When LeBron James chose the Philadelphia 76ers as his new team this summer, he might have imagined a lengthy honeymoon phase befitting the arrival of a king, but his new fans didn’t even wait until halftime of the Sixers’ home opener, on October 22, to give him a dose of Philly reality. The boos began at the 3:23 mark of the second quarter, after an alley-oop dunk by the Cleveland Cavaliers put the Sixers down an unacceptable 27. The boos returned when they fell behind by 29 with just over a minute remaining, and again as the buzzer sounded for halftime. The crowd even booed the halftime act, a drone-and-LED artist named Rally Tron who, to be fair, was pretty lame.
Philly fans are famous for their booing, and this was a particularly dark stretch for the city and its pro-sports teams. The Phillies had flamed out in the playoffs yet again. The Eagles’ Super Bowl–winning quarterback Jalen Hurts had just been ruled out for the season—blood clots in both lungs. The Flyers had opened their season in this same building three weeks earlier with a humiliating 7–0 loss. This winter in Philly, it’s Sixers or bust.
You’d never guess it from all of the booing, but this revamped Sixers roster, which also added the All-NBA shooting guard Jaylen Brown in a summer trade with the Boston Celtics, had aced its first test of the season, two nights earlier, beating the New York Knicks in Madison Square Garden on the night the latter received their championship rings. Sure, Philly fans were glad to get the win, but they also had to spend the whole day leading up to it hearing about how much LeBron loves playing in Madison Square Garden, how he probably would’ve picked the Knicks this summer if they hadn’t just won the title, how even though he’d chosen to play in Philadelphia, he would be living in New York City and commuting via a private helicopter on loan from Fanatics, the sports-apparel company. (His family stayed behind in Los Angeles.) In fact, from the day in late July that LeBron announced he was joining the Sixers, he almost seemed to go out of his way to make clear that, all things being equal, he’d rather be in New York.
And now, barely 20 minutes into his Philly debut: boos. The way the Sixers were playing, he’s lucky they weren’t throwing batteries.
On the surface, LeBron James and Philadelphia are an odd match. LeBron is basketball royalty, a glittering global celebrity and a walking billion-dollar corporation. He’s a guy who went on national TV to announce that he was taking his talents to South Beach, then returned to Cleveland for the most Hollywood of reasons—ending his hometown’s 52-year pro-sports title drought—before leaving again for actual Hollywood. LeBron has won four NBA titles with three different franchises, and in his prime, he went to the finals eight straight times.
Philadelphians, on the other hand, are famed for both their inferiority complex and their willingness to punch you if you bring up their inferiority complex. They have a particularly spiky dislike for being cast in New York’s shadow, but also a nagging insecurity that no one really knows or loves anything about their giant, supposedly world-class city besides cheesesteaks and Rocky Balboa. (Not true! We also love the Roots!) The Sixers last won an NBA title in 1983, the year before LeBron was born, and they haven’t advanced past the second round of the playoffs since 2001, when the team was led by the fearless undersized combo guard Allen Iverson, who still often sits courtside and very much remains the chippy soul of the franchise. It feels apt for Philly that the highlight of the Sixers’ century remains Iverson draining a jumper over Tyronn Lue during Game 1 of the 2001 NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers and then mercilessly stepping over his toppled body. It was a huge upset when Philly won that night, and then the Lakers won the next four straight. The moral of this Philly fable is that you might beat the Sixers—okay, you’ll probably beat them—but you’ll never clown them.
But LeBron is nearly 42, an elite all-around player though noticeably diminished as a scorer, an aging vagabond joining his fourth team, hoping to script his NBA career’s fifth and likely last chapter. He’s not South Beach LeBron anymore, or SoCal LeBron. To put it in the Philly-est terms possible, this is LeBron’s Rocky V phase: the tired old champ chasing one last shot at glory.
It’s a measure of just how beaten down Sixers fans have become that most of them seem willing to tolerate LeBron’s New York address. “I personally find the whole LeBron–New York thing to be insulting,” the Philly sports-radio host Spike Eskin told me. “I feel like we’re being cucked by both New York and LeBron.” (Philly sports fans!) Eskin, who also co-hosts a Sixers-themed podcast called Rights to Ricky Sanchez, acknowledges, though, that he’s in the minority. Most local fans don’t seem to care where LeBron lives so long as he’s wearing their uniform—and winning basketball games.
