Paul George didn’t mince words, saying he thinks the Sixers have a championship roster, but much will have to go right for a team that hasn’t won it all in four decades.
The Sixers’ 1982-83 championship trophy sits within a small display case on the second floor of the team’s practice facility, between the lunchroom and the area that was reserved for interviews during Monday’s Media Day, the annual preamble to training camp and the season beyond.
Next to the display case is a red piano, which according to a Sixers publicist coach Nick Nurse will play on occasion.
Now Nurse, who is entering his second season with the team, must do more than noodle. Now he must help a largely revamped club find its rhythm — and hope it’s not the blues, as has been the case every season since ‘82-83.
The goal is clear, and optimism is high.
“I think we should compete for a championship,” Paul George, the splashiest offseason acquisition, said.
Certainly these Sixers are, as Nurse said, better than last year, when they again flamed out in the postseason, this time against the Knicks. In fact, it’s not a stretch to say they are among the most talented teams in franchise history.
George, signed as a free agent after spending the previous five seasons with the Clippers, has made nine All-Star appearances and six All-NBA teams during his 14-year career, bringing his new team’s respective totals to 25 and 12 (with a bullet, given Tyrese Maxey’s rapid ascension).
That ‘82-83 team wound up with 40 and 13, totals dwarfed by the Wilt Chamberlain-led ‘66-67 title team (43/22), not to mention the ‘84-85 club (51/24), which had added Charles Barkley to the Moses Malone-Julius Erving core.
That latter team was beginning to show its age, and lost to Boston — in five games! — in the Eastern Finals. That’s a stark reminder that nothing is guaranteed, that there are a thousand variables in the championship equation.
The most immediate one facing the current team is how the parts will fit together. Can George complement Maxey and Joel Embiid? How comfortable will newcomers like Caleb Martin, Andre Drummond, Reggie Jackson and Eric Gordon be in their roles (much less holdovers Kelly Oubre Jr. and Kyle Lowry)? And where does a wild card like another new arrival, Guerschon Yabusele, figure into this whole thing?
Hey, that’s why you have camp, right? And never mind that it’s in the Bahamas. This will very clearly be a working vacation.
“For me, it’s getting a chance to get down there and start to see what it all looks like,” Nurse said. “That’s the best information I can get — getting them on the court and starting to go to work. And then trying to forge some kind of identity with this team.”
George, for his part, believes he will have no problem meshing with Maxey and Embiid — not an unreasonable expectation, given his versatility and the skillsets of the two holdovers.
“I see us flowing,” he said. “I think all of us can kind of play our game within the game.”
George is 34, and title-less. Certainly he wants to make this work. Certainly he understands the value of collaboration, though that wasn’t always the case, he admitted Monday. When he was with Indiana early in his career, he said, he “wanted the team to be mine. I wanted everything to fall on my shoulders.”
He built up his resume, but his teams never advanced beyond the Eastern Conference Finals in his seven years with the Pacers. Nor did he get very far in the postseason in two years with Oklahoma City or five with the Clippers.
“You can’t do it alone,” he said. “You need star power. You need firepower. Not to say I didn’t have that in Indiana, but you do figure out, all right, this is a challenge to win a championship being a lone superstar. And so it wasn’t taking the easy route (to go elsewhere). It was just kind of understanding the landscape of where the league was going, to where I did need help to win a championship.”
So now he’s here, and his hopes are higher than ever. That’s not only because of the Sixers’ explosiveness, but their experience.
“You have leadership,” George said. “You have guys that have been in meaningful games, meaningful playoff runs. It’s a well-balanced group. So I do think we have high expectations of being one of the best teams, and being the last team standing.”
Certainly the Celtics and Knicks will have something to say about that, as will others. The team’s health, too. Embiid, who turned 30 in March, seems to suffer an untimely injury every year, and as was noted Monday, George, Lowry, Gordon, Jackson and Drummond are all older than the seven-time All-Star center.
George countered by saying that the team’s geezers have “aged well,” but as he knows, increased age usually results in increased injury risk. Before playing in 74 games last season, he missed between 26 and 51 each of the previous four.
Long story short, there are no givens. The Sixers have tons of talent, but it’s going to take a lot more than that for them to get where they want to go, to avoid playing the same sad song they’ve played for four decades.