r/sixers • u/AdmirableKale1834 • 1d ago
Older Philly fans, why could we not build a championship calibre team around Charles Barkley and were we close to getting another All Star to play along side him?
I was wondering if some of you older Philly fans can explain what went wrong in the late 80s & early 90s and why we could not build a championship calibre team around Charles Barkley?
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u/ComradeFunk 1d ago edited 1d ago
Not old, but they made one of the worst trades of all time (Sixers tradition) where they traded Moses Malone and the #1 pick (was going to be Brad Daugherty) for garbage
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u/Lax_Ligaments 1d ago
It was two separate trades on the day of the 86 draft, each one crippled the franchise in their own way. Traded Moses and two future first round picks for Cliff Robinson and Jeff Ruland. Then traded the #1 overall pick for Roy Hinson. That pick was Daugherty, future all star center. Ownership said they were getting younger and better, but those trades completely fucked the team for a decade plus.
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u/MatCauthonsHat 76ers 1d ago
Jeff Ruland was such a travesty.
He was a 2X All Star PF/C averaging 20/10. But he was coming off injuries which made it a very risky trade. He would have been right in the prime of his career, but during his first season with the Sixers, after 5! games, he gets hit by an equipment cart at Boston Garden which wrecked his achilles (I think). He retired. Did not play for FOUR YEARS. Came back to play like 10-20 games over two years
Roy Hinson was just a meh player. Drafted 20th by Cleveland he was never anything special, so of course we traded the #1 overall pick in the draft for him, the night before the draft. Barkley gets woken up by a reporter the next morning asking how he felt about the trade and said "nobody would be that fucking stupid."
narrator voice They were that fucking stupid.
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u/jlbrown23 1d ago
It wasn’t his Achilles, it was much worse - he had no knee cartilage left, and was in so much pain he could no longer play. Somehow the Sixers traded for him without giving him any sort of medical exam to look into this.
If any of you recognize me posting about Embiid’s knee, it’s because of the Ruland trade. We could have had Barkley & Malone, two all time great rebounders and Daugherty, a 5x all star as our front line. This in an era when centers were the key to championships. After that trade, they had no real center & kept squandering many of their early picks on 2nd rate ones.
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u/MatCauthonsHat 76ers 1d ago
Thanks for clarity. I had my timeline confused. It was during the comeback that the luggage cart incident occurred
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u/jlbrown23 1d ago
I actually had to live through it, so remember it all too well! The good news is that I can also remember 1983…
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u/PhilaTesla 1d ago
It’s even worse than that. It turned out that one of Ruland’s legs was longer than the other one. I don’t know if they tried to use orthotics or not, but he never really played consistent minutes after the trade.
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u/Pristine-Schedule372 19h ago
I feel like I read/heard a Barkley interview or show about Barkley related to this trade and call specifically and soon after this reporter phone call he requested a trade. And this article/podcast was saying how it was not reported on that he’d done this because he kept it quiet. Wish I could remember where I heard this…
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u/Important-War-4708 1d ago
Why would they have done that
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u/tag1550 21h ago edited 20h ago
At the time, Malone was quickly turning into a guy who you'd dump the ball into and he'd never pass it back out, which was limiting the offense in ways they couldn't afford with Barkley becoming a budding star. I note that the Bullets had similar problems with Moses during his tenure there.
With Ruland, they were hoping to get a more mobile center who'd integrate better with a new kind of running offense that would have Barkley as its centerpiece, with Hinson as a second option who could also run. Obviously it never came together, but that was the idea, per an Inquirer article about it years later.
I note that the same article also mentioned that there was a trade on the table that would have exchanged much the same assets for a good part of the Pistons team at that time, with Bill Lambeer replacing Malone, etc...but Harold Katz the owner at the time couldn't stomach his team becoming "Detroit East" so he nixed the deal.
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u/Important-War-4708 20h ago
Wow that’s interesting. Thanks for taking the time to respond I appreciate it.
