With the Knicks advancing to the Eastern Conference Finals for the first time since 2000 courtesy of Friday’s rout of the Celtics in Game 6 of the teams’ semifinal series, there was a reminder of another bit of Sixers ignominy, in a season rife with it.
Absent from the conference finals since Allen Iverson led them there in 2001, Philadelphia now has the third-longest active drought in the East behind Washington, which last made it in 1979, and Charlotte, which has never achieved those heights since the team set up shop in 1989.
Not the kind of company you want to keep.
That checkered history – one marked by all-too-brief highs and long-lasting lows – got me to thinking about who the quintessential Sixer has been. Not the greatest Sixer of all time. With apologies to Iverson, Charles Barkley, Moses Malone, Wilt Chamberlain and (going way back) Dolph Schayes, that would be Julius Erving.
Dr. J spent 11 of his 16 seasons in Philadelphia, making 11 All-Star teams, winning the 1980-81 MVP and with Malone leading the Sixers to the most recent of their three championships, in ‘82-83. Stylish on the court and ambassadorial off it, he was also the perfect teammate, as Bobby Jones, his frontcourt running mate and the man Doc once dubbed his “vice president” on the club, told me several years ago.
“You hear a lot about superstars, (how) they put pressure on younger guys to come up to their level,” Jones said of his fellow Hall of Famer. “Julius was such an encourager. That’s what stood out in my mind, I think, the entire time I was with him: He wasn’t arrogant. He didn’t consider himself better than anybody. He worked as hard as anybody, if not harder. Didn’t put anybody down for the mistakes that they made.”
And, Bobby added, “That’s easy to do at that level, when the game’s on the line or something’s on the line. He knows he can do it, but you’re in a position where you have to do it and you don’t, it takes strength of character to say, ‘We’re in this together. We win together, we lose together.’ I think that was probably, to me, his greatest quality.”
That is as moving a tribute as one teammate can give another. While nobody could soar like Erving in a literal sense, he tried to lift everyone up, tried to bring the best out of all his teammates. That no doubt contributed to the Sixers reaching three other Finals while he was on the team, and three other conference finals. It was the greatest era in franchise history, but their many lulls bring us back to our original question: Who typifies the Sixers? Who is the foremost comet, the guy who ascended to the heavens, only to fizzle out?
I would submit to you that it is Willie Burton, who on Dec. 13, 1994 scored a Spectrum-record 53 points against his previous employer, the Miami Heat. Burton, a 6-8 forward who spent just that ‘94-95 season with the Sixers, played 316 games over eight seasons, ending in 1999. He scored 3,243 points, or 10.3 a game. Excluding active players, no one who has notched 50 or more points in a game finished with a lower career total.
His big night also tied Iverson, Chamberlain and Joel Embiid for the 11th-highest single-game total in franchise history.
“I left a mark in the game of basketball that will always be there,” Burton told me earlier this year, for a piece that appeared on the website Libertyballers.com.
At the same time he added, “Sometimes I have feelings that I could have been a much better player. I could have been an All-Star. I could have had multiple All-Star Game appearances.”
But he was sidetracked by mental-health and substance-abuse issues. He told me he started drinking when he was 14 or 15, and while his problems abated to a degree when he was starring at the University of Minnesota – he scored exactly 1,800 points there and was the ninth pick in the 1990 draft – they accelerated when he reached the NBA.
“I used to mix marijuana, cocaine,” he said. “I had some of everything – hash. Everything but heroin, because I saw what heroin did to people. So I caught myself staying away from something that would destroy me, when all the other stuff was just destroying me slower.”
But he cast all his troubles aside that night in the Spectrum, nailing 12 of 19 shots from the floor, including five of eight from 3-point range, and no fewer than 24 of 28 free throws. It was a stunning display for a guy who to that point had never scored more than 28 points in an NBA game, and thereafter would not score more than 33.
Burton and later Kyrie Irving, who scored 50 in a game for Brooklyn in 2022, have to date put up the second-fewest shots from the floor in a 50-point outing. Only Utah’s Adrian Dantley, who fired a mere 17 times in such a game in 1980, has ever attempted fewer.
As noted in the Libertyballers piece, Burton scored 13 of the Sixers’ first 15 points in what would become a 105-90 Philadelphia victory over Miami, and had 18 points after a quarter, 29 by halftime and 38 through three quarters. There is some suspicion that his former Heat teammates repeatedly fouled him in the fourth quarter in order to help him breach the 50-point mark – he shot 16 free throws in the period, making 13 – and when I asked one of those ex-players, Keith Askins, about it, he didn’t deny it.
Burton hopscotched to three other teams after playing for the Sixers, ending in 1999. He also played overseas. By then he had begun getting his life in order; he said he has been clean and sober since July 7, 1997. Now an assistant professor at his alma mater (and just a few days away from his 57th birthday), he earned his undergrad degree in 2013, his masters in 2020 and is currently studying toward his doctorate.
His is a hopeful tale, an uplifting one. But where the Sixers are concerned, it is also typical, in that his highest high was all too fleeting. Goodness knows we have once again been reminded of that this weekend. And goodness knows when the futility might end.