Joel Embiid began his basketball journey in earnest when he came to the United States at the age of 15, a combination of raw tools and athleticism, but little idea how to play the game.

His trajectory, his rate of improvement, his ability to quick master advanced footwork in the post, to learn and communicate defensive rotations and to develop world class touch in the blink of an eye, were virtually unprecedented.

That natural talent and hard work led Embiid to become the top prospect in his draft class just a few years later, ahead of many of his peers who had been playing the game for twice as long as Embiid had to the point. improvement continued, with Embiid eventually becoming one of the best players in the world, as he put together three consecutive MVP caliber seasons from 2021 through 2024.

And yet here the Sixers stand, with many fans already shifting their attention to Tyrese Maxey, Jared McCain, VJ Edgecombe and the next era of Sixers basketball, even as one of the best players in franchise history is still sitting there on the roster.

That pessimism stems largely from a lack of conviction that Embiid, who has suffered multiple tears of the meniscus in his left knee and looked like a shell of himself physically in the rare instances that he was able to take the court last season, will be able to stay healthy for an extended enough period of time to anchor a deep, grueling playoff run. It is, sadly, pessimism that is hard to fight back against.

If that is the case, this era of Sixers basketball will be viewed by most as a massive disappointment. It didn’t have to be this way. It shouldn’t have been this way.

Joel Embiid will take, and in many respects already has taken, the brunt of that frustration from the fan base. And certainly Embiid — in part because of ill-timed (and mostly random. Hello, multiple orbital fractures) injures that have impacted every playoff run, and in part because of his own failures — shoulders some of that blame.

But focusing solely, or perhaps even mostly, on Embiid ignores the failures of the organization around him. If this era of Sixers basketball does not include at least one deep playoff run, it will be one of the most unforgiveable bag fumblings in Philadelphia sports history.

It seems like just yesterday that the Sixers were setup for a potential dynasty, with future MVP Joel Embiid beginning to establish himself as a dominant force in the league, back-to-back #1 overall picks in Ben Simmons (2016) and Markelle Fultz (2017) set to form a long-term ‘Big 3’, max salary cap slots to further supplement that core and enough young trade chips that they could eventually land superstar Jimmy Butler in a trade.

Dynasties in the NBA are pretty tough to build. The CBA is designed almost specifically to make it so. The one cheat code, if you will, is exploiting the NBA’s rookie scale, and the Sixers were exceptionally well-positioned to build a sustainable force in this league. Instead, the Sixers, despite having all of the pathways at their disposal that I listed above, trotted out a non-shooting (and afraid to shoot) point guard in Ben Simmons and a handsomely paid (but mediocre) Tobias Harris as the second and third best players on supposed title contenders for much of Joel Embiid’s physical prime.

Wasting the prime years of an MVP caliber player is one of the most unforgiveable sins that a franchise can commit, and that will be the focus of a depressingly large chunk of our ‘Sixers What-if’s’ during Rank Week.

10 – What if Andrew Toney never developed a foot problem?

The sheer number of massive moments that Andrew Toney had during the Sixers’ 1983 championship run is often overlooked, overshadowed by his bigger name, and longer-careered, teammates. But Toney actually led the team in scoring in the Conference Finals against the Bucks, then went on to average 22 and 6 in the four game sweep over the Lakers to help the Sixers claim the Walter A. Brown Trophy (the Trophy would be renamed to the Larry O’Brien Trophy in 1984.)

Nicknamed “the Boston Strangler” for his playoff heroics against the Celtics, he had his career cut short after just seven seasons because of chronic foot injuries. Toney had stress fractures in the navicular bones in both of his feet, which limited him to just six games in 1985-86. Toney, who had averaged 20 points and 4.6 assists in back-to-back All-Star seasons in 1982-83 and 1983-84, was never the same, averaging just 9 points over his final three injury-plagued seasons.

The trio of Mo Cheeks, Dr. J and Moses Malone were aging out of their prime by that point, so short-term title contention was probably out the window even with a healthy Toney.

