What Can the Andrew Bynum Era Teach Us About This Sixers Season?
AU on trying to learn from history that he is nonetheless almost certainly doomed to repeat.
It really sucks to not know going into a season if you're more likely to be a contending team or a playoff-fringes-at-best squad. When all your hopes hinge on the health of one guy who seems far more likely to play 0 games than 70, with no clear indication he'll be healthy to start the season but no one likely to ever come out and definitively tell you that he won't be. When that guy is the exact player your team needs to make the rest of the roster make sense, when his presence at full strength could single-handedly transform your team from Young and Rebuilding to Ready to Fucking Go. When you've invested such a significant percentage of your resources, money and hopes in the guy to be the fulcrum of it all but know chances are pretty good the whole thing tips over without him. It's a sorry damn situation for sure.
All that said, it's one we've been in before. And maybe we should learn our lessons from that time and approach this season with our expectations adjusted accordingly.
Andrew Bynum was not Joel Embiid, of course, and the 2011-12 Sixers were not the Process era Sixers. Well, maybe we can't even say the latter part that confidently, because the '11-'12 squad did make it exactly as far in the playoffs as the Embiid-led Sixers have: Game Seven of the second round. (And they got a lot less significantly humiliated by the Celtics than we did in 2023.) And hell, maybe we can't really even say the first part either, since Andrew Bynum is technically a two-time NBA champion and Joel... yeah, not. But forgetting the playoffs for a second, in the regular season, Joel Embiid has done countless things on the NBA court beyond what Andrew Bynum could ever reasonably hope to achieve (though no doubt he fantasized about them while pissing off Phil Jackson in Lakers shootarounds). Jo's an MVP and two-time runner-up; Bynum was a one-time All-Star who as far as I can tell has never even gotten a single MVP vote.
Still, that one All-Star season for Bynum did come in 2012, where he averaged 19 and 12 on 56% shooting as a 24-year-old — right before he was traded to the Sixers in a four-team deal that ultimately netted the Lakers Dwight Howard. Acquiring an All-Star big man barely on the verge of his prime was such a dream-come-true for the early-2010s Sixers that we didn't bother spending a lot of time wondering why the Lakers were totally cool letting him go, or why the Orlando Magic (who traded Dwight) didn't seem to have much interest in getting him back. Of course, it turned out pretty quickly that Bynum's knees were arthritic, prone to bone bruises and wildly vulnerable to any attempts to pick up a 7-10 split.
But we held out hope. He'll be back by Thanksgiving. He'll be back by Christmas. He'll be back by the New Year. He'll be back by the All-Star break. He'll be back by [Googles what holidays there are in March.] Uhhhh we'll shut him down for the year just as a precaution then he'll re-sign and he'll be back for the start of next season? We never totally let go, never really faced the facts. As the team fought their way honorably through the first couple months of the season, staying competitive and barely losing a lot of games that they might've very well won with a skilled seven footer plugging their hole in the middle, we continued to wait for him to make them whole. The team seemed to give up the fight before we did, going 2-8 to end 2012 and then 2-6 to start 2013, by which point the season was already basically over — although we still wrung everything we could out of the Damien Wilkinses and Royal Iveys on the bench in the vain hopes of winning 38 games instead of 34.
That Bynum-less team has its similarities with this year's (potentially) Embiid-less squad, by the way. It was another young-ish roster led by a promising backcourt with one overachieving All-star caliber lead guard (Holiday/Maxey) and one versatile high draft pick (Turner/Edgecombe), with a scoring dynamo coming off the bench behind them (Sweet Lou/Grimes, hopefully). That squad didn't really have a Paul George — neither might this one, I suppose — but it did have Elton Brand before the team amnesty'd him to go sign Nick Young and Kwame Brown. And that team also had Doug Collins — who, after a couple months of having to take questions he doesn't have anything close to the answers to, Nick Nurse might to start resemble more and more closely, until he starts giving his own press conferences about how he used to run through his sneakers as an NBA player (file photo not found).
I imagine we'll spend the first couple months of this season losing a lot of games that we likely would've won with Joel. And we'll probably sigh and look for him on the bench and think to ourselves, "OK, well, maybe still..." But as someone who still feels the wounds of 2012-13 fairly deeply, I hope I'm able to avoid that this time. I can live with this being another lottery season — I'm done assuming they'll be anything else without Joel — but I can't live with it being another lottery season I spend expecting to magically turn into a contending season at any moment. Last season was close enough to that anyway; I'd much rather just spend this one fixating on random Jared McCain streaks and forecasting unlikely Adem Bona breakouts and cackling at the Celtics finally sucking. That seems like a pretty OK way to spend seven months all told.
And if Joel does show — like actual Joel? I mean that's cool too. We'll certainly take as much as he's able and willing to give. Play enough at decent-to-full health this year and maybe I'll allow myself to have expectations for him again next year. For this year, though, when I visualize Joel, it's always with one foot already in Wynnewood Lanes. Anything else, and we deserve all the Damien Wilkinses we get.
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.