Between 2013 and 2017, the Philadelphia 76ers won 72 total games. In just 2016, the Golden State Warriors won 73 games.
That era was the dark age of “The Process,” in which the 76ers morphed from a perennial pile of whatever to the laughing stock, punching bag, and punch line combo meal that the rest of the league feasted on annually.
Trying to actually win games became unapologetically abandoned, and the specter of LeBron James running the Eastern Conference for the next eternity-and-a-half made roadmaps to contention run directly through hell.
And thus, the culture of losing was born. Players shuffled in and out of Philly like it was a hospice care facility while future assets and long-term projects were prepared for the future. Super-duper high draft picks were spent on injury-riddled prospects, and Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid actually panned out until Simmons panned back in.
Selecting Embiid over the field in the 2014 draft is the lone moonshot of the era, but beyond that, the process has been devoid of major home runs. The downfall of Simmons was an apocalypse-level event and not the fault of the organization. But trading the pick that became Jayson Tatum stings like a yellow jacket, as do the pair of top-six drafted duds, Jahlil Okafor and Nerlens Noel.
Fundamentally, The Process subjected fans to four full years of blatant noncompetiveness and has not a single Conference Finals appearance to show for it.
Worse still is the feeling of impending doom that all the assets paid for in blood are reaching their expiration date. The James Harden situation has imploded, and we’ve at least reached DEFCON 2 with how Embiid feels about it.
If, at some point in the next few years, the 76ers begin another rebuild, it will be one of the saddest decades in sports history. All is not lost, but I’m going to dissect the process-era teams with a fine-tooth comb to see if there are any guys that should have been shipped off earlier and preserve the results here.
Those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it.
(Photo by Mark Blinch/Getty Images)
1. Danny Green
I’m going to use Danny Green as a vehicle to explain the highly sophisticated and mathematically infallible methodology behind these rankings. We really appreciate the sacrifice, Danny.
On the surface, it may seem ridiculous to claim the 76ers held onto Green for too long. He was only on the team for two seasons, so it doesn’t seem there was much holding on going on. But the process era simply did not have the level of continuity you’d see on other teams. The turnover was immense, so a simple evaluation of the number of years a guy played is not going to suffice.
Rather, I’m looking at the full picture. How they were acquired, what they cost to keep around, and if they meaningfully contributed to contending to determine if they should have been bounced earlier.
Green is a classic case of this holistic analysis. His two years on the team were fine but coincided with a rapid physical decline that stunted the defensive side of his primo three-and-D status. He was a filler that could hit a couple of threes in his 20+ minutes per game, shown by his yearly averages of nine and six points, respectively.
That’s nothing egregious, but Green’s tenure detracted from the goals in more ways than are obvious. The 76ers wanted to keep him around for two more years, as noted by the extension he signed in his second year before tearing his ACL.
Before all that, he was acquired from the Oklahoma City Thunder for Al Horford and a 2025 first-round pick, a trade that might still come back to haunt the 76ers. And at the end, he was traded for De’Anthony Melton, an essentially parallel player whose value I have questioned on the record.
Green was probably brought in for his unrivaled championship luck, having won with Cleveland, Toronto, and Los Angeles before making his way to Philly. But his cost to the team was never worth his value, and so he begins our list.
2. Jahlil Okafor
Ah, Jahlil Okafor. The holder of the illustrious “Only 3rd Overall Pick to Not Be Good in the Last Decade” trophy. In 76ers lore, Okafor has a horrendous reputation, seeing as a meniscus injury derailed his career before it could really get going. Whatever Twin Towers plan the 76ers had with him and Embiid went horribly, and his career statistics read like the graph of sometimes heart rate slowly flatlining.
That’s because Okafor averaged a very solid 17 points his rookie year, coming in fifth in Rookie of the Year voting. But then the Shakespearean tragedy began, and nothing was ever the same.
Injuries racked up, trades were explored, and Okafor suddenly had one foot forcibly pushed out the door in his third season with the team. But by then, his value had cratered, and no valuable trade was possible. He was eventually shipped off for Trevor Booker, who—get this—turned out not to be a franchise-changing guy.
Okafor exemplifies another trend of this era of 76ers team management and something we will return to in full force on this list: waiting too long to bail on someone. Sure, Okafor had a solid rookie year, but he did so on the worst team in the league, a red flag that has the good-stats-bad-team detectives currently investigating Houston’s Jalen Green.