But perhaps Toney maintaining his All-Star level (and, according to some, Hall of Fame trajectory) might have given Charles Barkley enough of a supporting cast that he doesn’t ask out of Philadelphia after a string of mediocre seasons in the late 80s and early 90s. That alone would have changed the trajectory of the Sixers franchise in significant ways, and helped avoid a real dead period of Sixers basketball.

9 – What if the Sixers never traded Brad Daugherty?

The Sixers traded Joe Bryant, a career role player, to the Clippers for an unprotected pick (the NBA was wild back then) in the 1986 NBA Draft. And, in a rare stroke of good fortune, that pick ended up being the #1 selection in the draft.

The Sixers, though, were building around Charles Barkley, and they didn’t think that Barkley and Brad Daugherty, the top prospect in the draft, would fit well together. So they traded Daugherty, a career 19 and 10 big man who made five All-Star selections, to the Cleveland Cavaliers for Roy Hinson, who spent barely more than a year with the franchise before eventually being shipped off to the then-New Jersey Nets for Mike Gminski.

Much like the Andrew Toney injury above, much of the ‘what-if’ here is preventing the disaster that was the second half of Charles Barkley’s tenure with the team, as once the old guard aged out of their prime the Sixers’ disastrous decisions would end up dooming the Barkley era.

I don’t know what the ultimate upside of a Barkley/Daugherty led team was, but I sure as hell know the watchability index of it would have been higher than the Dana Barros, Jeff Malone, Willie Burton slop that followed the end of the Barkley era.

8 – What if Markelle Fultz never got hurt?

The last decade of NBA basketball can succinctly be summarized as the “dribble, pass, shoot” era of the game, as opponents have become increasingly sophisticated in their defensive tactics to use any holes in an offensive player’s skill sets to make the lives of the foundational stars significantly more difficult.

Which makes it all the more stunning that the Sixers spent much of the Embiid era without a single player who fit that bill, as they didn’t have a real triple threat until the 2021-22 season, when they acquired James Harden in a trade and Tyrese Maxey really took off in his sophomore season.

It’s wild to think about, but it’s almost undeniably true: playing in the pick-and-roll, 3-point shooting era, while building around a 7-foot-2 behemoth, the Sixers didn’t have a single player who could dribble off of a simple pick-and-roll with the big fella and reliably knock down a shot. A couple of DHO snipers in Seth Curry and JJ Redick, sure. But none who used the action to put any real pressure on the rim as a result.

It should have been an easy formula to build around, and a go-to set for the Sixers to spam, especially as Joel Embiid turned himself into one of the best midrange shooters in the sport. But it’s a set the Sixers largely abandoned, instead turning to domed snug pick-and-rolls to help hide the deficiencies of Ben Simmons, the worst shooting point guard in the league.

This is an area that the Sixers invested the #1 overall pick in Markelle Fultz to address.

Fultz knocked down 41.3% of his 126 three-point attempts during his one season at Washington. Almost two-thirds (64.8%) of his half-court possessions came as a ball handler in pick-and-rolls, with Fultz mixing in his explosive first step, strong frame, great body control and touch at the rim, along with a devastating pull-up jumper, to work himself into being the best three-level scorer in his draft class. Fultz shot 42.4% on jump shots off the dribble, an incredible mark given that he had almost no help around him on an undermanned Washington team, and almost every shot that Fultz attempted was heavily contested.

And the Sixers, thanks to the right to swap picks with the Sacramento Kings, were in position to draft him, which they guaranteed that they would do when they found a willing trade partner in the Boston Celtics and moved up to the #1 spot.

And then it all went away.

The signs were there right from the jump, even if the severity of it might not have been clear. Never has a tweet aged more poorly than the one I sent after having seen Fultz’s predraft workout.

Value of today's workout was about 80% medical reports, 18% interview, 1% performance, and 1% miscellaneous. Don't worry about his shooting.