“He could get a Knicks tattoo,” Eskin said, “and everyone would be like, Yeah, but he’s on the Sixers.”
LeBron James has spent 16 of his 24 pro seasons on teams in the NBA’s Eastern Conference, and yet he’s never ranked all that high on the list of Sixers nemeses, in part because they’ve never really posed a serious threat to his dominance. “I didn’t leave my family to lose in the second round,” he said during a preseason media scrum—a great line, but also a pretty savage dig at his new (work) home. But it’s also because LeBron never played in Boston or New York, the two sports cities that Philly fans measure themselves against. They’re the southern pole of a 300-mile East Coast corridor populated by three distinct fan bases of warring sports jackasses, and you can’t truly understand how and why LeBron wound up in a Sixers uniform without understanding the recent history of these interlocking city rivalries that are as old as America.
About 10 hours before LeBron played that home opener in Philly, and a few days before the Eagles played the Dallas Cowboys at Lincoln Financial Field across the street, I was waiting to board a JetBlue flight from Logan Airport in Boston, where I moved eight years ago after growing up in New York. The flight was jam-packed. About half of the passengers were wearing some form of Philly sports apparel, and the agent at the check-in counter didn’t pass up the opportunity to sneak in some jabs.
“I’m not even gonna say where this flight is going,” she declared. “You all know.” Big laughs in the terminal. “For the Eagles fans, I brought over security.” A group of 50-something men with trim beards and designer tracksuits started chanting: “E! A! G!” They were joined by several more boarding passengers: “L! E! S!”
Most accounts of the Philadelphia 76ers’ recent futility start with “The Process,” the period from roughly 2013 to 2017 when the rebuilding Sixers lost on purpose in order to exploit a draft-lottery system that gave the worst teams a better chance at landing a premium pick and selecting a future superstar. But the misery goes back way further than 2013, and time and again, it was the Boston Celtics rubbing Philly’s face in the dirt.
The Larry Bird–era Celtics put an end to the last great Sixers team, the “Fo’ Fo’ Fo’” Sixers led by Moses Malone. “The Process” was in part a response to the Celtics’ 2008-to-2012 title-winning Kevin Garnett era, and although the strategy did yield one generational superstar, the 7-foot-2-inch center Joel Embiid, the NBA’s MVP in 2023, all of the other picks either busted or self-immolated. Embiid has also missed more than half of the games in his career due to injury, and he’s never displayed the kind of frothing, maniacal commitment to winning that defined someone like Bird or Garnett, or LeBron James. And although Embiid has embraced “The Process,” even claiming it as his nickname, the term also encompasses the disastrous 2017 lottery-pick swap with (who else?) the Celtics that landed Philadelphia a shooting guard named Markelle Fultz who immediately and mysteriously forgot how to shoot, and handed Boston a future All-NBA forward named Jayson Tatum, who turned into the foundational star of the Celtics’ next NBA title team, in 2024.
No Philadelphian wants to feel that they’re jockeying with Boston for attention in New York’s shadow. Boston fans, meanwhile, view themselves as far too busy polishing their title trophies, bragging about their schools, and leaf-peeping to waste any energy on what they see as a lopsided competition with Philly. What both cities can agree on is that they’d prefer for their primary sports nemesis to be New York. But at least in the NBA, it’s been Philly versus Boston for decades, for the simple reason that the Knicks have always been so cartoonishly bad.
But that all changed last summer.
Eskin told me he’s long believed that a Knicks title would be “a much bigger nightmare” for the residents of Philadelphia than any Celtics championship could be or has been, because of geography and market economics. “I lived in North Jersey for a few years,” he explained, “and having lived around Knicks fans, and knowing they’re so close [to Philly], and knowing that—this isn’t an insult—but knowing that so many of them can’t afford to go to their own arena,” he could foresee that if the Knicks ever managed to assemble a competent team and get into a playoff series against the Sixers, their fans would pay whatever it took to maraud down I-95 and turn Xfinity Mobile Arena into Madison Square Garden South.
In the second round of last season’s playoffs, that’s exactly what happened. In the opening round, the Sixers finally overcame the Celtics, charging back from a 3–1 deficit in the series to clinch—in Boston; in their faces!—in seven games. The spasm of genuine Sixers elation lasted maybe 48 hours. Then the Knicks steamrolled them in four straight games. Game 4 was in Philadelphia, and just as Eskin foresaw, the arena was wall-to-wall Knicks fans. It’s hard to overstate what a humiliating low this was for not just Sixers fans but the entire idea of Philly and its collective self-image. “A disaster,” Eskin said. In Philly now they just refer to it as “the takeover.”
