Know this about championship basketball seasons: They are the ultimate group project, requiring something from just about everyone on the roster. There is no better example of that than Game Two of the Sixers-Hawks playoff series.
The Sixers, who definitely harbor title aspirations, dropped Game One and were suddenly wobbling late in the third quarter of that second game.
Then Shake Milton saved ‘em.
Of course.
Absent from the rotation in recent weeks, the third-year guard unexpectedly reemerged to pack 14 points (including four 3-pointers) into an incendiary six-minute, 15-second stretch spanning the final two periods, and what had been a taut affair became a comfortable 118-102 Philadelphia victory.
Clint Richardson, watching off and on from afar, could appreciate what happened as much as anyone. The long-retired ex-Sixer, now two months shy of his 65th birthday and living in his hometown of Seattle, doesn’t know Milton. But he does know what it’s like to rise to the occasion.
And how everyone must.
Thirty-eight years ago, in Game One of the 1983 NBA Finals, Richardson, a reserve guard, poured in 15 points — a playoff career high to that point, and a total he would exceed only once in 72 postseason appearances across his eight NBA seasons — to help propel the Sixers to victory, an eventual sweep and the near-fulfillment of Moses Malone’s fo’, fo’, fo’ prophecy.
So yeah, he has some perspective on Shake.
“He, like me, is a very, very good insurance policy,” Richardson said over the phone Sunday night. “I think every team should have a couple insurance policies. … If you don’t have those insurance policies, you’re screwed.”
The Sixers cashed in another when Furkan Korkmaz provided 14 points off the bench in a 127-111 Game Three victory in Atlanta, after starter Danny Green departed early with a strained calf. With Green out at least two weeks, the Sixers will need other guys to step up, other special guest stars to take a bow — beginning in Game Four on Monday night. Coach Doc Rivers has been cagey about who will start, but he has plenty of options in Milton, Korkmaz, George Hill and Matisse Thybulle.
The larger point is, again, that there are always these little moments of truth in the playoffs. The stars will carry most of the load, as Joel Embiid is showing now, but there is the constant possibility of off nights, foul trouble or, ya know, calf strains.
So it’s all hands on deck, every night.
In the first quarter of Game One of the ‘83 Finals, the Sixers’ Andrew Toney and the Lakers’ Norm Nixon collided while chasing a loose ball. Nixon, who injured a shoulder, ultimately proved to be worse for the wear — his production diminished across the next two games, and he didn’t even play in the Sixers’ Game Four clincher — but Toney was the one who was left woozy that night.
Richardson, normally the first guard off the bench, was the logical fill-in, but he missed all three of his first-half shots.
Then he changed his shoes.
“That particular shoe was too tight on my foot,” he said of his Nikes. “It was really narrow in the front of the shoe.”
The pinky toe on his right foot bore the brunt of that, to the point that he said it was often injected with painkillers and ultimately required surgery.
“There were other guys who had that same issue,” he said, “so what we had to do was we had to literally cut a hole in the shoe, in the side.”
Whether there was any hole-cutting that night at halftime, he didn’t say. But he was feeling good enough to pour in 10 points in the third quarter and five more in the fourth. In all he played 31 minutes in a 113-107 Sixers victory.
“If I have to devise a defense to stop Clint Richardson, we’re in trouble,” Lakers coach Pat Riley told reporters afterward.
“I’d rather be underrated than overrated,” Richardson told the media mob when apprised of Riley’s comments. “If they want to underestimate or underrate me, that’s their problem. But I’m going to come out and play hard every time I’m out there. And if I hurt them, that’s going to be their fault, and not mine.”
Even now, Riley’s words rankle Richardson to some degree.
“He spoke before he thought,” he said Sunday. “He really did. It just gave us more motivation to not let them win a game.”
That was neither the first nor last time in that playoff run that one of the Sixers’ lesser lights stepped up. Reserve guard Franklin Edwards hit a jumper with two seconds left to win Game Three of a first-round series against the Knicks, and with Malone in foul trouble in Game Two of the finals, third-string center Earl Cureton played 17 minutes, even hitting a hook shot over Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who by then had just about perfected that maneuver. It was Cureton’s only field goal in the playoffs that season.
Richardson, for his part, managed 10 points in the final three games of the Finals. But really, defense and athleticism had always been his best attributes. That’s what superscout Jack McMahon found appealing about Richardson, a forward at Seattle University, and why the Sixers used a second-round pick on him in 1979.
They asked him to convert from the frontcourt to the backcourt, and it was a slow go at first. Pat Williams, the general manager at the time, once told me he showed up at a preseason game in Pittsburgh before Richardson’s rookie year with the intent of cutting him. Even had a one-way ticket to Seattle in his pocket. But Richardson played well that night, and actually wound up appearing in 52 games that season, 34 of them starts, after Doug Collins was injured.
In time Richardson would play Robin to Bobby Jones’ Batman, the two of them trundling off the bench to inject life into the team.
“There were a lot of times Bobby and I would come back to the bench and go, ‘Well, we saved their rear ends tonight,’” he said with a laugh.
Richardson averaged a modest seven points a game over his eight-year NBA run, the last two of which he spent with Indiana. Then he played in Greece for two seasons before calling it a career, having appeared in three Finals in all. He also played for two Hall of Fame coaches (Billy Cunningham and Jack Ramsay) and with no fewer than five Hall of Famers (Malone, Jones, Julius Erving, Maurice Cheeks and Charles Barkley).
“What else could I ask for?” he asked. “There’s really nothing else.”
A married father of five, he works as a family liaison at an elementary school just south of Seattle. He also stays in regular touch with Sixers officials, and often travels to Philadelphia for alumni events. Asked Sunday when he last picked up a ball, he could only chuckle.
“Well, I’m touching one now, but it’s just because it fell,” he said. “The dog was playing and it went down. That’s literally the last time.”
Let the record show that Clint Richardson did not drop the ball when the Sixers needed him most. And now, as then, the road to an NBA championship tends to be paved by guys like him.