T.J. McConnell is what The Process was supposed to be. He’s just doing it for the Pacers, not the Sixers.

It was impossible to watch Game 3 of the NBA Finals on Wednesday night, to watch T.J. McConnell inspire the Indiana Pacers and drive the Oklahoma City Thunder insane over his 15 minutes on the floor, and not think of the 76ers and the choices they have made.

No player in the NBA marries the unique and the everyday like McConnell does. In one sense, his performance during the Pacers’ 116-107 victory was nearly unprecedented. He had 10 points, five assists, and five steals, and no one had come off the bench in a Finals game to put up those numbers since 1974. In another sense, his performance was typical. For him, at least.

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Three of his steals Wednesday came when he pulled off what has become his trademark maneuver, lingering in the backcourt to swipe a lazy pass. Two of those led directly to baskets, including one remarkable sequence in which McConnell drove baseline, no-looked a pass to Aaron Nesmith for a layup, then stepped in front of three Thunder players to grab the inbounds pass and, while he was falling out of bounds, fire the ball off OKC guard Cason Wallace to get the Pacers another possession.

The crowd at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis went nuts, just like crowds at the Wells Fargo Center did whenever McConnell did his thing, and that sort of reaction is to be expected. Let’s be frank here: T.J. McConnell is a 6-foot-1, undrafted, white guard with a severe hair part whose NBA career is predicated on his playing harder and smarter than anyone else. The man is a walking, talking, stereotype.

He overcomes that stereotype, to be sure. He doesn’t get nearly enough credit for being an excellent jump-shooter (particularly on midrange pull-ups), for being quick enough to drive past defenders, and for being agile and strong enough to contort his body and withstand contact to get his shot off over taller opponents. Again, what happened in Game 3 wasn’t an outlier: He’s averaging 10 points over the three Finals games, is shooting 57% from the field, and has three times as many assists (15) as he does turnovers (five). But the sight of McConnell playing as he does reinforces every too-easy perception about him. It’s like one of Norman Dale’s kids at Hickory High came to life and started dribbling circles around everyone.

Nobody looks at LeBron James or Shai Gilgeous-Alexander or Anthony Edwards and says, I can do that. But a million basketball fans look at McConnell and say, That’s how you should play. His teammates say it, too. They always have.

“His energy is unbelievable,” Pacers guard Tyrese Haliburton told reporters after Game 3. “You guys know he’s definitely a crowd favorite. I joke with him. I call him ‘The Great White Hope.’ He does a great job of bringing energy in this building, and people feed off that.

“He had a couple of unbelievable steals. In a series like this, what’s so important is the margins. You’ve got to win in the margins. It’s not necessarily who can make the most shots. It’s rebounding, taking care of the ball, little things like that. He does a great job of just giving us energy plays consistently and getting downhill and operating. I mean, nobody operates on the baseline like that guy. He did a great job of consistently getting there and making hustle play after hustle play and sticking with it, and we did a great job of feeding off what he was doing.”

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McConnell, of course, brought the same heavy doses of Five-Minute Energy over his first four years in the league — with the Sixers. “Get guys the ball, do my role to the best of my abilities, and provide energy — that’s pretty much been my M.O. since I’ve been here,” he said in November 2018, back when he was proving that he, not No. 1 pick Markelle Fultz, was the Sixers’ true backup point guard. “That’s not going to change.”

Nope, it never did, and the franchise’s decision to let him walk away in July 2019 — to Indiana, for a modest two-year, $7 million free-agent deal — stands as the perfect contrast to another decision the Sixers made that offseason: signing Ben Simmons to a five-year, $170 million extension. There you have it: the consummate encapsulation of the Sixers’ fruitless attempts to build a championship team. There you have it: the two sides of the same symbolic coin.

McConnell and Simmons, each in his own way, represented everything The Process was supposed to be. The losing would lead, eventually, to a high draft pick who could develop into a superstar. The trolling for talent anywhere and everywhere might net an unknown or long-shot player who becomes an asset or, in the best-case scenario, indispensable.

Only one of those two held up his end of the bargain. Simmons could not shoot, so he did not shoot. Hell, aside from a few strategically edited social-media videos, there was scant evidence that he bothered to try to improve that aspect of his game at all. He was content to do only the things that he could do. McConnell does the things that anyone can do but only so many choose to do. There is intangible and inestimable value in those athletes who possess that quality, and though an NBA roster can’t be made up entirely of those kinds of players, it will be better off for having that element within its locker room and on the floor.

It’s not that the Sixers didn’t see that quality in McConnell. It’s that they decided they didn’t need it. Now here he is, doing his thing in the NBA Finals, his team two wins away from a title. “You look at T.J. McConnell,” Haliburton said, “and his story is unbelievable.” Not to anyone around here.