The 10 Process Sixers I Have the Fewest Negative Feelings About
The Sixers who are the closest to Schwarber Status for AU.
I've been thinking a lot this past week about Kyle Schwarber. Mainly about how I love Kyle Schwarber, natch: He just won the All-Star Game for the NL while making Pete Alonso hilariously redundant in the process, then he homered in each of his first two games back from the break. He's got 32 dingers on the season; he's averaged over 40 of those a year in his four years as a Phillie; he also hit three each in the NLCS and WS during the Phils' unforgettable 2022 run, and had a 1.670 OPS in the CS against the Diamondbacks in our ultimately doomed 2023 run. Of course I love Kyle Schwarber.
But more to the point: I only love Kyle Schwarber. When I think of Kyle Schwarber and I flash back over the four seasons of memories I've shared with him as a Phillie, love is the sole feeling generated. Which is not to say he is my most beloved Phillie: I love Bryce Harper and Ranger Suárez and (inexplicably) Bryson Stott all comfortably more. But all of those players conjure at least some degree of mixed emotion from me — they've frustrated, they've annoyed, they've had moments where I glumly predicted I bet they're gonna do that thing now and then they did it. Maybe Schwarber has done some of those things too; truthfully, it'd be hard for a guy who strikes out ~200 times a year not to. But that's never what I think about with Kyle: Due to some fortuitous combination of likability, reasonable salary, not-unreasonable expectations and a ton of good moments more memorable than the equivalent bad ones, I only have positive associations with him.
I wish we had a Sixer like that.
Which isn't to say that we don't have Sixers who I have mostly, maybe entirely affectionate feelings about. But after the last decade's succession of increasingly absurd offseason and regular-season tragedies and humiliating playoff disappointments, it's hard to maintain blanket positivity about too many of them — and most of the players who we can do that for were one-season wonders, or left (or got jettisoned) before shit got real, or never even got the opportunity to show us why they ultimately may have disappointed. Have we ever had a Schwarber type, who plays through multiple seasons and postseasons of consequence and never makes us go "Yeah, but..." when describing our feelings about their overall legacies? I dunno.
Regardless, the thought exercise got me wondering which Sixers come the closest to Schwarber Status for me. The answer certainly does not include either of my all-time most-beloved Sixers, Joel Embiid or Evan Turner, nor of course does it include All-Star Sixers such as Ben Simmons, Jimmy Butler, James Harden or theoretical All-Star Tobias Harris. It doesn't even include a Sixer as universally beloved as T.J. McConnell, since the things that frustrated me about him frustrated me enough by the time of his departure that I wasn't even particularly sad to see him go and it would be disingenuous for me to say otherwise (though invariably, my list still does include a healthy amount of revisionist history). For fairness purposes, it also doesn't include any Sixers who never played at least one full (or near-full) healthy season for Philly — so no shiny new favorites like Jared McCain or Quentin Grimes, nor embronzed early-departeds like Landry Shamet or Corey Brewer.
Here are the 10 golden boys of the last decade-plus. May we never know them for bringing us anything but love and happiness.
10. Furkan Korkmaz
Certainly brought his fair share of faint disappointments over the years — but for the most part, that's all melted away now and my memory of Furkan is just one long montage of Summer League scoring outbursts, unlikely buzzer-beaters, ridiculous IG photo spreads and always-hilarious clown-feet jokes.
9. Mike Scott
Certainly, we remember the good times — the Mike Scott Hive outings, the Lottery Party, the Cash Out triple against the Nets, the Purell Dunk against the Pistons, more than any of the long periods of nothingness that tended to transpire in between them. My only real Mike Scott-related negativity is towards the team for still relying on him to play a real role in the rotation after it had become abundantly clear that that had become too much to ask of him.
8. Guerschon Yabusele
There were a lot of surprises to be had last season, but Yabu was the only one who could consistently boast the adjective "pleasant" behind his. For many he'd probably be even higher on this list, and understandably so; I just could never get totally past my belief that he never would have held up in the playoffs — or that it always seemed rather unlikely he'd ever get the chance on the Sixers to prove me wrong.
