The Sixers Have Sucked in Game One For a Decade Now

The good news is, they don’t always lose the series.

[design by @zarjaved, Photo by Mitchell Leff/Getty Images]

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. 

Andrew's writing is brought to you by Kinetic Skateboarding! Not only the Ricky's approved skate shop, but the best place to get Chucks, Vans, any apparel. Use code "DAVESILVER" for 9.1% off your order.

---

Game One: Feels like a loss.

Such has been the case for the last ten years. Every year -- hell, every series -- we forget, and every series we are cruelly reminded with an underwhelming performance out of the gate to diminish excitement and lower expectations.

In the ten Game Ones the Sixers have played in since 2011 (the first Doug Collins year) they're 2-8. Some of that can be explained away by the fact that the Sixers have often been playing from a lower seed -- six out of the ten times -- but it's still pretty remarkable that they've lost *all six* of those, even with a couple of 2/3 matchups in there, and it's pretty uninspiring that they've gone 2-2 as a higher seed at home, with both of the losses coming to significantly lower-seeded teams. The series-opening L to the Hawks that the Sixers suffered on Sunday was the most recent, but probably not even the worst or most dispiriting of the bunch. Even one of the two wins sorta stunk. The Sixers of the last decade just have never been proponents of leading with the hit single as the first track.

The good (well, better) news? The Sixers have gone 4-5 in those series so far, with the potential to even move up to a respectable .500 if they can play more like the last four minutes of the Hawks Game One and less like the first 44 for the rest of this series. To foreshadow what the rest of this series might hold, let's look back at those first nine Game Ones and how their series played out from there -- presented in descending (as in "into hell") order from least to most painful.

THE ONE GOOD WIN

2018 Round One: Sixers 130, Heat 103

True story you're probably sick of hearing if you actually know me: I was covering Coachella for Billboard when this game was happening, and I skipped Beyoncé's headlining set -- you know, the one she later turned into a live album, a Netflix film, and general pop music history -- to go back to the condo where I was staying and watch this game. Not even to watch it live, but just to fire up the ESPN+ replay as quickly as possible. (I didn't want the score spoiled! You know how ravenous the Bey Hive is in their Process Trusting. Plus, I'd seen her headline Made in America a few years earlier, how different could this set have possibly been??)

To be fair, as historic an occasion as Bey's Homecoming concert might have been, the Sixers game might've been even more of a shooting star. In Game One against the Miami Heat -- the tough-as-sunburned-nails Heat, who'd taken 2-4 from Philly in the regular season -- the Sixers simply tore ass, despite being down one Joel Hans Embiid, still out with a Markelle Fultz shoulder to the face. I don't recall the game being quite the evisceration the final score would imply; the Sixers were actually down 35-29 at the end of one, but outscored the Heat by 31 in the second half and turned it into a blowout. It was one of those games where you get bogged down in the play-by-play and suddenly look up and realize the game is already over. The Sixers had four guys who outscored everyone in the Heat's starting lineup, including both Marco Belinelli and Ersan Ilyasova. Coming after a 16-game winning streak to close the regular season, it felt like the Sixers would lose again.

The Sixers of course lost the next game, falling victim to the requisite one unstoppable Dwyane Wade game and dropping to 1-1 in the series. But Embiid returned, they won the next three games fairly handily, and for the first and possibly last time in Process Playoff history, we headed into round two with complete belief in our postseason supremacy. More on what happened next to come!

THE OTHER WIN

2021 Round One: Sixers 125, Wizards 118

You probably remember this one pretty OK, even though it already feels multiple Sixers teams ago after Embiid's injury and Sunday's loss. It wasn't a bad win, necessarily -- even though the Wizards kept it annoyingly close throughout, it never really felt like the Sixers were in danger of losing -- but it wasn't exactly the feel-good, stress-free evisceration we were hoping for from the first playoff game at the Wells Fargo Center in two years. Bradley Beal was unguardable, Davis Bertans hit a bunch of threes, our bench was lousy and Ben Simmons' 0-6 night from the FT line guaranteed a long two days off of Ben Discourse, always a shame. The best thing you could say about that game was that if the Wizards didn't manage to steal that one, they really didn't have any chance in the series -- and they didn't, losing in a five that probably should've been four.