— Derek Bodner (@DerekBodnerNBA) June 18, 2017

In my defense, what I said is true 99% of the time. A single workout, especially a 1-on-0 workout, should never override a season’s worth of tape, and a career’s worth of progression. It’s incredibly easy to overvalue what happens on the basketball court during some of these predraft workouts, and a lot of mistakes are made because of it.

But Markelle Fultz’s situation was … unique, and before you knew it his shot had completely evaporated.

The reasons for the de-evolution of Fultz’s shot have never fully been explained. Initially, there was skepticism, both from both the team and also those in Fultz’s inner circle, over whether the shoulder injury was the actual root cause of Fultz’s struggles or merely a side effect of him having changed his shooting mechanics, as the adults from both sides of the divide went into full-blown CYA territory to make sure they weren’t the ones to blame as a teenager’s NBA career came into jeopardy. The injury gained some acceptance as an explanation, or at least a significant contributing factor in the situation, as time went on, but even now I don’t think anybody knows the full scope of what went down, or of what is to blame.

In truth, it doesn’t even really matter at this point. What does matter is the devastating effects the loss of Fultz’s jumper had, both on the team and, just as importantly, Markelle Fultz’s NBA career. The latter deserves significant attention, but this is a Sixers focused article, so we’ll devote the rest of the time to the former.

The reverberations of the Markelle Fultz situation are still felt to this day. Directly, in the sense that Fultz would be traded to Orlando for the draft pick that eventually become Tyrese Maxey, the Sixers’ current All-Star point guard. Even still, the Fultz pick not working out cost the Sixers a precious few years of Joel Embiid’s prime, from when Fultz was drafted in 2017 until Maxey really asserted himself in 2021, a stretch which looks even more precious now that Embiid’s injury threatens to cut his prime artificially short.

If Fultz had been who we thought he would become? An All-Star level, three-level scorer fit between Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons? It’s tough to overstate how much that could have changed that era of Sixers basketball, especially for a team that lost three Game 7s (including to a pair of title contenders) over the next few years. Advancing in any one of those series could have given them a real shot at competing for a title, and could have completely rewritten the legacy for many involved.

When the Sixers drafted Markelle Fultz, they were on a patient path towards building a sustained, championship level core. Everything after that felt like a panic move to try to get back on track. Whether it’s acquiring the mercurial Jimmy Butler (who, while a great value trade, his unhappiness alongside of Ben Simmons was predictable), to overpaying for Tobias Harris, to trying to fit square pegs (Josh Richardson and Al Horford) into a round hole (playing those two alongside of Joel Embiid), nothing felt right until the Sixers eventually drafted Tyrese Maxey all those years later.

Maxey was admittedly one heck of a way to save the sequence of events, but the four years lost in between will haunt fans for a long time.

Note: some would have phrased this as “what if the Sixers drafted Jayson Tatum with the #1 overall pick, but that was never truly in play, as Danny Ainge required assurances that the Sixers would not take him before they agreed to trade down. And most of the other options in that range — Lonzo Ball, Josh Jackson, De’Aaron Fox and Jonathan Isaac — don’t significantly change the trajectory of the franchise. That’s why the real lost opportunity here is Markelle Fultz not working out, not that they should have made a different decision.

7 – What if Matt Geiger waived his trade kicker?

WE FINALLY GET A POSITIVE WHAT-IF.

Most of the entries in this list are “well, this decision really screwed up”, but Matt Geiger refusing to waive his trade kicker set the Sixers up for some of the most iconic moments in franchise history.

In the summer of 2000 the Sixers were ready to move on from the Allen Iverson era, with his relationship with Larry Brown, practice habits and general tardiness becoming too much for the Sixers’ organization to deal with.

So the Sixers had a deal with the Detroit Pistons lined up which would have sent Iverson and Matt Geiger to Detroit in exchange for Eddie Jones, Glen Rice and Jerome Williams. But there was one catch: Matt Geiger had a 15% trade kicker in his contract, and the trade would only work under the salary cap if Geiger agreed waived the kicker, and turn down the extra $3.3 million that would have come his way.

Geiger refused, and what happened next was one of the most magical seasons in Philadelphia 76ers history.

