerlens Noel
Ironically, three of these five players ended up having very strong NBA careers. Grant, a former second-round pick of the Sixers, has three different seasons with at least 20 points per game in the NBA. When his current contract with the Portland Trail Blazers expires, Grant will be nearing $250 million in career earnings.
Covington became a critical role player for multiple organizations, and it seems the last stop of his NBA career came last season with the Sixers. Covington's eventual development into one of the NBA's most effective wing defenders, on top of his high-volume three-point shooting, enabled him to win a lot of basketball games. Covington blossomed under former Sixers head coach Brett Brown, assistant Lloyd Pierce (now with the Indiana Pacers) and co., and spoke glowingly of them in an interview with HoopsHype last November.
"[Brett Brown] made it more than just basketball. He taught us about life, taught us about different things. Just to help us go through that tough phase that we were in, in The Process years. He’s one of my favorite coaches. The things I learned from him and the coaching staff, my player development coach, Lloyd Pierce, will stay with me forever."
One of the other crown jewels of that era of Sixers basketball from a development perspective was McConnell, whose Pacers are in town to face the Sixers on Friday night. McConnell, who reached 10 years of NBA experience earlier this season, spoke with a few writers in Philadelphia about how quickly things change.
Earlier that night, Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle recalled how on most nights, even the least talented of Sixers teams fought like hell, and how McConnell set the tone for it.
"The first thing that I always remember is when they were going through the rebuild in the early stages," Carlisle said. "You'd come in here, and you'd have, like, 14 turnovers at halftime and be down eight or 10 points. [McConnell was] the main reason for a lot of the chaos. I gained a lot of respect for him, just as a hard-playing, defiant competitor. Time goes pretty quickly -- now it's 10 years."
Canaan played in 89 games as a Sixer and played in another 89 NBA games across three seasons after his departure from Philadelphia. Noel, the first building block of Hinkie's time leading the organization, was unable to emerge out of a logjam when the team selected centers with their first-round picks in the following two drafts. He was eventually traded to the Dallas Mavericks, where he fizzled out quickly before briefly reviving his career with the New York Knicks. Noel's last NBA appearance was exactly two years ago last Wednesday.
Bench: Jahlil Okafor, Nik Stauskas, Richaun Holmes, Hollis Thompson, Tony Wroten, JaKarr Sampson
The most memorable moment of this game came on its final basket, when an unknown behemoth named Boban Marjanović drew the adoration of the crowd and put the Spurs up by 51 points. Years later, Marjanović would join the Sixers' rotating cast of failed veteran backup centers. But facing the rookie Okafor, Marjanović delighted the Philadelphia crowd by duping the No. 3 overall pick with a pair of fakes before sinking a long jumper. The crowd reacted as if a Sixer had thrown down a poster dunk:
Speaking of Okafor and the Pacers, the Duke product spent time with their G League affiliate earlier this season and eventually earned a 10-day contract. He made one appearance for the Pacers, his first time checking into an NBA game in over three years.
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