And he did so in too small a sample size, only playing 53 games that year. By the time the team had resigned to trade him, there was nothing left to receive. Maybe the offers were never good enough to warrant giving him up for 50 cents on the dollar, and it is easy to laud an organization for not rushing to give up an asset.
But the cultural detriment of a lame duck is real, so you just wait for the last guy on the list.
3. Dwight Howard
“Ok bro… what is this? WHAT is this!? Dwight Howard was on the team for ONE YEAR. How can you POSSIBLY say the 76ers held onto him for too long it was ONE MEASELY YEAR!!”
Listen, imaginary heckler who has increasingly become a mainstay of my written work. You have to remember the holistic approach we take here. Howard’s tenure with the 76ers was so short some would call it insignificant. But I say that the 62 games he played in 2020-2021 were very significant because they represent a critical problem the 76ers have been completely unable to solve:
Who is backing up Joel Embiid?
Best player insurance policies are a delicate business. You definitely don’t want to invest too much capital in a position ideally filled by your franchise guy, but hanging him out to dry with zero or negative help is never a good idea either.
Howard and the next two guys on this list represent the failure to achieve a good balance of depth and efficiency behind Embiid. If this was a Disney Pixar movie and NBA players were actually talking cars, Embiid would be a Ferrari. But even the nicest cars can’t be driven all the time, and with how reliant the 76ers have become on Embiid, his odometer is starting to scream out in pain.
Putting mileage on your stars without proper depth can kill a season, and Howard was more of a throwing-things-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks player rather than an actually coherent plan. My hunch is that once LeBron James left the East, the 76ers felt like winning right the heck now was the way to go and grabbed an experienced former star to try to do that.
But his 62 games were 62 excuses for not solving the Embiid backup conundrum. He was a name-brand player without any of the corresponding production and represents a season of procrastination. He was essentially a prayer that it would all come together nicely and no one would look back on it with any angst.
But here I am, looking back and with plenty of angst to go around.
4. Andre Drummond
The second part of the unholy trinity of Embiid backups enters the room. Andre Drummond has confused me for a long time, as I swear his career has taken place on that beach in the new M. Night Shyamalan film Old, in which everyone ages way faster than normal.
If someone asked me to gut-check Drummond’s place in the NBA, I’d say he’s a washed-up veteran about to enter a job as the color commentator on the local Detroit Pistons radio broadcast. Except, wait, he’s actually only 29 years old and averaged a double-double for Brooklyn as recently as 2021.
Even I feel bad about putting Drummond on this list because he quite literally only played in 49 games for the 76ers, but I refuse to let Philly’s unwillingness to figure out a backup center go unnoticed. Drummond’s tenure with the 76ers was far-and-away his worst statistical performance to date, and his legacy is ultimately as a piece in the Ben Simmons-James Harden trade.
But the very signing of Drummond to his veteran minimum in 2021 was enough for him to make this list, and he should really be taken along with the guy who comes next as one player. Drummond is indicative of the name-brand issue that Dwight Howard also had, as well as forcing everyone who notices Drummond’s 20 minutes per game to ask the same, exhausted question:
“What exactly is the plan here?”
Howard and Drummond as the backup five to one of the best players in the league is like painting your Ferrari neon green and emblazoning the hood with a four-foot-wide decal of Hello Kitty. It’s embarrassing, and you bet I’m going to bring this home with our last failed Embiid backup.
5. Deandre Jordan
I was so offended by this signing that I’m including a player who unironically appeared in 16 total games for the 76ers on the “players they held onto for too long” list. Is this some kind of sick joke? Yes.
Think of Deandre Jordan as the drum major for the pantheon of backup centers that should never have been more than break-glass-in-case-of-emergency guys but ended up playing 10+ minutes on what was supposed to be a contender. After trading for James Harden, GM Darryl Morey conceivably decided that Deandre Jordan, Harden’s former teammate, would be the perfect guy to bring onto this roster in March.
Once Jordan donned his number 9 jersey, he completed the triumvirate of Dwight Howard, Andre Drummond, and Jordan that would have been the greatest frontcourt in the universe in like 2015.
Their collective tenure was an exercise in not having a plan. It’s kind of like someone drafting a fantasy football team and realizing they forgot to get a backup wide receiver, so they overpaid on Robert Woods in the 9th round. I’m totally not speaking from personal experience.