The Sixers came out on fire to start the 2000-01 season, winning their first 10 games of the season just months after they nearly shipped their star guard off to Detroit. The Sixers went on to start the season with a 41-14 record, leading to the top record in the Eastern Conference at 56-26, and eventually earning an MVP (Iverson), Coach of the Year (Brown), Defensive Player of the Year (Mutombo), and Sixth Man of the Year (McKie) for their efforts.

They then went on to vanquish their longtime nemesis Reggie Miller and the Indiana Pacers in the first round, then came out on top of a brutal, and iconic, duel between Iverson and Vince Carter in the Conference Semis, before another seven-game series win over the Bucks in the Conference Finals, and finally The Stepover over Tyronn Lue to stun the invincible Lakers in Game 1 of the Finals.

It didn’t end in a championship, but everything up to that point was downright magical. And none of it would have happened if not for Matt Geiger.

6 – What if the Sixers re-signed Jimmy Butler in 2019?

In some respects, Jimmy Butler may have been the most complete teammate that Joel Embiid has had during his career. Not the cleanest offensive fit — that goes to James Harden and Tyrese Maxey — but in terms of a two-way star who had the right temperament to complement Embiid, Butler was unique among the co-stars that the big fella has been partnered with.

Unfortunately, Butler’s Sixers career lasted barely more than six months.

The reasons for the abrupt departure are varied. Butler certainly wasn’t enamored with head coach Brett Brown, and the feeling was mutual. But sources have told me that Butler would, in fact, have come back to play for Brown if the Sixers had gone in that direction, mostly because Butler had a strong desire to continue to try competing for a championship with Joel Embiid. And, let’s be honest: there were reports during the Toronto series that Brett Brown’s job was in jeopardy, and teams never choose an on-the-hot-seat coach over that of a star player.

Butler would have won any power struggle if it was just between he and Brown.

There was certainly some concern at the time about Butler’s next contract, as Butler, who would have turned 30 before the start of the next season, had played massive minutes under Tom Thibodeau in Chicago, and how he would age into his mid-30s was a question that many had at the time.

The biggest hurdle (by far) towards Jimmy Butler returning, however, was the presence of Ben Simmons, as both Butler and Simmons wanted to run the offense and initiate from the perimeter, and neither excelled at (or even put much effort into) being an off-ball player.

The Sixers “solved” this dilemma by letting Simmons run the offense in the regular season, and then slid him to the dunker spot in the playoffs as Butler ran the show. There were internal conversations about whether they could repeat that again the following year, and the general belief was that they could not. While neither Butler nor Simmons (or their respective camps) had given any sort of a demand or ultimatum about the the role or roster spot of the other star, sources that I spoke to on all three sides — Simmons, Butler, and the team — doubted whether it was tenable long-term.

The team ended up prioritizing Simmons, which was understandable at the time. Simmons, seven years Butlers’ junior, was coming off of his first All-Star birth, in just his second year of playing in the league. He’d follow that up by making Third Team All-NBA, First Team All-Defense, and coming in 4th in Defensive Player of the Year the following season.

Almost everyone would have sided with Simmons if forced to make that choice.

Yet in terms of inflection points this is one of the biggest during the Joel Embiid era. Nobody had more insight into the mindset, and limitations, of Ben Simmons than the Sixers did at that time. They knew of his aversion towards shooting, and of the mental block that came along with it. They had more information than anyone in the world that his progress might stall. Had they acted on that, and made the right sequence of moves?

After being traded to Miami, Jimmy Butler would go on to average 21.5 points, 6.3 rebounds and 5.9 assists over the next four seasons, advancing to two NBA Finals, and one more Conference Finals, over that run. A Sixers team that has so often failed to elevate their games in the postseason let one of the top playoff performers of his generation walk out that door.

But this what-if doesn’t just involve building around the Joel Embiid and Jimmy Butler duo, but also includes the haul you could have gotten by trading Ben Simmons at the apex of his value, and of not tying yourself to the anchor that was Tobias Harris’ contract.

