The Philadelphia 76ers, currently a perennial powerhouse in the NBA, didn’t just walk into their current state. Everyone knows about The Process, but even before the string of seasons imbued with a mountain of losses, the team had a lengthy bout with the least enviable situation: the league’s purgatory.
Some years after Allen Iverson got traded, the 76ers tried clinging onto the sum of its parts, scraping the bottom of whatever they had just to get into the playoffs and remain competitive. Led by Andre Iguodala, Philadelphia did become a bottom-tier playoff contender, but alongside him in the mediocre ride was Evan Turner, the franchise’s second overall pick in the 2010 NBA Draft.
Former 76ers forward Evan Turner drops another embarrassing take
Since retiring, Turner has become one of the foster kids for habitually bad NBA takes, and this time is no different. In a recent apearance on the Club 520 Podcast hosted by ex-veteran guard Jeff Teague, he was asked about his thoughts about not living up to his billing as a No. 2 pick in Philadelphia, to which he replied:
When number two dropped it’s like oh I guess I’ll be a Philadelphian or whatever so luckily that was the case and we went and did a workout and you know everything worked well until the first game…Sh*t was real like sh*t, like I was supposed to come in and be LeBron James! I had to go talk to my sponsors, I got partners and I didn’t have them by the second year.
Turner turned in a solid NBA career, but not when viewed from the lens of what a No. 2 overall pick should have been like. The 2010 NBA Draft yielded All-Stars drafted behind him like DeMarcus Cousins, Paul George, and Gordon Hayward, while he never became more than a marginal starting-caliber point forward who failed to adapt to the modern game.
Him expecting some LeBron James treatment anywhere between his rookie and sophomore years is an overestimation of grand proportions. Say what you will, but no one probably pegged him to be of that ilk just based off his first few months in the NBA.
The 76ers quashed his stint in Philly in regrettable fashion. Ultimately, he was flipped to the Indiana Pacers in 2014 for a washed-up Danny Granger and bounced around the league for quite a while before retiring in 2020.
