Remembering The Lou Williams Shot -- The Happiest Moment of The Pre-Process Era -- 10 Years Later

It was an Easter afternoon, ten years ago…

[art by @zrjaved]

Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and is now writing for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey As Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard. 

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I've been to precisely two Sixers playoff games in my life, and they were polar opposites of one another. The more recent was Game Three of Sixers-Celtics in 2018 -- where, despite having lost both games in Boston, we still came in largely confident in being the better team and expecting to begin to restore order in the series and resume finals contention, before losing in absolute David Cronenberg fashion and leaving essentially dead to rights. The first was Game Four of Sixes-Heat in 2011 -- ten Easters ago -- where, after having lost the first three games to Miami, we went in with minimal expectation of winning and none of being able to contend either that year or in the near future, but still pulled out the surprise victory thanks to a deus ex machina-like final minute-plus. You might remember it as the Lou Williams game -- in my opinion, the greatest moment of a thoroughly middling era in Sixers history.

Lou Williams was my least-favorite Sixer of that period, maybe my least-favorite Sixer, period. That seems unfair now, given how likeable and watchable he's been in his various stops around the NBA since, winning three Sixth Man of the Year Awards and peaking in relevance well over a decade into his career. He was ahead of his time in his offensive efficiency -- getting to the line, pioneering the "Lou-for-one," never turning the ball over -- and he's been ensured Basketball Twitter immortality since it was discovered in the mid-’10s that he was openly dating two women at the same time. The biggest artist of the last decade basically made a song about how cool he is. He's had as enviable a career as you could imagine for a guy who's never made huge money or played deep into the postseason.

I couldn't stand him on the Sixers, though. That's largely because of my own ignorance of advanced stats, and largely because the Sixers had so few respectable offensive options at the time that he was pressed into a role well beyond his then-capabilities -- but man, also because he was just frustrating to watch. He played little defense. He took bad threes. He went looking for contact with drives that had no failsafe option. And repeatedly, he came up short in the clutch: After being branded "Mr. Fourth Quarter" by Marc Zumoff and Ed Pinckney following one strong finish early in the 2009-2010 season, he proceeded to never have another good stretch run for the rest of the Sixers' miserable 27-55 campaign. He was too small to effectively attack a good-sized half-court D, he wasn't a good enough shooter yet to reliably drain bail-out jumpers or a good enough play maker to really leverage his gravity as a threat, and the refs never called it when he went foul-hunting late. Ultimately, he wasn't the guy you wanted with the ball and the game on the line.

Still, that's the part he often played on the Sixers -- even on the overachieving 2010-11 squad in Doug Collins' first year as coach, when the team exceeded all pre-season expectations by making a push to respectability and even making the playoffs as the seventh seed. They still had Andre Iguodala at that point, an elite fill-in-the-gaps guy on both sides of the ball, and Elton Brand, who'd brushed off a brutally disappointing first two years to his infamous "Philly Max" contract and reinvented his game as an undersized five, becoming an incredibly valuable contributor in the process. And they had a bunch of guys who at least had the semblance of true prospectdom: Spencer Hawes, a floor-spacing and ball-moving big in theory, if not always in practice; Thaddeus Young, an athletic and increasingly versatile energy guy; Jrue Holiday, a recent first-round steal with an incredibly high two-way ceiling; and Evan Turner, the No. 2 overall pick the previous summer whose struggles to produce at the NBA level we were still willing to "OK, But" at every hint of a greater spark.

It was a fun team, but it was a team without any semblance of a true No. 1 option. Turner and Holiday weren't ready yet, Hawes and Young clearly never would be, and we'd already given Iguodala a couple seasons to lock down that role himself, before both sides came to the realization that the miscasting was doing no one any favors. Brand was their scoring leader that season, with the Old School Chevy grinding out just over 15 points a game, despite needing the Flight Squad's trampoline to reach the rim after his career-altering Achilles tear. Hence, despite a half-decade of increasingly convincing evidence that Sweet Lou was not the answer to our late-game woes, Mr. Fourth Quarter was still perpetually on call for takeover duties down the stretch. It's not particularly hard to see why even getting a single game off Miami -- in the first year of the largely insufferable Big Three experiment, with LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh shrugging off early struggles to lead the Heat to a 58-24 record -- seemed a bridge way too far.