Even though a lot of this wasn’t obvious at the time, it really just goes to show how the Sixers missed on every opportunity that they had in front of them during this era.

5 – What if the Sixers drafted Dirk Nowitzki or Paul Pierce over Larry Hughes?

There are a lot of parallels in the careers of Allen Iverson and Joel Embiid, from questions about practice habits and leadership, to relatively limited playoff success (especially outside of Iverson’s 2001 run), to difficulties in building around their respective archetypes.

But perhaps the most depressing commonality between the two is the lack of star help that they had around them.

In Iverson’s case, the easiest way to fix this was with the 8th pick of the 1998 NBA Draft.

The options there were plentiful, as future Hall of Famers Dirk Nowitzki and Paul Pierce were selected by the Mavs and Celtics with the next two picks. And the Sixers had connections to both of them, with Pierce having played at Kansas for Larry Brown’s successor, Roy Williams, and General Manager Billy King was reportedly enamored with Nowitzki.

Brown would even go on to say that the Sixers had Pierce rated higher than Hughes, their eventual selection. But the Sixers didn’t expect that Pierce would fall, and had given Hughes a promise during the predraft process.

Brown stuck to that promise.

The AI era would come to be defined by the short-lived 2001 team, a collection of role players who overachieved around the heliocentric Iverson. Their attempts to add offensive talent around Iverson were mostly out of desperation, taking flawed, and often old and injured, players like Keith Van Horn, Derrick Coleman and a shell of Chris Webber to try to give Iverson the help that he needed.

It was never enough. And it all could have been avoided just by taking the guy who fell right into your lap, just two years into Iverson’s eventual Hall of Fame career.

4 – What if Ben Simmons never breaks down?

There are two aspects to Ben Simmons’ swift fall from grace: the continued drop in confidence, and the back injuries which sapped him of much of his world-class defensive abilities.

It’s easy to forget just how good Ben Simmons was on defense, a true 1-through-4 defensive terror who could defend the point of attack, force turnovers, hold his own against the apex wings in the league, control the defensive glass and turn all of that into opportunities to score in transition. The Sixers had the 2nd best defense in the league in 2020-21, Simmons’ last season with the team.

And then ‘The Pass’ happened.

It was one of the most staggering losses of confidence that you’ve ever seen, with Simmons now seemingly petrified of going to the free-throw line, especially with the game, and season, on the line.

While The Pass was the flashbulb moment for much of the NBA, there had been a monthslong buildup up to that point. Simmons shot just 51.2% from the line after March 1st of that season, including a dreadful 25-73 in the playoffs, after having shot 67.5% from the line prior to March 1st.

When things deteriorate that badly, and that quickly, you’re in a full-blown crisis of confidence.

Simmons has never really attacked the basket since, with him attempting a grand total of seven (7!) free-throw attempts in 295 minutes for the Clippers last season.

Simmons’ defense had started to decline prior to that point, with his first serious back injury occurring in the COVID-shortened 2019-20 season. It makes this ‘what-if’ a bit tough to project. Even ignoring the huge drop-off in offensive aggressiveness, productivity and impact that not looking at the basket had on his career, I’m not sure that the Sixers were ever getting the 2017-2020 version of Ben Simmons going forward.

Still, that 2021 playoff run was a tough one to stomach. With a first-round opponent in the Washington Wizards (34-38) and a second-round matchup with the Atlanta Hawks (41-31), there will never be an easier pathway to a Conference Finals birth. And while I’m not sure the Sixers had it in them to beat the eventual champion Milwaukee Bucks, the Sixers had to walk away from that season with something more.

This was the series where the Sixers transitioned from ‘young, up-and-coming team with a long-term core in place that should dominate the Eastern Conference for years to come’ and into a group of underachievers. This loss was unacceptable. This was the series when the fun died.

3 – What if Sam Hinkie was able to see his Process through?

I am not going to give this ‘What-if’ the time and space that it deserves, because in all honesty this could be its own column. Heck, it could be a freakin book.

The truth is, we just don’t know.