Not even included are the other random dudes that occupied the backup center spot during the time, namely Paul Millsap (who remembers him from about ten years ago?) and Willie Cauley-Stein, whose coolest attribute is that his middle name is Trill. Should I stop? I should stop.
The moral of our three-player tangent? Figure out a backup to Embiid. Don’t make me write this again.
6. Dario Saric
And now, back to our regularly scheduled program and the final undercard match before the main event. Dario Saric is the first player I thought of when making this list because while he technically played three seasons with the 76ers, he was technically on the team for five.
That’s because he was drafted in 2014 but elected to play in Europe for two more years before coming over to the NBA to develop his game further. This was immensely frustrating for 76ers fans, as generally, you want promising young players to develop within the NBA ecosystem rather than elsewhere.
That’s why all the best college players are drafted after one year. To maximize their abilities, getting reps at an NBA pace is critical, and removing the associated jitters and refining skills before their physical prime begins is the hallmark of successful player development.
Saric, on the other hand, took forever to even step onto an NBA court. He showed flashes of greatness during his tenure but never could piece together the consistency to become a great player. Eventually, he became the quote-unquote centerpiece of the infamous Jimmy Butler trade.
Butler quickly soured on the 76ers as a winning environment, and thus Saric feels like a wasted five years of promise. The trade still made sense, so it’s hard to bash it now retroactively, but I’d argue that the promise itself was the issue.
Saric’s delays coincided with Embiid’s early career, which was completely muted by injuries, which allowed the 76ers to feel as though they had a real plan in place that needed time.
But time is an excuse for why a team is failing, not a plan to fix it. The 76ers’ reliance on time to fix their problems is probably what is causing all of them these days. The culture of waiting, losing, and a general lack of urgency seems to have invaded the championship window, which is a cautionary tale for teams too eager to tank. Saric represents this perfectly.
7. Ben Simmons
Buckle up because this is about to be the ultimate zag to the rest of the world’s zig.
Saying that the 76ers held onto Ben Simmons for too long is both obviously right and obviously wrong at the same time. On one hand, it became abundantly clear he would never suit up for the 76ers again over the summer of 2021, yet he wasn’t traded until February of 2022. One could argue that he was dead weight for eight entire months, and so he was definitely kept for too long, right?
Not if you ask most people who talk about the NBA for a living, because heaps of credit has since been afforded to Darryl Morey for standing pat on Simmons until he could get a real asset back in James Harden. I distinctly remember the Simmons hold-out saga as characterized by periodic reports that the 76ers had called up a team and offered up Simmons in exchange for their best player, which was hilarious to read.
Headlines like, “76ers want Damian Lillard for Ben Simmons” or “Morey would trade Simmons and assets for Tatum” were all over my timeline, and my reactions were mostly in line with the prevailing opinion in NBA media at the time: Simmons had completely ruined the 76ers plans, and the difficult in picking up the pieces was hardly the team’s fault.
And when Morey flipped Simmons—who quite obviously was never going to play for the team again—into a former MVP in Harden, it was super impressive. But today, I sit here and wonder if the delay caused shockwaves that still haunt the team today, and I’m not just talking about Harden’s current trade request.
One of the secrets of the NBA is that winning is hardly just about basketball. Having a roster that is bought in and up for the smoke associated with contending is at least half the battle, and the 76ers’ process-era culture was the antithesis of that. Winning was discouraged, and not playing in games was perfectly fine if it preserved long-term health.
I think Simmons’ saga is the manifestation of this culture in all the wrong ways, and letting him lame-duck around for over half a year sent all the wrong messages about what this team needed to be mentally.
Morey’s insistence on getting the best return possible for Simmons makes sense from a basketball perspective, but at the end of the day, this team didn’t need Harden. They needed an exorcism.
Trading Simmons as soon as he quit on the team would have proved to the rest of the players that it was no longer playtime and that insolence and lack of commitment would no longer be tolerated. Instead, the team was left flat-footed and dazed for a huge chunk of the season, only to receive the ultimate lack-of-commitment player back in Harden.
Today, the whole situation feels like an endless cycle of promise, dysfunction, and reset. There is no continuity, no certainty, and clearly, a hard reset of culture was needed around that time. But a cold calculus was used once again, and while Simmons may have become a useful asset, the team kept its issues at home.
8 players the Philadelphia 76ers gave up on too soon
The Philadelphia 76ers have a terrible recent track record of keeping good players on the roster. Here are some who slipped through the cracks.