PHILADELPHIA \u2014 On Oct. 28, 2003, the Philadelphia 76ers opened their regular season at home \u2014 the arena was called the Wachovia Center then \u2014 with an 89-74 victory over the Miami Heat. It was the first game of Randy Ayers\u2019 head coaching career, a career that would last just 52 games before he was fired. The Sixers\u2019 starting lineup that night would make for a trivia question that would stump even the most obsessive hoops historian. Can you name the five? Don\u2019t bother trying. They were Allen Iverson, Eric Snow, Derrick Coleman, Kenny Thomas and John Salmons. It was, to put it mildly, a long time ago.<\/p>\n
The next night, LeBron James played his first game in the NBA.<\/p>\n
It is not enough to say that James has been with us ever since, for more than 22 years. It is not enough, now that the 76ers are reportedly one of the few franchises for whom James might choose to play this season, to say that he would be a nice, snug fit with Tyrese Maxey, Jaylen Brown, VJ Edgecombe and Joel Embiid (when Embiid is healthy enough to suit up). For much of those two decades-plus, he has been the dominant figure in professional basketball and, at times, in all of sports. If your primary thought about a James-Sixers union is, He\u2019d be the perfect power forward for this team, you\u2019re shrinking him to a ridiculous size.<\/p>\n
Immediately upon his arrival, he would be the biggest sports star in this city, beyond any of his teammates, beyond anyone on the Eagles or Phillies. A talk-radio debate about Jalen Hurts would be a literary salon next to the daily LeBron discourse.<\/p>\n
Steph Curry changed the way basketball was played and the way boys and girls around the world wanted to play it, and among the fraternity of NBA players themselves, Kobe Bryant was more respected and feared, for his preparation and cutthroat competitiveness, than James. But James has been greater longer than any other player in the sport (with the possible exception of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, if you count his Lew Alcindor\/UCLA years).<\/p>\n
Set aside, if possible, the four NBA championships and the 10 Finals appearances and the league\u2019s career scoring record and the three Olympic gold medals and the other records he has set. His choreographed announcement in 2010 that he was leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami Heat was the 21st century\u2019s answer to the revelation that Kristin Shepard had pumped two bullets into J.R. Ewing\u2019s belly. It changed everything about the power that elite players held over their respective teams because it showed elite players that they held power over their respective teams. Pro sports hasn\u2019t been the same.<\/p>\n
Finding an athlete comparable to James in popularity and influence is difficult enough, let alone one who arrived in Philadelphia during the middle stage or latter half of his career, after he had established his galactic superstardom. Wilt Chamberlain already had been a high school phenom here when the Warriors made him a territorial pick in the 1959 NBA draft. Julius Erving was the \u201cBabe Ruth of basketball\u201d \u2014 at least, that\u2019s how Sixers general manager Pat Williams described him in trying to persuade owner Fitz Dixon to cough up the money to acquire Dr. J. But Erving had spent six years in the relative obscurity of the ABA; telling someone you had seen him play for the Virginia Squires or New York Nets, whether in person or on TV, was akin to claiming you had spotted a Sasquatch.<\/p>\n
Iverson was a pop-culture revolutionary with the Sixers for introducing hip-hop style and fashion into the mainstream; his on-court accomplishments, though, don\u2019t stack up to James\u2019. Bryce Harper was as well known as any player in Major League Baseball when he signed with the Phillies in 2019, but he didn\u2019t and still doesn\u2019t have anywhere near the global recognition and cachet that James does. We\u2019re talking an all-timer among all-timers here.<\/p>\n
None of this context and history means that James will sign with the Sixers, and none of it means that they\u2019ll win a championship for the first time since 1983 if he does. But it does provide a good counterbalance to the muted public reaction to the prospect that James could become a Sixer any day now. Yeah, he\u2019s 41. Yeah, he has his coterie of agents and handlers and podcasters and supplicants. Yeah, he could turn out to be a handful or worse, especially if he wants to be the alpha on a team of younger, talented players who believe their time is now and aren\u2019t interested in taking a backseat to anyone, even to one of the five best players ever.<\/p>\n
Cool. I\u2019ll believe LeBron will sign with the Sixers when I see it; if I had to guess, I\u2019d say he opts for a charming third go-round with the Cavaliers. But if he does come here \u2026 bring it on. Bring on the hope and expectations and the potential chaos. LeBron James in Philadelphia could be a coup, and it could be a disaster, and that volatility would be the fun and fascinating part of it. When Michael Jordan came out of retirement and joined the Wizards in 2001, just two years before James\u2019 debut, The Washington Post assigned a writer, Michael Leahy, to cover Jordan and Jordan alone \u2014 a reporter whose beat wasn\u2019t the cops or the courthouse or the \u2018burbs or the basketball team, but one man. To my editors: Sign me up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PHILADELPHIA \u2014 On Oct. 28, 2003, the Philadelphia 76ers opened their regular season at home \u2014 the arena…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":790433,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3769],"tags":[679,90720,7,6,1734,4015,678,207,3817,66,95630,1612,417],"class_list":["post-790432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia-76ers","tag-76ers","tag-americas","tag-basketball","tag-nba","tag-north-america","tag-pennsylvania","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-76ers","tag-philadelphia76ers","tag-sports","tag-sports-administration","tag-team-sports","tag-united-states"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116945804548310641","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=790432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790432\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/790433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=790432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=790432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=790432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}