We don’t know in part because Sam Hinkie was far from perfect as an NBA decision maker, with a “safe” track record (passing on Giannis Antetokounmpo, taking Jahlil Okafor) in the draft that belied his reputation as a true-blue believer in upside above all else. He never showed that he was capable of building a team that could win, although in his defense that wasn’t really one of their goals during this stage of The Process.

Detractors of Hinkie will point out that he drafted centers in three consecutive drafts, which only goes to show that ‘building a team’ took a back seat to ‘finding a franchise player’ in this era. Passing on Joel Embiid because you already had Nerlens Noel, for instance, would have been a disastrous decision that would have set the franchise back a decade.

(Sources have told me that Colangelo criticized all three draft day decisions when he first arrived in Philadelphia: that they shouldn’t have selected Noel because he was too immature, that they shouldn’t have drafted Embiid because of the injury risk, and that they shouldn’t have drafted Okafor because they had a glut of big men. He was definitely correct on Okafor, arguably correct on Noel, and absolutely lacking in foresight on the Embiid critique.)

But what we do know is that Sam Hinkie left his successors with a ton of “optionality”: a future MVP in Joel Embiid, the upcoming #1 pick in the 2016 draft (which came just two months after Hinkie left), the right to swap picks with the Kings (which netted them the 3rd pick in the 2017 draft), two maximum salary slots in free agency and enough trade chips to land a star in Jimmy Butler, a trade package that was centered around Dario Saric and Robert Covington, both of whom were brought in under Hinkie.

That’s not even counting Jerami Grant and TJ McConnell, who were both on the roster that Colangelo inherited, and who would go on to have long and impactful NBA careers.

Hinkie’s time with the Sixers is often dismissively summarized as “anybody can intentionally lose”. But that’s not all that it was. Cycling through minimum salary contracts and 2nd round picks landed the Sixers with McConnell, Grant and Covington, the latter of which was central to the Jimmy Butler trade years later. The tactic bore real fruit.

The prime example of their planning was the pick swap, which left the Sixers in a position where they could have had the 3rd pick in the draft regardless of their own personal record. It ended up where the swap only moved them from 5th to 3rd, but decoupling draft position from the team’s own success would have, and could have, been much more significant if Joel Embiid’s rookie season hadn’t had been cut short after 31 games because of a bone bruise. The team had really started to turn a corner before his January injury, having won 8 of their 10 games before Embiid first suffered the knee injury, and were threatening to challenge for a playoff spot.

The Process was about more than just losing games: it was about finding creative ways to engineer luck and maximize optionality as you wait for your true franchise centerpiece to step forward, and to not take short-term, Pyrrhic steps forward before you had that centerpiece in place.

While we don’t know exactly how Hinkie and his staff would have built around Joel Embiid, we do know that him surviving to see it through would have prevented the disaster that was to come.

Much of this article up to this point has been about the missteps taken by the Colangelo (and Collaborative) regimes, so I won’t relitigate all of them. But the number of mistakes made were astronomical. More to the point, the process (lowercase p) that got them there was disheartening, to put it kindly.

When the Sixers eventually hired Bryan Colangelo, who just so happened to be the son of the advisor that they hired months earlier (just a coincidence, I’m sure) they tried to get out ahead of the nepotism charge by stating that they “started with a list of 75 candidates” to try to pretend that the search was exhaustive. When I asked Josh Harris after the press conference how many people they actually interviewed, he responded that he “didn’t think that was an appropriate question”.

If that’s not an appropriate question on the day that you hired your advisor’s son to run the team during the most pivotal moment of your stewardship of the franchise then I don’t know what I, or anyone else in the media, was even doing there.

Harris would later say that they interviewed “not many [candidates], but a few”. Multiple sources around the team at the time told me that the real number was two: Bryan Colangelo, and a backup plan in case Colangelo turned the job down.

The hiring process somehow only got worse from there, as after Bryan Colangelo was relieved of his duties following Burnergate, Harris was convinced to go forward with The Collaborative, a murky combination of Brett Brown and Alex Rucker and David Heller and others, ostensibly working under Elton Brand (who had been the Delaware 87ers’ GM for all of a year).

