On Monday, the Philadelphia 76ers waived the just-acquired JaVale McGee, freeing him up to be eligible to play for a contender after playing in only six games with his new team.
The unforgettable 76ers careers of JaVale McGee and Andrew Bynum
Two great 76ers, joined forever in ignominy.
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Bill Hanstock is a writer, author and Emmy Award-winning producer. He began writing for SB Nation in 2011.
The move brings back memories of another short stint in Philadelphia by a high-profile player: the “lost season” of Andrew Bynum in 2012-13. Acquired in the summer of 2012 from the Los Angeles Lakers for a king’s ransom after an extended period of falling from grace in Southern California, Bynum had serious knee problems and was held out of training camp. He then continued to sit. For an entire year. He never played in a single game for the 76ers, and when his contract was up, he promptly signed with the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Now that McGee and Bynum’s 76ers careers are behind them, we can take a look back and see who fared better in the City of Brotherly Love.
Stats
McGee played 61 minutes for the 76ers over the course of six games, making eight of 18 field goal attempts. He had 13 rebounds and two assists. He averaged 3.0 points per game and 2.2 rebounds per game.
Bynum did not compete on behalf of the 76ers.
Age
McGee’s stint with Philadelphia came in his age-27 season, after a steady offensive decline. McGee has averaged 4.6 points per game overall in 2014-15, down from seven in 2013-14 and 9.1 in 2012-13.
Bynum’s season with the 76ers would have come at age 25. He was coming off an 19-point, 12-rebound season with the Lakers, so hopes were clearly high. The season after he left Philadelphia, he averaged 8.7 points and 5.6 rebounds in with Cleveland and Indiana. He has not played since.
Legacy
In the midst of a season with a sub-.250 winning percentage, McGee’s arrival and departure were both met with a not-particularly-enthusiastic shrug from 76ers fans. His stint was the NBA equivalent of ennui. If JaVale McGee plays six games in Philadelphia, does it make a sound?
Bynum, meanwhile, was a lightning rod for the entirety of his Sixers career. The growing frustration with his inability to play was a very, very sore subject among Philly fans and didn’t get any better after he left. He was lustily booed when he returned to the city ... and that was AFTER the new Sixers CEO addressed the team’s fans to essentially say, “Our bad on that whole Andrew Bynum thing.” Some people in Philly probably have a flight tracker alert just so they can go to the airport and boo him if he ever comes to town again.
Who had the better career in Philadelphia?
It depends on what you value in a basketball career: performance, or notoriety. If you’re going strictly by in-game performance, McGee wins hands down, having played in actual games for the 76ers.
But in Andrew Bynum’s lone year spent just behind and in the general vicinity of the bench, he had people tuning in to see what hairstyle he would be rocking, forced a CEO of a major sports team to publicly apologize for his ever being there and of course taught us you can drive around the city with a gas nozzle stuck in the tank of a Ferrari.
So yeah, it’s pretty clear that Bynum wins hands-down. He’ll be hated in the city forever, but to me, that means he had a more powerful career as a 76er than JaVale McGee will have had.
Congratulations, Andrew. I hope we never forget you.
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