Come on the Ricky, Evan Turner: Be Our No. 1 Frenemy
AU wants to make things right with the most complicated figure of the Sixers' proto-Process era.
Within the world of the Rights to Ricky Sanchez, we talk a lot about friends and enemies — Friends of the Pod, Enemies of the Process and so on and so on. It's easy to live within that with-us-or-against-us binary, to view all public figures as either being Jason Lipshutz or Jerry Colangelo. But venture out into the Ricky extended universe and undoubtedly we also have a handful of frenemies: Folks who have spent time being with us, but ultimately turned against us, even though we still can't help but feel some degree of affection for them stemming from our many memories together.
I don't know if there's a purer Frenemy of the Pod, the Ricky or the Process in general than Evan Turner. Evan is the perfect complicated figure of modern Sixers basketball: a guy who was drafted with high expectations, ultimately underwhelmed but still played a key role in countless Sixers memories good and bad, left in somewhat contentious and controversial fashion, and remains a visible and sporadically antagonistic figure even today. That "even today" has gotten a lot closer to literal in the past week, as now he and Spike are beefing in the IG comments over remarks made about his foreboding Summer League play (now a full 15 years ago) and subsequent Sixers career. He views us as pure haters at this point, no doubt, though the truth is actually far more complex — which I hope he would come to see after talking to us for just a few minutes.
Bottom line: We gotta actually get Evan on the Ricky.
For my part, Evan Turner remains my second-favorite Sixer of all time. Which isn't to say I always loved watching him — far from it, he pressed me to my limits as a Sixers fan more times over the course of three and a half seasons than I could count or stand. But I loved him dearly. I wanted the absolute world for him. I connected to the humanity in him early on and I was emotionally tethered to him from there. He was also my first-ever interview as a Sixers writer, back when I was writing for the 700 Level blog and the great Enrico Campitelli — I don't remember a ton about the discussion, except that he confirmed he was more of a Backstreet Boys fan than an *NSYNC one because they ultimately had more hits. (Not sure I agree, but I suppose there's an argument.)
I've often compared my relationship with ET to a relationship between a parent and a wayward child: They make your life unbearably stressful, they sometimes absolutely break your heart, but at the end of the day you still love them unconditionally and keep rooting for them to succeed no matter what. And your good times together are even more precious as a result — I still have a mental scrapbook of each of Evan's mini-hot streaks, his buzzer-beaters, his flashbulb moments as a Sixer, which still makes my heart swell to twice its size whenever I flip through it.
But I don't really blame Evan for viewing us as opps. We weren't exactly sentimental about his exit: By the time of his 2014 midseason trade, we were so ready for him to go that an entire sarcastic Twitter #FarewellEvan goodbye trend got enough notice to even title a Grantland article about the trade. (That hashtag was another Spike Eskin Joint, natch; Evan and Spike coming to IG blows of late is perhaps not as surprising as the fact that it took this long in the first place.) And when he came back, he got booed: I wrote another 700 Level article in November 2014 pleading with fans to treat him better, but as with all of my attempts to police Philly fan booing (I know I know I don't even try anymore) it fell on deaf ears. We've mostly treated him like an Enemy of the Process, so it's hardly a shock that he holds us in similar contempt.
I do think that in reality it's more complicated than that, though, on both sides. Evan disappointed for us as a No. 2 pick, for sure, but I've never felt totally comfortable calling him a bust, exactly. There were a lot of really good memories in there: big moments against the Miami Heat and game-winners against the Boston Celtics (both in the regular season and the playoffs), as well as that 3-0 start to the first Process season that invented the concept of the Sixers being Too Good. He peaked at the wrong time for the Sixers, when his production was mostly just getting in the way of Sam Hinkie's Grand Design — and truthfully, his peak was never quite as high or as consistent as we needed it to be — but he wasn't a bad Sixer. He wasn't a waste of our time or affection. And we did give him plenty of both as a Sixer; we loved him until we just couldn't stand to love him like that any more. I did, anyway.
By the time he was shipped to Indiana, it was just maybe a little too easy for us to dump on him as a representative of the Pre-Process Sixers, and the thinking that got us to where we were in the pre-Hinkie days. That entire team was built to be Good Enough, to have its moments, but ultimately tap out well short of where we hoped the Sixers would eventually get to. When we traded him, we weren't just cackling #FarewellEvan, we were bidding a celebratory goodbye to an entire era of Sixers basketball we had long since reached our breaking point with. With Evan (and Spencer Hawes, and soon Thaddeus Young) gone, Hinkie was finally free to totally rebuild the team to his own vision, a vision we hoped would take the Sixers far past the second-round ceiling they had hit with all those dudes on the squad.
Of course, Evan would eventually get the last laugh. Not only did he go on to a decently successful Celtics tenure that led to a big-money contract with the Blazers, once in Portland, he did the one thing we're still waiting on the Sixers to do: He showed up in a Game 7, playing a big part in powering the Blazers past the Nuggets in the 2019 conference semis, just hours before the Kawhi quadruple-doink ended that year's Sixers run. Evan had a pretty lousy conference finals that year and Portland got swept by Golden State, but still — he gets to clown on us now, and possibly forever, because he's gotten to the third round and we (still, somehow) haven't.
Anyway: It's time to hash this all out on the pod, Evan. It's been well over a decade at this point — we've taken our shots, you've taken yours, it's all been fair play. But we've played too big a part in each other's stories and have too rich a history together for our relationship to be one of sheer antagonism. That'll always be a part of it, of course, but there's a lot of love there too, and a ton of commonalities and shared experiences. We're not so different, you and we. So come on the Ricky, Evan, and we can finally shake hands and make up. And then we'll probably go back to sniping at each other from afar shortly after — but we'll do so with respect for one another, and the uniquely frenemist bond we've so long shared.
Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.
E.T. phone home.