The Heatles were prone to the occasional slow start, however, and the Sixers took advantage of that in Game Four -- jumping out to a 23-8 lead, thanks to a locked-in Elton and some uncharacteristically hot shooting from distance, as Miami lazed its way through the first quarter. The Sixers' maintained their advantage until midway through the second, but if there was one characteristic of that Heat team that I'll always remember them by, it was that no matter how big a lead against you held against them, once they turned it on, it would be gone in just a few minutes -- and once lost, you usually didn't get it back. So when a 39-23 Sixers advantage turned into 45-41 Heat before the end of the half, all you could really do was give a Well That Was Fun shrug and pivot to wondering about late first-round draft options and potential free agency steals.

But the Sixers were able to battle back in the third, essentially playing the Heat even in a quarter where neither team scored more than 20 points. Part of the reason for the Heat's tendency to start slow that first season is that their starting five was weighed down by a pair of cinder blocks in the decrepit Mike Bibby and Zydrunas Ilgauskas, neither of whom offered anything but the faintest whiff of veteran experience by that point in their career. They combined for one point on nine shots over 24 total minutes in that contest, and unsurprisingly were off the floor long before crunch time, but helped the Sixers stay in the game before that with their negative contributions -- particularly to the the Heat's spacing, as neither Wade nor LeBron were particularly excitable three-point shooters at that time, and even Bosh was pump-faking on the catch from 18 feet like Embiid currently does from deep. Frankly, even with all the elite talent they had, it's kind of amazing that Miami team got as far as they did before coach Eric Spoelstra's epiphany the following season to have Bosh as a stretch five shooting corner threes while Shane Battier served as the smallball four -- watching it back now, the Heat basically look like a late-'90s Pat Riley squad, working almost entirely in the paint, shooting 5-23 total from beyond.

The Sixers weren't exactly flowing free on offense at this point either; their only really good looks in the third came out of operating through Hawes in the mid-post, finding 'Dre and ET for dunks. Otherwise, it was mostly a bunch of turnovers and clanked Iguodala jumpers -- and let me tell you, after more than half a season of watching Joel Embiid and Tobias Harris operate like a couple of Dr. McDreamys out of the mid-range, it is sobering as motherfucking Lent to go back to watching Andre Igudoala brick his parabola 18-footers, like his only real goal was to get his shot over the defender's arm and he's just sorta hoping gravity takes care of the rest. The Heat's defense, particularly with Joel Anthony and Mario Chalmers subbing in for Ilgauskas and Bibby, was stifling, and it was hard to see how the Sixers were going to be able to score enough to withstand the inevitable next Heat run.

And Lou Williams was a non-factor. He had badly missed a couple straight-on threes early in the game, and the cold streak had made him uncharacteristically gunshy. There was even a point in the third quarter where he was given this late-night-Wawa-open look from distance:

And he opted not to take it. Instead, he motored into the paint for a drive that Wade easily swatted away. If you can't believe that, I don't blame you -- indeed, I shouted in very loud disbelief upon watching it back last night. I mean, this is Lou Williams we're talking about, a more conscience-free shooter than Anton Chigurh, and here he was giving the easiest look from three he'd get all postseason the Ben Simmons treatment. But I swear it's true, and that kinda shows you how rattled this Miami defense had gotten our Ballers by the second half of Game Four. The only Sixer still attacking with total abandon was Turner, who even at the end of a hellish rookie season, still had never met a matchup he didn't think he could get the better of. Looking back on the heart he played with in this one, I'm reminded what a shame it was that he didn't turn out to be just a slightly better shooter in the pros, even just on long twos -- regardless of whether or not his three-pointer ever came along, if his mid-range pull-up game was 25% more effective, I'm fairly convinced he could've at least found a career about halfway between CJ McCollum and Rudy Gay.

The game once again seemed over early in the fourth, as the Sixers' offense continued to sputter and the Heat finished off a 10-2 run to go up 73-66 with under 10 minutes to go. But appropriately for that Easter Sunday, the Sixers continued to rise from the dead, and Lou got going with a driving layup that gave him the confidence to take and make a catch-and-shoot three a possession later, capping off his own mini-run with a short floater to tie the game at 75-75 right after that, with 6:35 to go. But the Sixers would then go the next five minutes without a field goal, Miami shutting all windows and doors on Philly as they crawled back to an 82-76 advantage with a minute and a half remaining. To say the game should've been over at that point would be like saying Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band should end after "A Day in the Life," obvious to the point of redundant.

