Championship in Philadelphia
With Houston rebuilding their roster, the Rockets allowed restricted free agent Malone to explore options in the free agency market. He signed an offer sheet with the Philadelphia 76ers on September 2. Houston then exercised its right of first refusal and matched the offer, only to trade Malone to the 76ers on September 15 for Caldwell Jones and their 1983 first-round draft choice.
Philadelphia added the Most Valuable Player of 1982 to a mix that already included Julius Erving, Andrew Toney, Maurice Cheeks and Bobby Jones. The result was an NBA championship—and the second straight MVP Award for Malone (becoming the only NBA player ever to win the MVP award in consecutive seasons with two different teams, a feat only matched by Barry Bonds (1992–93) in the four major sports).
Now in his seventh season of professional basketball (fifth in the NBA), Malone led the league in rebounding (15.3 rpg) for a third consecutive year. With Erving (21.4 ppg) and Toney (19.7) making strong scoring contributions, Malone's average dipped to 24.5 points per game, still good enough for fifth in the NBA.
An All-Star for a sixth straight time, Malone made the All-NBA First Team and the NBA All-Defensive First Team at season's end. The 76ers lost only one postseason contest en route to the league championship, concluding their title run with a four-game sweep of the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1983 NBA Finals. Malone averaged 26.0 points and 15.8 rebounds in 13 postseason games and was named Most Valuable Player of the Finals. It was also around this time that Malone began to tutor a young Nigerian big man in Houston by the name of Hakeem Olajuwon, passing on the torch to the future Rockets superstar.
His head coach Billy Cunningham said, "The difference from last year was Moses" (the Lakers had beaten the 76ers in the 1982 NBA Finals). Before the playoffs began, reporters asked him how well the 76ers would do. Malone famously said "fo', fo', fo'" (four, four, four)—in other words, predicting that the 76ers would sweep all three rounds to win the title, in the minimum 12 games. However, the 76ers could not quite back up Malone's boast, losing one playoff game (Game 4 of the Eastern Conference Finals to the Bucks) en route to making Malone a world champion for the first time, sweeping the Knicks and Lakers along the way. This led some to rephrase Malone's prediction as "fo', fi', fo'" (four, five, four). Indeed, the inside of that year's championship ring was inscribed with "fo' fi' fo."
The 76ers' 12–1 record in the playoffs became the second-most-dominant playoff run in NBA history (the 2001 Lakers went 15–1 in the extended four-round playoff set-up). However, this would turn out be the last championship for the city of Philadelphia until the Phillies won the 2008 World Series.
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Famous quotes containing the word philadelphia:
“It used to be said that, socially speaking, Philadelphia asked who a person is, New York how much is he worth, and Boston what does he know. Nationally it has now become generally recognized that Boston Society has long cared even more than Philadelphia about the first point and has refined the asking of who a person is to the point of demanding to know who he was. Philadelphia asks about a man’s parents; Boston wants to know about his grandparents.”
—Cleveland Amory (b. 1917)