There are two ways to interpret this structure, and I’m honestly not sure what was worse: either Harris hired a GM in Elton Brand who had all of one year of G-League front office experience to run the team during the most pivotal portion of Harris’s ownership of the team, or he empowered a murky group of hangers-on to fight for influence under a nominal figurehead in Brand to take the brunt of the criticism. (For the record, sources over the years have maintained that Brand did not have final say, and did not have the most influence out of that group.)

As much as we criticize the decision makers for their mistakes during both the Colangelo and The Collaborative era, and they deserve it, the buck ultimately stops with Josh Harris, who empowered this nonsense. Which is why the decision to move on from Sam Hinkie, even if his track record wasn’t perfect and even if we don’t know how he would have built the team, was so damaging.

At the very least, a clear and consistent vision, executed by competent people, could have prevented wasting so much of Joel Embiid’s physical prime.

A sub “What-if” here: what if Joel Embiid never needs that second surgery on the navicular bone in his right foot? The Sixers ended Joel Embiid’s rookie season with a 28-54 record, and were 15-26 when Embiid went down with the torn meniscus in his left knee. They had just won 8 of their last 10 at the time of the injury, and the excitement was real. Embiid transformed that team from laughing stock to ‘holy crap they might sneak into the playoffs’ almost singlehandedly.

If that Embiid rookie season happens in 2015-16 rather than 2016-17, does Josh Harris keep Sam Hinkie around? Probably so. If Embiid doesn’t need the second surgery, does Hinkie make the Okafor mistake in the 2015 draft? I’ll never forget when Hinkie was asked about that following the draft, he said “I’d like to think” they would have still drafted Okafor, which was about as lukewarm as you could get. Would the Sixers have been more cautious with Embiid’s bone bruise during his rookie year if Hinkie were running the team than they were with Colangelo at the helm, and could that have changed how Embiid’s knee looks today?

These are all questions that we don’t know the answer to. But given how everything has shook out since, I’m willing to give the alternate timeline a try.

2 – What if the Sixers kept Mikal Bridges?

The 2018 NBA Draft was stacked, and the Sixers had so many opportunities at their disposal with the 10th pick in the draft. From Mikal Bridges to future MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander to Michael Porter Jr, all off whom were selected in the next five picks. It was almost impossible to screw that up. This was the Embiid era equivalent of the Dirk Nowitzki/Paul Pierce 1998 mistake.

And the Sixers walked out of that draft with Zhaire Smith and a future draft pick that they eventually traded for the right to overpay Tobias Harris.

Obviously, SGA would have been the “right” pick here, but it would have been a tough one to make. The Sixers already had a point guard in Ben Simmons, and SGA was a low-volume (albeit accurate) shooter from deep. His development into an MVP caliber player was outlier, and would have been tough to predict at the time.

But Bridges was right there. Literally, having played up the street at Villanova, but also the player the Sixers actually took with the 10th overall pick before the Suns called them up and convinced the Sixers to make the 10-for-16 swap, a trade which was finalized after the Sixers made the Bridges selection. There was a time when the Sixers thought Bridges was going to be their draft-day haul, and oh what a different world that would have been.

Bridges was a 3-and-D rotation player from Day 1, a spot starter during the first two years who then became a full-time starter in Year 3. In fact, he has started every game that he’s played since the start of the 2020-21 season, and has not missed a single game during that time. (In fact, he played an extra, 83rd, game in the 2022-23 season because of the trade.)

The Sixers during this era has desperately needed all of that. The versatile defense, the 3-point shooting, the secondary creation, the consistency. A Sixers era defined by poor perimeter shooting, a lack of wings and constant upheaval thanks to multiple trade demands could have instead been anchored by one of, if not the, most consistent two-way contributors in the league, and could have avoided the Tobias Harris sized anchor that they acquired the following year.