En route to the Xfinity Mobile Arena for LeBron’s home debut, I asked my ride-share driver, Rob, a lifelong Sixers fan, if he could recall a low moment that compared to the takeover.
“There’s a low moment every day!” he cried out. “Every time you think about the Sixers, it’s a low moment!”
He started rattling off past catastrophes. I assumed he was going to go for recent stuff, like the premature confetti cannon, or Embiid’s playoff case of Bell’s palsy, or the entire Ben Simmons experience, but Rob reached way back into the forgotten catacombs, like he was exorcising demons. “There’s Sean Bradley eating cheesecake every day to somehow stay in shape, there’s drunk Manute Bol, Theo Ratliff getting injured, Matt Geiger doing dumb shit …” On and on he went. “It’s been bad for a really long time.”
The takeover, though, was the breaking point. The Sixers front office “needed to do something about the embarrassment,” Eskin said. So first they fired their president of basketball operations and replaced him with a young executive named Mike Gansey, who just so happened to know LeBron from high-school basketball in Ohio. Then they pulled off that rare intra-division trade with the Celtics, simultaneously adding the third MVP-caliber player and splitting up a hated rival’s championship duo in the process. But it was still a shock when LeBron announced he was coming to Philly. The vibe shift in the city was instantaneous. When I asked Rob what he thought of this new LeBron-led team, I expected more fatalism. Instead, he didn’t even hesitate.
“They’re going to win the title,” he said, Philly bravado back on full blast. “They’re going to win two, aren’t they? I think they’ll probably win two. And anyone saying they won’t is a naysayer.”
As if someone flipped a switch during halftime, or maybe a table in the locker room, a completely different Sixers team showed up for the third quarter. Instead of settling for stagnant, me-first jump shots, they were whipping the ball around, creating easy baskets. They started forcing turnovers instead of committing them. And LeBron was the driving force behind all of it, not just making passes—firing them. Not just guarding—hounding. They cut a 24-point halftime deficit to two in nine and a half minutes, staggering the Cavs, and turning those surly boos into arena-shaking pandemonium. In Philly, it can shift that fast.
The Sixers took the lead halfway through the fourth quarter, pulled away, and wound up winning by eight. Remarkably, it was the largest single-game comeback of LeBron’s entire career.
When LeBron isn’t being unnecessarily honest about his love for New York and Madison Square Garden, he’s a shrewd interview subject who’s gifted at manipulating storylines and, to put it in basketball terms, keeping a fan base glued to his hip. Speaking with the media following the game, he said he couldn’t have scripted a better opening night, boos included. “It was everything that I dreamed of and more,” LeBron said. “We got the boos. That was amazing, and we deserved it. And then we got the cheers and almost blew the roof off this thing tonight, in a good way. It was a hell of a night.”
But it’s easy to laugh off the boos when it’s only the second game of the hundred or more necessary to win a title. LeBron is a going-on-42-year-old man with an arthritic foot and chronic sciatica. Embiid and his balky knees haven’t topped 50 games since his MVP season four years ago, and he’s probably past the stage in his career when he can get through a playoff series without missing at least a game or two. So far in the regular season’s opening weeks, the Sixers have won eight of nine games, an impressive start considering how unimpressive they’ve looked on the floor, still getting to know one another. LeBron’s scoring is also way down—he’s averaging less than 20 points a game for the first time in his career (though he’s turned the dials up on defense). However he plays for now, there’s really nothing he can do to chase away Philly’s demons until the playoffs, which are an eternity away. And this fan base is incapable of stewing patiently for that long without periodic mutinies.
Before the Cavs game, I met a Sixers fan who told me his name was Stone. “LeBron being here is like when we were kids and we’re being assholes—but then Dad comes home,” Stone said. “Dad’s here now, so we’ve gotta behave and work hard or he’s gonna call us out.” The Sixers, to his mind, haven’t lacked talent—they’ve lacked mettle. Discipline. A dad. The team will have it made, Stone predicted, so long as LeBron and Embiid stay healthy, “and nothing else crazy happens.”
But that’s the thing with the Sixers—something crazy always happens. It’s just a question of what it’ll be this time, and whether LeBron James is enough for the Sixers to finally overcome it.
Leave a Reply