THE "HUH, HOW ABOUT THAT?" LOSS

2012 Round Two: Celtics 92, Sixers 91

Of the many perplexing things about this Sixers-Celtics second-round series -- which NBA archaeologists will never be able to properly explain to future generations -- the most was possibly that despite winning three games as the eighth seed, the Sixers arguably underachieved. Game One was also theirs for the taking: The Sixers led with three minutes to go, and had it within one possession multiple times in the final minute, before ultimately letting the game slip away to the C's, led by an Uncut Gem-powered KG (29 and 11). I think I mostly laughed about it at the time, incredulous that the Sixers had kept it that close -- they were the significantly worse team, and no one on Philly even had a particularly good game. It seemed like we missed our chance and Boston would just kinda pedal away from there, like we did against Washington this year. But Jrue Holiday was good, Rajon Rondo was weird, and we somehow took a series we never should have been in in the first place to seven games -- making this a much more meaningful Game One performance than we ever would've predicted.

THE "YEP, FAIR ENOUGH" LOSSES

2011 Round One: Heat 97, Sixers 89

This could maybe even go a category up -- the Sixers ended up playing the Heat tougher than most of us expected in that first-round series, even stealing a game thanks to the Lou Williams shot -- but really, despite going up double digits in the first and losing by a single-digit final margin, it didn't feel like they ever actually had a shot of stealing this one. It basically came down to LeBron having an off shooting night and the early-Big Three Heat being downright awful at spreading the floor -- just 4-17 from three for the game, an unimaginably unprolific output even by the standards of just a couple years later. Nice to not get run off the floor in Miami, and show enough heart to eventually result in one home win, but these two teams were who we thought they were.

2012 Round One: Bulls 103, Sixers 91

if you remember this game, it's probably not for anything that happened in the first 46 and a half minutes -- in which the top-seeded Bulls slowly, unexcitedly and uneventfully smothered the life out of the 8th-seeded Sixers -- but for 1:22 remaining in the 4th, when reigning MVP Derrick Rose went up for a short floater and came down with a torn ACL, ending the Bulls' title hopes and permanently changing his career trajectory. Before that, it was just like Game One against the Heat, nothing more or less interesting than a really good team beating an (arguably) slightly above-average one. After that... well, it was the first of two series those playoffs that the Sixers were going to have a much better chance of winning than anyone would've rightly predicted beforehand. But it was pretty clear from that Game One that had Rose stayed healthy, we would've been fortunate to get a Gentleman's Sweep out of it.

THE "WELL, MAYBE IF..." LOSSES

2019 Round Two: Raptors 108, Sixers 95

I went into the Sixers-Raptors series convinced that a) Toronto had a better team and b) Joel Embiid had to be the best player in the series by a significant margin for us to have a chance. Game One was discouragingly validating of both parts of that: Toronto cruised to a relatively easily victory behind Kawhi Leonard's 45 points on 16-23 shooting while Embiid was stonewalled by Marc Gasol to the tune of 16 points on 5-18 shooting. The series looked like it would be over before it got back to Philly if Embiid didn't respond with a massive Game Two. He didn't -- just 12 points on 2-7 shooting in that one -- and he never really got back on track during the series, but the Sixers somehow turned it around anyway, pushing Toronto to a tight seven games. Unfortunately all recorded evidence of the end of Game 7 has been lost to the ages, so we'll never know for sure who ultimately walked away with the victory; regardless, as far as Game Ones go, this ended up being surprisingly misleading.