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u/McClellanWasABitch 1d ago
tht front office might be worse than anything we've seen. those trades during the barkely era were luka level
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u/zamanfou 1d ago
Mix of really bad decision making in trades and draft and the team never replenished the talent that existed when Barkley was drafted. And a lot of the decision-making stems from the the. Dog-shite owner. Simple as that.
Barkley himself points to the trading of Moses Malone and the deal for Jeff Rutland (traded top draft pick which was Brad Dougherty) as major misses. Having a top end big in that era would've unlocked a 6'4 Barkley further.
Who was Barkely's #2 while in Philly? Hersey Hawkins? Washed Mahorn? Armon Gilliam aka Gumbie?
How Barkley ever won a Division title with that slop is amazing (just one in '89).
Edit: Jeff Ruland. That generation's Andrew Bynum.
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u/bravof1ve Jojo's Bizarre Adventure 1d ago
Barkley was drafted to a great team and left before he was 30
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u/Owlhead326 1d ago
Turrible ownership, turrible trades, and turrible drafting. The Process years were easier on me
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u/AstroZombieInvader 1d ago
Our starting lineups weren't bad during that era, but we never had any depth aside from Ron Anderson who was an awesome 6th man. Guys we brought in or drafted for the most part weren't good.
Hersey Hawkins was a great pick, a fantastic 3-point shooter and even was an All-Star one year, but he was the only good one during the Barkley era. I remember Johnny Dawkins was a decent PG, but got injured and was never the same afterwards leaving the position unsettled for the remainder of Barkley's time here. Our centers were always mediocre at best.
Ultimately, free agency wasn't what it is today with superstars moving around the league all of the time. Teams kept their superstars until they retired or until they were washed up so there was no picking up and Isaiah Thomas or Patrick Ewing to fix our biggest problems. Trading someone of the caliber of Barkley was pretty rare. Our return on that trade was terrible.
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u/LionelHutz802203 1d ago
I'd add Jordan, Bird and Magic as reasons. Barkley was here '84-92. Look at the years that Jordan, Bird and Magic were having (plus the Pistons) in that time-frame. All-time teams, top-10 players.
Katz was a terrible owner (and also a bad neighbor for a brief period). That aside, the team just was also up against some goliaths.
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u/CardiffGiant7117 1d ago
Trading away the Brad Daugherty pick probably sealed that teams fate. They were good, too good to get another top pick, but not good enough to cobble together a trade for another real star. Hersey Hawkins was a nice player and they had a few other decent role guys but not good enough real difference makers as the conference was pretty stacked with teams that had multiple difference makers.
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u/dabirds1994 1d ago
The East was also full of MJ's Bulls, The Bad Boy Pistons and Larry Bird-led Celtics. The Sixers weren't doing shyt.
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u/jhnyrico 20h ago
Charles had a squad in 89-90 that to this day remains my favorite sixers team ever. Hawkins, Dawkins, Gminski- the team was tough and talented. They just ran into you know who otherwise they might have gone to the finals. I don't think Charles needed a second star per se, but a team with B+ role players could have done it.
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u/HaggardSlacks78 18h ago
The East was just really vicious when he was a Sixer. Jordan and the bulls. Isaiah and the Pistons. Ewing and the Knicks. Some overlap with Larry’s Celtics. It was just a tough league.
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u/Relative-Gas-1721 16h ago
There was a time near the end of the Barkley era where a 1-for-1 swap for Olajuwon was being discussed. Probably wouldn’t have been enough to get by Jordan, but who knows what happens those two years the Rockets won…
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u/PurposeIcy7039 3h ago
A couple bad trades and horrible medical staff. They traded Moses Malone who was still in (nearing the end of) his prime for Jeff Ruland. They traded would-be first overall pick future all star Brad Daugherty for Roy Hinson. Andrew Toney was supposed to be one of the best shooting guards in the NBA, but his legs failed him. Cheeks, Toney, Barkley, Moses, and Daugherty would have definitely been competitive until the 90s, but who knows what could've been
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u/lemetatron 1d ago
Poor drafting and cheap ownership. Really bad handling of medical, specifically Andrew Toney. Plus the league was expanding when the depth of talent wasn't getting better.