The Sixers Went All-In: LeBron, Jaylen Brown and the End of the Process

PHILADELPHIA — There is a moment, early in every superteam experiment, when the whole thing still looks perfect. Nobody has missed a rotation yet. Nobody has sulked over touches. The group chat is still fun. The Philadelphia 76ers are living inside that moment right now, and they intend to stay there as long as possible.

What general manager Mike Gansey pulled off this summer would have sounded like a group-chat fantasy in June. First, the Sixers pried Jaylen Brown out of Boston — sending Paul George and draft capital to a division rival in a trade so brazen and so quiet that, as executive vice president Jameer Nelson told CNN Sports, “if it had leaked, I’m not sure it happens.” Then, with the roster suddenly attractive enough to matter, Philadelphia won the LeBron James sweepstakes, signing the 41-year-old icon to a two-year, $8 million deal on July 27. Just like that, a 45-win team that got swept by the Knicks in the conference semifinals became the most fascinating roster in basketball.

The projected starting five tells you everything about the ambition: Tyrese Maxey and VJ Edgecombe in the backcourt, Brown and James on the wings, Joel Embiid at center. Between them, 36 All-Star appearances and five MVP awards. Everyone but the 21-year-old Edgecombe has been a career 20-point scorer. USA Today’s season preview projects 62 wins and calls it the best starting lineup in the Eastern Conference, top to bottom. BetMGM has the Sixers at +850 to win it all.

How the recruitment actually happened

The Brown trade started the ball rolling, but Tyrese Maxey may have sealed the deal. The 25-year-old guard and James became workout partners years ago — 6 a.m. sessions, summer after summer — and when James decided not to return to the Lakers, Maxey was one of the first calls he took. James explained it on his “Mind The Game” podcast with Steve Nash: “First of all, my relationship with Tyrese Maxey goes beyond the court… I just love everything about Tyrese Maxey, man. Like, every day, you get the same person. That is very rare in sports and, obviously, super rare in life.”

“He was one of the first people that was on my line. Calling me, like, ‘Yo, what’re we doing? Yo! What’s up, OG!? What’s up, old head!? Come on down here, man! We could use you down here!’” James said he usually doesn’t even pick up those calls during free agency. For Maxey, he picked up.

Media day felt like a coronation. The event was near standing-room only — one team official lamented that a Phoebe Bridgers concert kept them from moving it to the arena — and James set the tone himself at media day, telling reporters: “I didn’t leave my family to lose in the second round.” The best detail came from VJ Edgecombe, who told CNN Sports he started a new team text chain and then realized the problem: “But I don’t have LeBron’s number. And even I did, I wasn’t adding him to it. I made Tyrese do that.”

The depth is real too

The stars got the headlines, but the margins got better as well. Dean Wade signed for four years and $39 million and Anfernee Simons for two years and $12.2 million — Bleacher Report called both among the best mid-tier contracts any team signed. Kentavious Caldwell-Pope brings championship experience to the second unit, and rookies Labaron Philon Jr. and Ariel Hukporti add young legs. The rotation runs ten deep: Wade, Simons, Caldwell-Pope, Philon, Adem Bona, Hukporti, Dominick Barlow and Justin Edwards behind the starters.

That depth matters because the top of the roster has real mileage. Embiid, the former MVP and still the franchise’s best player when upright, has played just 96 of a possible 246 games over the last three seasons — 39 percent. James turns 42 in December. Brown is 29 and in his prime, Maxey 25 and ascending, but the whole construction leans on two stars whose bodies have filed complaints. Yahoo! Sports, ranking Philadelphia fourth in its preseason power poll, put it bluntly: if Embiid can’t stay on the floor, the season gets weird fast — and a new front office with championship expectations doesn’t do patience.

The fit questions nobody can answer in October

Superteams live or die on sacrifice, and this one has five players accustomed to being the answer. Brown spent years as the 1B in Boston next to Jayson Tatum; now he’s arguably the third option on his own team. James has spent two decades as the sun in every offensive solar system he’s entered. Maxey is 25, coming off the best season of his career, and suddenly sharing a backcourt with two all-time greats. There are only so many shots, only so many pick-and-rolls, only so many fourth-quarter isolations.

Head coach Nick Nurse, entering his fourth season, has never had a talent surplus like this — or a locker room with this many gravitational pulls. The early returns are encouraging: James debuted at the Blue x White scrimmage Saturday in front of nearly 10,000 fans (see our preseason weekend roundup), throwing lobs to Maxey and looking entirely comfortable as a playmaking forward rather than the entire offense. But October optimism is free. The test comes in January, on the second night of a back-to-back, when someone finishes with nine shots.

Even Jayson Tatum, who lost his running mate of nine years to a division rival, couldn’t help but admit the league is better for it. Appearing on The Dan Patrick Show while rehabbing the Achilles tear that cost him most of last season, Tatum said: “I was just kinda excited for the NBA. I think the buzz and the excitement level around this season is higher than in recent years. The NBA is going to be super competitive this year.” That’s the unquestioned face of the Celtics telling you the East runs through Philadelphia now.

What success looks like

The bar is not the conference finals. The bar is a parade. Philadelphia has not won a championship since 1983 — 43 years — and has not been past the second round since Allen Iverson’s Finals run in 2001. The Process produced MVPs and memes and zero conference finals appearances. Gansey, Nelson and HBSE president of sports Bob Myers were brought in to end the cleverness and start the winning.

Monday night offers the first real glimpse: the Sixers visit the Knicks in preseason action, a preview of the Oct. 20 regular-season opener between the same teams. New York swept Philadelphia in last spring’s semifinals. The Knicks are the defending champions. If the Sixers are who they think they are, that building is where they’ll have to prove it — first in October, then again when it counts.

For now, the group chat is still fun. The trick is keeping it that way until June.

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