Working My Way Through the LeBron Signing (Pt. 1 of 474)
AU is gonna need some time with this one.
Let me be the 500,000th person now to say: I never thought this day would actually come. I wrote some bullshit last Tuesday about LeBron James taking till January to sign with a team because I thought it would be funny and why not. I didn’t think that was a terribly likely outcome, but I thought it was much more likely than the news dropping 72 hours later that LeBron would be signing to the Philadelphia 76ers — our Philadelphia 76ers, the same franchise that did all that crazy nonsense Mike talked about on Friday’s podcast, in roughly the same era — for two years and $8 million. “I wonder what these words will sound like coming out of my mouth,” I thought to myself as I walked into the other room of my apartment to tell my appropriately incredulous girlfriend Lisa about the news on Friday morning. They didn’t sound right, I’ll tell you that much.
For many years, Sixers fans have debated whether or not we are still in the Process Era, whether The Process ended with Sam Hinkie’s ousting or whether The Process is still ongoing as long as Joel Embiid is on the team. What the signing of LeBron makes clear to me — LeBron James, that is, signed by the Philadelphia 76ers — is that we are done with the Process (Noun) era and have now moved into the Process (Verb) era. The Process is no longer something that is happening to us, but something that we are going to have to be doing ourselves, continuously, all the time, possibly forever. It might take that long to accept, believe and truly understand that LeBron James is on this team, chose to be on this team, chose being on this team over being on literally any of the other teams. There aren’t enough Augusts in the world for us to wrap our heads around that. Not for me anyway.
It’s been 48 hours and two grafs now, so at this point I guess I should probably say for the record: I didn’t want this. It’s how I started my last article, so not like I’ve been particularly coy about it, but I don’t expect anyone to remember that or really anything else that happened before Friday morning. But yeah, despite the LeBron-to-Philly mania of the last couple days, despite Jason and Mike both thinking a couple messages from them had a chance to snap me out of an existential quandary nearly 20 years in the making, this is still something I’m having a pretty tough time with. Considering the reception Spike is currently getting for his own skepticism, I expect this will not be received warmly by the Ricky faithful. There’ll probably be at least one r/RightsToRickySanchez thread trying to get me fired. It’s fair. I considered skipping writing about the topic altogether, not wanting to harsh anyone’s good time or make myself any kind of online main character. But ducking this forever would be cowardly, even for me. So I waited two days, and now here I am. I didn’t want LeBron James to sign with the Sixers.
Why not? It barely even feels worth writing about, to be honest. Many years ago, when I was really getting back into basketball in the mid-late ‘00s after not watching for a long time, I found some stuff he did on and off the court annoying or unrelatable, and I started rooting against him. At the time, it was fun for me. It gave me a reason to care more about various games and playoff series that the Sixers weren’t involved in (and some that they were). It made me a more passionate, more invested NBA fan. I wrote about it a lot. It had nothing to do with him as a player or as a person; he was easily the best player I’d ever watched (not really remembering Jordan’s heyday) and he seemed like a generally OK human being. But he wasn’t my guy. I would have rather had the other guy win. That’s dumb, maybe, but it’s also sports. Sports are dumb. We take interests that are largely arbitrary over events that are basically without objective consequence and build emotions and personal stakes around them that make their outcomes feel something like life or death. That’s the whole thing.
Over the years I’ve become a little less irritated with LeBron, mostly because the entire league doesn’t quite revolve around him like it used to, and because it’s hard not to get at least a tiny bit sentimental about star players when they get closer to the end of things than to the beginning. I have to appreciate that he’s (still!) even older than I am, not many players I can say that about these days. I may have even rooted for him in a couple games of that Lakers-Rockets series last year, just because he felt like a semi-legitimate underdog in a way I finally found somewhat charming. I’m also just not as life-or-death about the larger NBA in general these days; I feel things a lot less explosively than I did when I was going through my version of NBA fandom puberty 15-20 years ago. There are plenty of teams LeBron could have signed with this offseason where I probably would’ve ended up wishing him well-ish.
And even now, I can objectively acknowledge that him coming to the Sixers is a cool and certainly a hilarious thing. It’s a massive get for the city of Philadelphia to now be the center of the NBA universe, and a huge get for Sixers fans to have one offseason where the buzz around the team may actually, finally be nearly as loud as it is for the Birds. Local indie rock paragons reporting Sixers-related announcements being made over the loudspeaker at ACME? I love that shit. It’s fantastic. And we’re gonna get a whole offseason of this, of Philadelphia at its absolute Philadelphia-est, tilting the entire axis of the NBA world in the meantime. Brian Windhorst is probably gonna be unleashing his cheesesteak power rankings within a couple months. It’s gonna be garish and stupid and hysterical and absolutely beautiful. As dozens of folks on my timeline the last couple days have pointed out, it’s the kind of shit you wish Dan McQuade was around for, which is just about the biggest compliment you can give a Philly sports happening.
