Here is a ranking of the top five worst trades made in the long history of the Philadelphia 76ers.
The Philadelphia 76ers are a franchise of history, tradition, and success, but they also have made some awful transactions in their history.
Who could forget just deciding to trade one of the best big men the game has ever seen in Wilt Chamberlain? Or the awful Charles Barkley deal? We’re going to rank those plus a few others based on the loss the Sixers had in these deals as well as the impact the outgoing players made in their new homes.
These five deals are all bad, you can decide what’s the absolute worst, but the one thing that can be universally agreed upon is that the Sixers lost out on all of these trades.
On April 29, 2012, Andrew Bynum staged a block party in the Lakers’ playoff opener versus the Denver Nuggets.
Once the 2011 NBA lockout ended in late November, the Los Angeles Lakers looked to reload, but it turned into a disaster.
They were on the verge of landing Chris Paul, but then-commissioner David Stern, in the capacity as acting owner of Paul’s team, the New Orleans Hornets, vetoed the trade.
Lamar Odom would’ve been sent to the Big Easy in that deal, and once he found out, he was inconsolable, and thus the Lakers sent him to the Dallas Mavericks for the NBA equivalent of 20 cents to the dollar.
L.A. also had a new head coach, Mike Brown, who was known as a defensive guru but was inept when it came to coaching offense.
As a result, the Lakers were a good team in 2012, but they were no longer the juggernaut they had been in the previous four seasons.
But heading into the playoffs, they still felt they had a puncher’s chance at yet another championship, and Andrew Bynum would make a statement in their postseason opener versus the Denver Nuggets.
He tallied 10 points, 13 rebounds and 10 blocked shots in L.A.’s 103-88 win.
Those 10 blocks tied an NBA playoff record and seemed to be the cherry on top of his best season, which saw him get selected to the NBA All-Star game.
The Lakers took a 3-1 series lead over Denver, but they would need the full seven games to eliminate them. They then got waxed by the young and dangerous Oklahoma City Thunder in five games in the next round.
On Nov. 2, 2005, Los Angeles Lakers center Andrew Bynum became the youngest player ever to appear in a regular-season game.
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On Nov. 2, 2005, Los Angeles Lakers center Andrew Bynum became the youngest player ever to appear in a regular-season game at 18 years, six days, breaking Jermaine O’Neal’s 10-year old record by 46 days.
The record set by Bynum still stands today and was aided in large part because the eventual two-time NBA champion entered the NBA draft straight out of high school. His draft class was the last in which high school players were eligible to enter the NBA draft.
Bynum logged just five minutes during his NBA debut, recording two rebounds and two blocks while he missed both of his field-goal attempts in a win over the Denver Nuggets. He would go on to make 46 appearances that season, averaging 1.6 points and 1.7 rebounds per game.
Since he entered the NBA straight out of high school, Bynum was the second-youngest player during his second season. He became a full-time starter that season and would go onto have a strong six-year run after that point, earning All-Star and All-NBA Second Team honors in 2012.
Bynum last played during the 2013-14 season with the Indiana Pacers.
In the offseason of 2012, the Philadelphia 76ers traded their pick in order to acquire Andrew Bynum.
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The Philadelphia 76ers had just finished up a 2011-12 season that brought some hope for the team. As an 8 seed, they upset the Chicago Bulls in Round 1- albeit an injured Bulls team -and they had then pushed the Boston Celtics to Game 7 of the conference semifinals.
Those performances led the front office to believe that they were on the verge of contendning. So, they pulled the trigger on a bold move late in the summer by acquiring All-Star big man Andrew Bynum from the Los Angeles Lakers in a major 4-team deal.
In the 2012 NBA Draft, the Sixers held the 15th pick and they selected versatile wing player Moe Harkless out of St. John’s. He was then sent to the Orlando Magic in the deal that brought Bynum to Philadelphia and in the process, the Sixers also sent out Andre Iguodala to the Denver Nuggets as well as Nikola Vucevic to Orlando. The idea was that Bynum and Jrue Holiday could lead the Sixers to the next level.
Instead, Bynum did not play a single game for the franchise as he suffered an injury in a bowling alley that kept him out for the entirety of the season and the team went from promising to back in the lottery and it then triggered a massive rebuild. Meanwhile, Iguodala has since gone on to win a Finals MVP in his career and Vucevic has gone on to become an All-Star for the Magic.
After the season, he signed with the Cleveland Cavaliers only to play 24 games before being traded to the Chicago Bulls, waived, and then playing two games for the Indiana Pacers. That ended his basketball career after a very promising start to it with the Lakers.
They weren’t together very long, but the duo of Carmelo Anthony and Allen Iverson were among the highest-scoring of All-Time.
While the upcoming Michael Jordan documentary and the Chicago Bulls of the 1990s are on the minds of most sports fans, the hiatus has given sports fans and sports media more time to reminisce on teams that we loved but may have forgotten. And LeBron James’ son, Bronny James Jr., gave a shout out to one of those teams forgotten to the NBA past on Thursday.
Bronny gave a shout out to his Dad’s buddy Carmelo Anthony and Allen Iverson, who were teammates together on the Denver Nuggets in the late 2000s for the better part of two seasons. During their lone full season together in Denver, Iverson averaged over 26.4 points per game while Anthony averaged 25 points per game. They were one of the highest-scoring duos of the last 20 years. The fine folks at SLAM gave them a shoutout on Instagram, which was reposted by Bronny.
Unfortunately for the Nuggets, their cult status as a high-scoring duo was the high water mark for the Anthony-Iverson duo. They were swept in the first round of the 2008 NBA playoffs by Kobe Bryant, Pau Gasol, and the Los Angeles Lakers, who would eventually win the Western Conference championship that season. Early in the next season, they would trade Iverson to the Detroit Pistons for Chauncey Billups and eventually meet the Lakers in the 2009 playoffs, but in the Western Conference Finals.
We are now ranking the top five worst trades the Philadelphia 76ers ever made.
The Philadelphia 76ers are a franchise of history, tradition, and success–though there hasn’t been much success over the past two decades–but they also have made some awful transactions in their history.
Who could forget just deciding to trade one of the best big men the game has ever seen in Wilt Chamberlain? Or the awful Charles Barkley deal? We’re going to rank those plus a few others in order of the amount of awfulness.
These five deals are all bad, you can decide what’s the absolute worst, but the one thing that can be universally agreed is that the Sixers should not have agreed to any of these trades.