7. BBall Paul
I do sorrrrrrta hate that he let me and the team down in the Knicks series and gave the Sixers an excuse to deem him expendable. But he's still my beautiful perfect BBall and really any ultimate failings on his part were probably Nick Nurse's fault for just not believing in him enough.
6. Isaiah Joe
Similarly, it would've been nice if Isaiah Joe could've hit just a few more threes during his spot regular-season Sixers minutes in his first two seasons, but Daryl unceremoniously cutting him when we all knew it was gonna come back to haunt us sorta guaranteed his immortality via Sixers martyrdom. In our memories now, he was basically prime Paul George with much better shooting range.
5. K.J. McDaniels
At this point, I have precious few specific recollections of K.J.'s actual playing career. My primary memory of his Sixers tenure is him participating in the dunk contest as a rookie — which he didn't even do, I just assumed he would and got pre-emptively outraged about him losing unfairly. Still, I remember being totally enamored with him, to the point where I loved the couple things he did well (dunking, weak-side shot-blocking, maybe he hit a couple corner threes?) and just assumed he would get better at all the other stuff. And since I basically never saw him again in the NBA after he turned down the Hinkie Special contract extension in the offseason — except for that video he filmed for Spike calling the Rights to Ricky Sanchez the Only Sixers Podcast — that's still how I feel a decade later.
4. Dario Saric
It felt like 15 minutes after the first time I wondered to myself "Hmmm... what exactly are we hoping Dario Saric is ultimately gonna be in this league, really?" he was traded to Minnesota for Jimmy Butler. Unlike Robert Covington, who he was dealt alongside, Dario didn't have particularly glaring flaws — but also unlike RoCo, he didn't have those one or two things he was obviously elite at, that would obviously make him a strong fit in any good five-man lineup. In that sense, he was really traded at the perfect time, right before we could start to have those long-term questions about a player who otherwise brought us nothing but joy with his scrappiness, his clutchness, his susceptibility to cartoonish overtanning and of course, his clumpy-flumping.
3. Shake Milton
Every time he gets cut loose from a new team — as he was on the Lakers over the weekend — I hope that it ends with Shake coming home to Philly. There will simply never be a better director of operations for the Hospital Sixers; seemingly any time injuries pressed him into lead-guard duty, he turned into Damian Lillard with size and strength. I know that there were stretches in there of the Sixers turning to him for some actual back-court consistency and him ultimately letting them down, but I don't really remember those; I just remember the "whoa where did that come from?" scoring outbursts where it felt he could do no wrong. I'll always believe that's who Shake really is, everything else was just temporary circumstantial underperformance.
2. Nicolas Batum
What a dream season The Boy From La France had as a one-and-done role player: He came over as an unexpected bonus of an addition-by-subtraction trade, he filled a very specific role nobody else on the team had ever filled, he did everything he did well and didn't try to do anything else, he had one signature game that absolutely saved the team's lardons at the outset of the playoffs and then he left. I guess you could have negative feelings about the leaving part — especially him going back to L.A., the team that traded him in the first place — but most of us felt so lucky to unexpectedly have Nic the one season that it felt kinda greedy to ask for more from him anyway.
1. Tyrese Maxey
OK so I lied when I said (or at least misled when I heavily implied) that the Sixers don't have a Kyle Schwarber: They do, and it's Tyrese, obviously. I don't know why it didn't occur to me until I was starting to put this article together; I guess last season had such an overriding stench to it that it felt like no player still on the team could have escaped it without still stinking at least a little. And Tyrese certainly didn't have his best year last season, but I can't say I have a particularly strong memory of why he fell flat.
Yeah, if I press my memory hard enough I can pull up a few files of cold shooting stretches, some slight pissiness with the refs, a couple egregious no-shows towards the end — but even now, those memories are buried under more-easily-accessed recollections of the four-game win streak he led the team on when it seemed like things were turning around and he seemed well on his way to deserving a second straight All-Star appearance. Give it another season or two and those rare bad memories will be as repressed as thoughts of Tyler, the Creator's disappointing third album, and we'll just remember Tyrese as the pure source of joy and light and three-pointers that give Ben Stiller and Tracy Morgan the all-time gassiest of gas faces. Like with Schwarber, the flashbulb moments shine the brightest, and whatever else happens in between ultimately fades from the highlight montages our heads conjure when we think of them.
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.