Paul George and the Sixers could be watching his former teams in the NBA Finals. What might they learn?

Fate could have one final insult for the 2025 Sixers.

Nearly eight years have passed since the Pacers traded Paul George to the Thunder, thus creating the first butterfly wing flap in a series of events that has led those two teams to the precipice of the NBA Finals and the Sixers to the No. 3 overall pick in the draft.

That’s a long enough period of time to warrant some nuance when looking at the situation. It’s not as simple as saying the Pacers and Thunder got to where they are because they traded George, nor that the Sixers got to where they are because they signed him.

Then again, it’s not all that complicated, either.

The Pacers are playing in their second straight Eastern Conference finals, which means they’ve been to as many conference finals in eight seasons without George as they went to in seven seasons with him. If the Pacers hold on to beat the Knicks — they entered Sunday’s Game 3 with a 2-0 lead — they’ll advance to their first NBA Finals since that 2000 classic against the Lakers. That would be one more NBA Finals than George went to with any of his former (or current) teams.

The Thunder can make it two.

Oklahoma City is playing in its first conference finals since it began a meticulous rebuilding effort by trading George to the Clippers in 2019. That’s further than they advanced in either of their two seasons with George, who presided over first-round losses in 2017-18 and 2018-19.

The final tally for the Pacers and Thunder: three conference finals, potentially two NBA Finals, in a combined 14 seasons after trading George. This, after a combined two conference finals and no NBA Finals in a combined nine seasons with George.

Now, for the nuance.

This isn’t about George. It’s more a curiosity than an indictment that a player with such a winning profile has done so little high-level winning. Injuries and circumstance are as much to blame as any personal defect. George was a very good player with the Pacers and the Thunder. He would have won a title in plenty of places. He was a one-man band in Indiana. In Oklahoma City, where the Thunder were transitioning away from the Kevin Durant-James Harden era, George was sidled with a Russell Westbrook who had not yet achieved self-awareness. Had he wound up with Harden in Houston or Durant in Golden State, he would have made both teams better. Instead, George moved on to the Clippers, and the last of the superteams. By then, the NBA had changed.

The story of George’s career is mostly a story of an NBA in transition. While he was chasing titles, and teams like the Sixers were chasing the superstars they thought they needed to win them, teams like Indiana and Oklahoma City resigned themselves to building the old-fashioned way. And, now, here all of them are.

You have to be careful when discussing NBA macro-theory. The individual talent is so singular and limited in supply that there can be no handbook for acquiring it. The Thunder aren’t where they are because they traded George. They are here because they traded him for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Go back through the last two decades of NBA history and count the number of players who averaged 10.8 points per game as a rookie and went on to win an NBA MVP. Then, count how many of those players were on a team that thought it was close enough to a championship that it was willing to trade him for a win-now player.

Likewise with the Pacers. Indiana went six straight years without making it out of the first round of the playoffs after it traded George to the Thunder. Sure, you can draw a semi-direct line between that trade and this year’s team. The Pacers traded George for Domantas Sabonis, and Sabonis for Tyrese Haliburton. But six years is a long time to go without hope of contention.

You need to acknowledge all of these inconvenient truths when assessing the Sixers’ current situation. Their argument for signing George basically boiled down to “What else can we do?” It remains a difficult question to answer. Nothing the Sixers could have done with their cap room last offseason would have left them any better off without Joel Embiid. You can argue that they could not have hoped for any better outcome than the No. 3 overall pick in the draft.

The big lesson concerns where the Sixers should go from here. It isn’t a coincidence that each of the four teams left standing operates with a similar vibe. They play hard, they play together, they play defense. They are each built largely around one primary star, with a sensible supporting cast filled around them. Each fits the description to a different degree. Each was built in a different manner. But, together, each should throw cold water on the notion that you need two or three superstars to win. That is the idea that George and his suitors have spent nearly a decade chasing.