But before the Sixers could get to the Lou Will miracle we all recall, it needed some less-remembered heroics from Turner and Holiday. ET hit a running floater along the baseline with 1:22 to go to cut the lead to four, and after Chalmers bricked a makeable corner three at the other end, Holiday hit a pull-up wing triple over Dwyane Wade -- two pretty ballsy shots that had no real business both going in. But that was the deal with this matchup: Thanks in equal part to the Heat's defensive supremacy and the Sixers' own offensive inferiority, Philly went basically the entirety of the fourth quarter without getting a single good look at the basket. So, they had to start stepping confidently into bad ones.

And boy howdy, is that what Lou Williams did in his own signature moment. I thought I remembered his shot being a bad look, but I forgot just how crappy it really was. He had a chance at a better one, too: Dancing with Wade beyond the arc, he got Flash to stumble a bit, forcing a switch with Bosh, who gave him a couple feet's space to step into a decently clean three from straight on if he so desired. But the slip seemed to catch Lou off-guard, or maybe he just hadn't worked up the nerve yet, so he passed out to Evan instead -- who gave the ball right back to Sweet Lou, now with Wade back on him, and the clock starting to dwindle. This time, Lou stepped into it decisively, but he did so several feet beyond the arc, with Wade in position to make a strong contest, and just an inch or two away from blocking him outright. It was the worst of the three shots the Sixers took in the last 90 seconds, and that made it the most rewarding when it became the third straight to connect, sending me, my parents, and the rest of the towel-waving Wells Fargo Center into Iverson-era-level conniptions. Brand altered a LeBron look at the other end, ET sank some free throws, and we were headed back to Miami for Game Five.

The elation of that game was something else, something totally different than the kind of joys we experience with this Embiid-and-Simmons-led Process-era. It was a no-stakes triumph, one almost entirely without big-picture meaning: It might've allowed us to talk ourselves a little into Evan and Jrue being the foundation for something more than they really were, but none of us actually believed that this cap-strapped team lacking in any no-doubt blue-chippers was actually going to be showing down with the Big Three Heat for real in the next couple years. We weren't excited for anything to do with what the win might mean for the future in either the long or the short term, we were just thrilled to have squeaked out a gutsy win against this Miami team right then, right there. It meant nothing more than what it was, but that was still plenty. I remember getting guff from some Heat fans in the WFC parking lot -- as Spike recalled on the weekend Ricky, there were a surprising number of them in attendance -- and all I wanted to say to them was, Look, you guys have the next decade. Just let us have today.

Indeed, that was it for that Sixers run. Game Five in Miami was close but no cigar, a character-building loss that nonetheless sorta brought the team back to square one. The next season was delayed by the NBA lockout, then began with the Sixers absolutely rolling to a 10-3 record -- an iron pyrite beginning that the team inevitably came down from, ultimately ending up an overmatched eighth seed in the playoffs. Pre-Process Trusters and Uncut Gems obsessives alike will no doubt recall that team as the one who upset an injury-stricken Bulls squad in the first round before improbably taking the aging Celtics to seven games in the conference semis. But despite that postseason run being far more extensive, nothing from it really compares to the Lou Williams shot in terms of true joy: Andre Iguodala's free throws to win the Bulls series and Jrue Holiday's Game Six performance to force the Celtics series to go the distance might come close, but both were mired in confusion, weirdness and weariness from the season's disappointing trajectory to that point, as well as the overwhelming sense that the team just wasn't really supposed to be there. Then the Celtics won Game Seven, the Sixers traded for Andrew Bynum, and you remember the rest of the story from there.

No matter how great things go or don't go with this team from here, the Lou Williams shot will always remain one of the most indelible Sixers memories for me -- not just for being there and sharing it with my parents, but getting to enjoy a pure moment of NBA ecstasy with no accompanying baggage to clutter it. Even the fact that it was from my least-favorite Sixer doesn't weigh down the memory; if anything, it just makes it richer, deeper, like a hard-earned moment of grace in a difficult family relationship. And that's why -- as I asked Mike and Spike to discuss during a recent pod -- I do encourage my Knick fan friends not to write off a potential playoff this appearance season as a waste of time, even if this Knicks team as currently constructed has little chance to really grow into much. A championship is the ultimate goal, but moments like the Lou Williams shot are also special, and worth struggling for. You certainly don't want to spend your entire future just hoping for a fun single win in a five-game series loss, but in the moment the first time around, it doesn't feel possible that there's a lot of sports experiences that could matter much more.