2008-09 News and Features

Former Sixers GM Pat Williams

"Hard to believe, one more game at the spectrum, one more game."

On his memories when he hears about the last game at the Spectrum
"Well I do, I’ve got a ton of memories. I came to the Sixers initially in 1968. That was the second year of the Spectrum. I remember Earv Coslof, the former owner, used to talk to me and he really didn’t want to leave Convention Hall and had to be talked into it. Finally they sweetened the deal and he was willing to leave Convention Hall and come and join the Flyers in the Spectrum. The first year of course the roof flew off. Bob Patron mad a living out on the speaking circuit, telling roof flying off stories. Then the next year was my first year, 1968."

On his first memory of the Spectrum
"Opening night, October 1968. The Philadelphia 76ers and the Los Angeles Lakers. Jack Ramsey’s first game as the coach in the NBA. Wilt Chamberlain had been traded that summer. He returned with West and Baylor to face Dr. J, Cunningham, and Luke Jackson, Chet Walker, Wally Jones, and Hal Grier and the Sixers have a convincing win on opening night. I thought, my goodness, if every night in the NBA is a night like this it can’t get any better then that."

On the Spectrum being a state-of-the-art facility when it first opened
"I remember Lou Scheinfeld was right in the middle of naming the building and there was a huge to do about this incredible name, the Spectrum, which captured all sorts of events. There was no building like it. It was absolutely a Taj Mahal."

His all-time Spectrum starting five
"Wilt Chamerlain, Moses Malone are my centers, Maurice Cheeks is my point guard, Grieg and Andrew Toney are the two guards, Barkley has to be one forward along with Julius Erving, we’ll bring A.I. (Allen Iverson) off the bench, use Billy Cunningham as a sixth man, how does that sound? We’ll bring those two along with Moses off the bench."

On how he starts his second team
"We’ll start Barkley and Julius with Wilt, Cheeks, and Hale Grier. We’ll bring Toney off the bench too. We could go a whole lot deeper. We didn’t get Bobby Jones on that team. He’d make the squad, he’d be on the 12-man roster. When George came in 1975, that was the turning point in bringing basketball back to Philly. We had his draft rights, went through a real struggle to get him signed and to come over from the ABA. But when George arrived in the fall of 1975, it put us on the map. We became a viable entity."

On the Sixers advertising campaigns at the time
"If advertising campaigns are judged by how long they stick in people’s minds, like, ‘Where’s the beef?’, those classic commercials u never forget the tag line. I guess we’ll go down with all the greats in advertising. ‘We’d owe you one’ has been around for what, 30 years. Everywhere I go, nobody in Philly ever forgets it. We finally ran an ad after we won it in 1983, ‘Paid in full’."

On Dave Zincoff’s role in all this
"Well he was the voice of basketball for decades. Every time you go into an area now and hear those PA announcers carrying on and on, blame it or credit it all to Zinc. He was the originator. Nobody could ever do it like Zinc. His rhyming, two for shoe and dipper dunk, and heard of buffalo. Mix makes, he just had them all. He’d work overtime to try and get the right little mix and statement. And, that is the quota. Shooting three-for-two is always a classic. He was just the greatest and we miss him to this day."