I wouldn’t necessarily say I’ve spent the summer coming to terms with the LeBron James-Jaylen Brown era in Philadelphia. In truth I haven’t really thought about it all that much, at least not compared to how much I’ve thought about the Phillies’ rotation reliability shuffle, the generational implications of Olivia Rodrigo and Ella Langley, and my own creeping mortality. It’s not like the same thoughts of LeBron’s smiling-through-it-all face in a Sixers uniform that left me somewhat disquieted in July are giving me the warm fuzzies in September.
But I guess I’m most of the way to acceptance, if nothing else. I’ve had enough conversations with friends, family and colleagues incredulous that I’m not just 100% over-the-moon about everything that I’m bored with my own explanations of why. It’s going to be interesting, it’s going to be fun, and it’s going to be different. If it’s not going to be truly emotionally and narratively satisfying, in the way that we’ve suffered for the past 15 years in the hopes that the end of the story would ultimately end up being, well… I guess I have come to terms with the fact that at this point, it wasn’t going to end like that anyway.
And that’s why I have spent the summer being more and more grateful that before everything changed forever with this team, we at least got that fucking Boston series.
I haven’t revisited the series yet in full the way Mike and Spike have the past few episodes — I still need at least a couple more Sixers Augusts, maybe even one or two in 2027, before I’m ready to dive back in that deep. But I don’t really need to, or even much want to yet. I like keeping it sorta foggy in the remembered haze through which we all initially watched it back in May, not expecting anything remotely like what was happening, not understanding how or why it was unfolding like it was, not particularly believing any of it was real until it was almost over, and then not totally believing it even then. I like kinda forgetting about it sometimes, and then remembering: Yes, Tony Wroten, the Philadelphia 76ers really did come back from a 3-1 deficit to beat the Boston Celtics in the NBA playoffs.
And I even like how everything that happened immediately after served to make an already gauzy memory even cobwebbier. It’s tough to remember the specifics of the greatest comeback in modern Sixers history when directly following it, they got steamrolled 4-0 by the Knicks on their very loud way to their very loud championships, and then the Sixers responded by trading for their historic rival’s longest-tenured player and then signing the greatest player of the entire 21st century for the veteran minimum. The Celtics series was only four and a half months ago, but now that it’s been buried by all this other shit, it feels like at least a presidential term in the rearview.
But the farther we get from it, the more I’m convinced it was a moment we absolutely had to have. Whether or not The Process is officially over, everything about the Sixers — from the team itself to its media coverage and particularly to its fanbase – is about to shift to something essentially unrecognizable from where it was during the Hinkie years. It’s about to be something totally new, with a whole bunch of totally new people. And that’s fine; that’s even exciting (and probably overdue) in a lot of ways. But it also means that the thing we had, the thing we shared for the last 13 years, is largely done with. It means the book’s closed on all that now.
Which is why I’m so grateful we got the final chapter we did. In terms of the larger basketball world, the Sixers-Celtics’ 2026 series will probably be mostly forgotten — it was just a first-round series, after all, with the winner eliminated immediately after, and the whole thing wildly overshadowed by one of the most attention-hogging championship runs in all of modern American sports. But for those of us who’ve been around since the beginning, it was a truly great memory that was truly ours, with Joel as the conquering hero and Tyrese as the Prince Who Was Promised and even Our Once and Always Dark Lord Sam Hinkie as the post-series victory-lapper. The more it’s memory-holed by everyone else, including by the folks just showing up to the party, the more it will settle permanently into our hearts and souls, as the had-to-be-there moment of true sports greatness that now allows us to be able to move on to whatever’s next.
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And imagine if we didn’t get it? Imagine if the Celtics finished us in five, as in 99 out of 100 available universes they most likely do, and then we somehow still get Jaylen Brown and LeBron James in the offseason. Then these guys aren’t just our potential saviors, they’re also basically our bail bondsmen, yanking us out of total irrelevancy. Then Joel Embiid isn’t just the guy who’s never led the Sixers to the championship, he’s the guy who’s never even led the team to a convincing Sixers playoff series win. Then the rest of us really did spend 13 years waiting around for a deus ex machina that really had nothing to do with anything, with zero postseason achievements worth remembering in the years between. It’s fucking depressing to think about.
Of course, it’s also all sort of moot, because not only did that Celtics series actually happen — we’re pretty sure — but it was probably a large part of the reason that the Jaylen Brown trade and the LeBron James signing unfolded after. So not only did that series give us our truly happiest memory — by some definitions, maybe our only truly happy memory — of the Process Sixers era, it also gets a little bit of the credit for whatever positive (or negative) things happen from here. It’s guaranteed to always be a crucial, inextricable part of our timeline. It’ll get a scene in the movie. It has to.
I don’t need to spend the last days of this summer thinking about the Sixers-Celtics series, because I’ll think of it plenty over the course of next season. When LeBron posts a triple-double to beat the Knicks in front of an arena full of screaming Sixers fans wearing No. 23 jerseys and the ESPN first-takers spend the next day talking about him finally bringing a winning culture to Philadelphia, the somewhat mixed feelings all of it invariably inspires in me will ultimately lead me back to the true warm fuzzies of Sixers-Celtics — and how that series not only validated Process Trusters’ pasts, but allowed us to have a path to a real future. And then I’ll be the one smiling through it all, still in disbelief that this is my 40-year-old life.
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.