For me? It’s definitely not the end of the world, or of my Sixers fandom, but it’s a little bit of a bummer, yeah. I don’t really sports-hate LeBron the same way anymore, but I just never wanted his thing to be our thing. I never felt like our thing needed him. Our thing was already epic enough, with enough massive personalities and totemic league figures and dramatic swings and occasionally traumatizing results. I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t have changed anything about it over the last decade, but I at least always felt good that win or lose or total collapse, it was entirely ours. As many other players and coaches and execs passed through over the years, from James Harden to J.J. Redick to Doc Rivers to Ben Simmons to the Colangelos, at the end of the day, The Process was first and foremost the story of Sam Hinkie, and of Joel Embiid, and of us, all of us who’d been there since the Andrew Bynum trade, if not far earlier. But the story with LeBron is always LeBron — it has been for the last 23 years, anyway, so I assume it probably will be here too. He’s the first guy we’ve had who’s bigger than The Process. It hurts me a little to have to give that up.
Don’t worry, I can hear you all at home — those of you who haven’t already closed this out to start typing angrily, anyway — Yeah, but what about winning? You remember WINNING? Isn’t that supposed to be what it’s actually about? Don’t you want that to be included in the Sixers’ story somewhere? Sure. I like winning. Winning feels good; better than losing, I’d tend to agree. And our chances at winning are undoubtedly better with LeBron on the court than with those minutes going to Justin Edwards or Johnni Broome. I don’t know if it makes us title or even conference favorites, exactly; that’s not a debate for this week regardless. But being good at basketball and helping his team be good at basketball is a field in which LeBron has done quite extensive work over the past 23 years. I do not for a second doubt his ability to do so here.
That said, there’s still context to all of this, right? There’s a reason why the Sixers’ first-round series win against Boston last season and their first-round series win against the Nets three years earlier didn’t feel the same, even though they ultimately brought us equally close to actually winning a championship? There’s a reason why we look back fondly at some Sixers regular-season campaigns where they won under 20 games and shudder at the memory of some where they won 50-plus? There’s a reason why even if some of us know in our heads it might be the best thing long-term for the team to get off Joel Embiid’s contract, we still believe in our hearts that we should do whatever it takes to ride it out with him until the very very end? Not all wins, even the biggest wins, are created equal. If our long-overdue winning comes primarily as the closing chapter of the LeBron James story... it’s just not gonna be the same thing.
But look: I’m not going to insist I know how I’m going to feel if and when we do start winning with LeBron. Maybe winning with him feels good enough that the rest of it just sorta disintegrates into the ether for me. I expect that after writing this, if I express positive feelings about the LeBron-led Sixers in the months to come, I’ll get a flood of comments from folks about how I was wrong and they were right and told you so. But I’m not saying anything about what this will be. It could be great, both on the court and for me personally. I hope it will be.
And there are parts of it that are already making me gooey inside to think about. LeBron grabbing a rebound in traffic and then outletting to a streaking VJ for a massive thunderdunk. Joel drawing a double in the post and then throwing some showy, Jokic-ish high-low pass over his shoulder to LeBron at the basket for an easy two. LeBron feeding Maxey in the two-man game for an open movement three and then tousling his hair as Maxey’s smile stretches from Broad Street to Sacramento and the roof blows off the not-Wells Fargo Center and Kate and Alaa strangle each other out of excitement. There’ll probably be some not-so-giddy moments too, hurt egos and uncomfortable compromises and losses that really feel like they should have been wins. But there will be moments of absolute basketball nirvana to be had, no doubt, for us and for the guys on the court who’ve suffered the most for us. I promise I am not so hard-hearted as to not get joy out of the prospect.
What’s more, the part of me that is having the easiest time coming to terms with this is the part of me that has already accepted that the way I did want this story to end — with Joel Embiid unequivocally leading the Sixers to a championship — was not going to happen. We won one playoff series last year and it seemed to take absolutely every last drop of energy, character and determination that Joel and the rest of the team had to do it; the idea of them being able to do that and then do it again three more times during the same postseason felt far-fetched at a minimum. Jaylen Brown would’ve helped, but who knows how much; I certainly hadn’t penciled the Sixers in even as Eastern Conference Finalists at any point. So it stings a little less to close the book on that possibility knowing it was already about 96% shut anyway.
Maybe this actually sounds like me coming around to the signing, like Mike and Jason and everyone else are winning me over already. If so, that’s fine. There’s a reason this article is titled “Working My Way Through the LeBron Signing” and not “Condemning the LeBron Signing From Beyond the Grave.” I’m still figuring out my own feelings here, and it’s going to take a real long time for me to get through the whole thing; maybe longer than LeBron even has left in his NBA career. It’s obviously a no-brainer move for the Sixers and a humongous win for all of Philadelphia sports, nobody could credibly argue otherwise. It’s just not something I can drop all my emotional baggage over and be fucking pumped about right away.
My Nets fan co-worker told me on Friday, “If you can’t get excited about the greatest player in the sport’s history playing for your team in any stage of his career, I don’t know what to tell you.” I told him I wasn’t asking for him or anyone else to tell me anything. I’m not looking for sympathy or commiseration. I’m not looking to be convinced or to convince anyone about anything LeBron-related. I’m just trying to wrap my arms around the craziest, wackiest, most emotionally confusing thing that has ever happened to my team or to me as a sports fan and figure out what the hell it means for them and for me — mostly for me — moving forward. For nearly 20 years I rooted against LeBron James; now his (sports) success and my (sports) happiness are inextricably entwined. I’ll figure it out, but it’s going to take an adjustment a whole lot bigger than I can make in 48 hours or 48 days or maybe 48 months. If you can’t allow me that, I guess I don’t know what to tell you either.
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.