2020 Round One: Celtics 109, Sixers 101

Another "Joel has to be the best player by far for us to have a chance" series. In Game One, he wasn't quite that (26 points on 8-15 shooting, but five turnovers to just one assist) and the Sixers -- missing Ben Simmons of course, post knee surgery -- couldn't quite hang. Still, there was talking yourself into the Sixers being Right There to be done if you could expend the emotional energy last summer; hell, for a minute there in the third after Al Horford's barbaric yawp, it looked like Philly might even be able to steal one from their new guy's old squad. But Boston's perimeter play proved indomitable, both in Game One and for the remainder of the series, with Joel (great, not really great) and company ultimately getting unceremoniously swept and the entire Process looking to be hanging on the precipice of total oblivion. Ultimately, I'm still glad we didn't have to deal with Jayson Tatum in the first round this year.

THE "AW FUCK, REALLY?" LOSSES

2018 Round Two: Celtics 117, Sixers 101

This one still hurts a little to think about. The Sixers entered this series with all the chest-beating swagger you could muster without literally having a member of D-Generation X strutting along side you, having won 20 of their prior 21 games between the regular season and Round One of the playoffs, and generally feeling like they should bulldoze a Boston team missing Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward. Game One couldn't have gone much worse: the Celtics made 17 threes to the Sixers' five (including seven by Terry Rozier alone), Embiid was awesome but essentially got played to a draw by Horford, Simmons had more turnovers (7) than assists (6) and the bench went 5-21, as the Celtics coasted to a victory best described as "decisive." I still believed the Sixers would prove the better team until the end of Game Three -- hell, maybe the Game Five -- but after Game One, it was pretty clear the dick-swinging days were over.

2019 Round One: Nets 111, Sixers 102

Probably the most painful in the moment, though the events to follow have dulled the edge here a little at least. No one really was predicting the Nets to upset the Sixers in 2019's first round, but there was semi-legitimate reason to at least be on alert. Philly had limped to the regular season's finish line with a 3-5 closing, with Embiid hurting and the rest of the team looking short on defense and on chemistry, and the Nets had taken two of four from them in the regular season, with their shooting-focused, guard-oriented lineup guaranteed to give us fits. Game One was a brutal confirmation of all my worst fears, with the Sixers getting housed early and getting booed by the home crowd before halftime. The final score was actually significantly closer than I would've guessed from memory -- 36 from Jimmy Butler undoubtedly helped there -- but I was in pretty heavy freakout mode until the Sixers restored order in the second half of Game Two, and dominated the rest of the series afterwards.

2021 Round Two: Hawks 128, Sixers 124

This felt a whole lot like the Nets Game One two years earlier -- where Embiid was also questionable before Game One, and we felt like once he was ruled in, the game was ours for the blitzing. Didn't turn out that way, obviously, and a combination of poor defensive game-planning, missed offensive opportunities, bad bench play and some red-hot Atlanta shooting resulted in this game being too far out of reach for Philly by the time they decided to hit the turbo thrusts on the fourth-quarter defense. Like the Brooklyn game, the final score doesn't quite indicate how resounding a beating this one was, and like the Brooklyn game, this exacerbated fears about the way a more ground game-focused Sixers team can match up with the aerial assault of a team like the Hawks.

So does that mean that like the Brooklyn game, this will also end up being fool's gold for Atlanta as Philly comes back to sweep the next four? It's possible: It certainly seems like they figured some things out in the second half on Sunday, and that if they can keep Atlanta from getting airborne early in Game Two, they should be able to impose their will from there. But you just don't want it to end up like the Boston series from the year earlier, where a soft first-round opponent and some regular-season flukiness gave us an over-inflated sense of ourselves. You'd hope an MVP-level Embiid would be the difference, but with his health likely to be a question mark all series, you never know when he might have to sit a game, making an already thin margin of error damn near invisible. Losing Game One at home, with a mostly healthy and entirely productive Joel, just makes everything else more of a challenge.

If we do go on to win this one, though, making us an even 5-5 in our last 10 playoff series? It’s not dominant, exactly, but it’s pretty damn good considering how we almost always start by spotting the other team the first one.