Bridges was runner-up in Defensive Player of the Year in 2021-22, a year where he made the All-Defensive First Team. He then exploded offensively, averaging 19.1 points and shooting 36.9% from 3-point range in the three years since.

The Sixers have lost three Game 7s in the second round over the course of Mikal Bridges’ career, with Joel Embiid’s teams starting incredibly flawed players like Robert Covington, De’Anthony Melton and Seth Curry in roles during those playoff series that Bridges could have filled instead. The margin from playoff disappointment to triumph isn’t that steep, and winning just one of these crucial playoff series feels like the bare minimum that this one decision could have changed. More realistically, the Sixers probably have multiple Conference Finals appearances under their belt up to this point, with a real chance for something even greater.

1 – What if Kawhi Leonard missed his game-winning shot in Game 7?

The experience of witnessing the Kawhi shot in person is one that I will never forget.

The stakes of that game were clear for the Raptors, with Los Angeles’ courtship of Kawhi not even remotely a secret. Kawhi ended up bolting for LA even after winning the championship, but a second round exit would have virtually guaranteed Kawhi’s exit, and with little to show for it.

So Jimmy Butler’s transition layup to tie the game at 90 with five seconds left put the Scotiabank Arena in a state of panic.

Those murmers at the Scotiabank arena turned into a complete silence when Kawhi’s shot went up. To say you could hear a pin drop in an arena filled with nearly 21,000 people isn’t even hyperbole. The tension was palpable.

The final outcome truly absurd.

The whole sequence — from the “Sixth man” pestering the inbounds pass, to Joel Embiid cutting off Ben Simmons as Kawhi drove to his right, to Embiid’s honestly incredible contest as he trailed Kawhi step for step and timed his jump perfectly, to Kawhi’s clear travel, to the other eight players standing and watching as fate was outside of their control, to Kawhi crouching down after the first fortuitous bounce off the rim, to the truly absurd way the ball popped straight up and over the cylinder despite hitting the front of the rim, to the deafening reaction of the crowd after the ball finally went through the net, to Embiid throwing his hands over his head as tears streamed down his face when reality set in — will live with me for the rest of my life, something that I’m sure is true for every 76ers fan who had the misfortune of watching that agonizing play.

I am honestly not sure what the “What-if” on this one is. Even if Kawhi missed that shot, the game still goes to overtime and there’s no guarantee that the Sixers win. If they do win, there’s no guarantee that they beat the Bucks in the Conference Finals, much less then go on to beat the Warriors to win the championship.

But they had a chance. Despite the fact that team’s offensive output never quite matching the sum of their parts, which is to be expected for a team that barely played together, they had the chance to be lockdown defensively, with enough sheer offensive talent to take on anyone.

And obviously a breakthrough here could have changed everything, from the decision on bringing Jimmy Butler back to Brett Brown’s job security to the legacy of Joel Embiid. Perhaps more than anything it would have extended the Age of Innocence and delayed the dread and anxiety and frustration that came to define the second half of the Joel Embiid era.

But more than the actual ramifications of this shot is how this came to be the defining moment of this era of Sixers basketball. An iconic moment in NBA basketball, at the expense of a Sixers team that is still, to this day, looking for a signature moment of their own to hang their hat on.

I often think about how fickle legacies are in the NBA, and juxtapose the Kawhi shot with that of Vince Carter’s. Both shots, by a Toronto Raptor, as time expired in Game 7 of the second round, that went on to define the legacies for many involved.

Allen Iverson didn’t have a long catalog of playoff success — in fact, 2001 was the only year that he himself got out of the second round, and he was literally an inch away, on a play outside of his control, from losing that game. But one moment, one inch, can open up door up to unforgettable moments that define a player for the rest of time.

Carter’s shot went an inch too far as Iverson watched helplessly on the weak side, and Iverson then went on to use that second chance at life to build memories that will last a lifetime. Kawhi’s shot came up an inch short, but thanks to an extremely fortuitous, one-in-a-thousand bounce it somehow went in.

Would Joel Embiid have seized the moment, like Iverson did 18 years earlier? We’ll never know, and that’s a shame.