Hal Greer Stayed. In His Last Sixers Season, He Ended Up on the Bench.

By the time the Philadelphia 76ers finished with nine wins in 1972–73, Hal Greer had occupied almost every kind of place a player could hold in the franchise’s history. He had come with the team from Syracuse. He had been a star on its championship team. He had remained as other pieces of that team disappeared. In his final season, he appeared in 38 games, averaged 5.6 points and, according to the NBA’s account of his career, also served as an assistant coach.

It sounds like a natural transition: a veteran lending his knowledge from the bench as his playing days drew to a close. Greer did not remember it as the beginning of a coaching career. Looking back in a 1980 Associated Press interview, he called that last Sixers season “a disaster.” Though he had been “always a team player,” he said, he “never got a coaching chance.”

Original editorial illustration for Hal Greer Stayed. In His Last Sixers Season, He Ended Up on the Bench.; interpretive, not historical documentation.

Those remarks do not tell us precisely what Greer did as an assistant or what opportunities he was offered. They do make the familiar story of the worst Sixers season more complicated. The club did not merely lose 73 games while an old champion watched. Its longest-serving player was nearing the end of his career, spending much of it off the court, and would later describe a gap between being given a role and being allowed to grow into the next one.

Greer’s presence in Philadelphia had once represented continuity of a different sort. Drafted by the Syracuse Nationals, he stayed with the franchise when it moved to Philadelphia and became the 76ers. He was not a late addition to the great team of 1966–67. He was one of its central players, part of a group that went 68–13 in the regular season and won the NBA title by beating the San Francisco Warriors in six games. Greer averaged 27.7 points in that championship playoff run.

That team’s record still stands beside the 1972–73 record in franchise history, inviting a stark comparison: 68–13 and 9–73, championship and collapse. For Greer, however, the distance between them was six seasons of continued employment, roster change and an aging player’s altered place in the game. The comparison matters not because it turns him into a symbol, but because he was there for both teams. He had helped establish what Philadelphia could be at its best, then remained to see how far it could fall.

Greer’s stature did not depend on one title. The NBA lists him as a 10-time All-Star and a seven-time All-NBA selection. Over many seasons, his name became inseparable from the franchise’s history. By 1972–73, that history could not put points on the board for him. The guard who had averaged 27.7 points per game in the championship playoff run was nearing retirement, and the team around him was no longer built like a contender.

The breakup had taken years. Wilt Chamberlain went to Los Angeles in 1968. Luke Jackson’s career ended because of injuries. Chet Walker and Wali Jones were traded. Billy Cunningham departed for the ABA after the 1971–72 season. Philadelphia had also failed to find a stable new foundation through successive high draft picks. As Frank Fitzpatrick later reconstructed in The Philadelphia Inquirer, the trouble extended beyond any one departure or one coaching decision.

Even the search for a coach exposed the club’s difficulty. After Jack Ramsay left for Buffalo, the Sixers could not secure their preferred candidates. They eventually hired Roy Rubin after advertising the opening. Rubin inherited a roster already diminished from the championship years, but the results under him were severe. Philadelphia opened 0–15. The club used 19 players over the season, an indication of how little settled from one stretch to the next.

Within that turmoil, Greer’s situation had its own sharp edge. Fitzpatrick reported that Rubin relegated him to the end of the bench. Dale Schlueter, a teammate, later said he thought Greer should have started or at least been used as a backup. In Schlueter’s recollection, Greer “never even got an opportunity to play.”

Greer did play, as his 38 appearances show. Schlueter’s words are best understood as a teammate’s judgment about how little meaningful playing opportunity Greer received, not as a literal account of every game. Still, the judgment is revealing. Even on a team struggling to win at all, someone in its locker room saw the reduced use of its veteran as difficult to justify.

It would be easy to make that decision carry more of the season’s blame than the evidence permits. One player, however accomplished, could not repair years of roster decline. Nor does the record establish that giving Greer more minutes would have changed the Sixers’ course. His diminished role matters for another reason: it shows how little room the organization seemed to have for a man whose value to it had been unmistakable, even as the form of that value was changing.

A 20-game losing streak followed the winless start. The Sixers played home games not only in Philadelphia but also in Pittsburgh and Hershey. When Rubin was replaced by player-coach Kevin Loughery, the team stood at 4–47. The season ended at 9–73, a record that has made the club a recurring point of reference whenever an NBA team begins to lose at an extraordinary pace.

That shorthand can flatten everyone involved. The 1972–73 Sixers were not just a number at the bottom of a standings page. They were a changing group of players working through a season that offered few victories and little stability. Greer’s experience was not identical to that of a younger teammate trying to establish himself or a newly arrived player trying to learn where he fit. He had already done what every team hopes its players will do: stay, excel and help win a championship. Now he was nearing the end of his playing career on a club unable to find its way forward.

The assistant-coach designation makes his final year particularly hard to summarize. On paper, he had a place in coaching. In his later account, he had never received a coaching chance. Both can be true. A title does not tell us what authority a person had, what duties he performed or whether anyone regarded that position as a path to another job. Greer’s 1980 words should not be treated as a detailed account of day-to-day life in 1972–73. They do tell us that, seven years later, he still distinguished between holding a title and getting an opportunity.

By then he was seeking one elsewhere. In 1980, Greer took a job as coach and general manager of the Philadelphia Kings in the Continental Basketball Association. He described it as a chance to gain professional coaching experience. His pursuit of that work puts the end of his Sixers tenure in a different light. Retirement from playing had not ended his interest in basketball or settled what he wanted to contribute. The man who had spent his final NBA season with an assistant’s title was still looking for a place to learn and work as a coach.

None of this requires a claim that the Sixers caused everything that followed in Greer’s coaching life. The available accounts do not establish that. Nor do they explain why he stayed through the team’s decline. Loyalty is an appealing answer, but remaining with a franchise is not proof of a private motive. What can be said is simpler and, in its way, more striking: Greer stayed. He was there for the championship, there through the losses, and there when the franchise’s worst season brought his playing career to a close.

The nine wins will always be the easiest fact to retrieve about the 1972–73 Sixers. Greer’s place in that season asks for a second look. He was not merely a reminder of how good Philadelphia had once been, or a famous name attached to a terrible record. He was a working basketball figure whose established role was disappearing and whose hoped-for next role, by his own later account, had not truly begun.

In 1967, the Sixers had a clear use for Hal Greer: they needed him on the floor as they won a title. Six years later, he was still with them, but his place was far less clear. The distance between those two seasons is measured in wins and losses. It is also measured in the difference between keeping someone close to the game and giving him a chance to take part in what comes next.