Only seven teams have ever done this before. The list does not read the way you might expect.
Nick Nurse was coaching his team through a Game 7 on the road in Boston, down 3 games to 1, without the real possibility of losing looking any more certain than it did when the Celtics took that commanding lead.
And yet here the Philadelphia 76ers are, standing in territory that almost no team at their seeding has ever occupied in the history of this league.
The Sixers are a 7 seed in the conference semifinals.
Go back through four decades of NBA playoff history and you will find fewer than ten teams that can say the same thing.
Since the league expanded its playoff bracket to 16 teams in 1984, the 76ers have become just the eighth 7 seed to advance past the first round and reach the second stage of the postseason.
The other seven did not do particularly well once they got there. Understanding their stories tells you something important about what Philadelphia is really up against now.
The first team to pull it off was the 1987 Seattle SuperSonics, and they remain the gold standard for what a 7 seed can accomplish in this league.
Seattle finished that regular season 39 wins and 43 losses, a below five hundred record that gave no indication whatsoever of what was coming.
They knocked out the second seeded Dallas Mavericks in four games. Then, in the conference semifinals, they knocked out Hakeem Olajuwon and the Houston Rockets.
The Sonics were playing in the conference finals as a 7 seed, which at that point in NBA history felt something close to impossible. They lost to the eventual champion Lakers, but the run itself belonged to the short list of most improbable postseason stories the sport had ever seen.
It took two more years before another 7 seed made the second round. The 1989 Golden State Warriors, the original Run TMC outfit with Mitch Richmond, Tim Hardaway and Chris Mullin, swept Karl Malone and John Stockton out of the first round before running into the Phoenix Suns and losing in five.
The same franchise did it again in 1991, getting past David Robinson and the Spurs before bowing out in round two. The Warriors were building something with those teams, and both runs offered the kind of entertaining basketball that made people pay attention even when the results were predictable.
The 1998 New York Knicks were next. Allan Houston hit the shot that everyone remembers in Miami, the running floater that bounced twice and dropped to seal one of the most famous first round series in playoff history.
New York beat the Indiana Pacers in the second round that same year, but this was actually an 8 seed team, not a 7.
The Knicks had done it the year before as a 7 seed, beating the Miami Heat in five games before losing in the conference semifinals. It is a distinction worth noting.
San Antonio entered the 2010 playoffs as a 7 seed having won 50 games during the regular season, which says more about the Western Conference that year than it does about the Spurs themselves.
They beat Dallas in six games, which qualified as a genuine upset at the time. Then Phoenix swept them in the second round and that was that.
Then came the team that redefined what this run could look like.
The 2023 Los Angeles Lakers, with LeBron James at 38 years old and Anthony Davis playing like a man possessed, came through the play-in tournament as a 7 seed and proceeded to beat the Memphis Grizzlies, then beat the Golden State Warriors in the conference semifinals, then lose to Denver in the conference finals. Two series wins as a 7 seed. The furthest any 7 seed had gone since Seattle in 1987.
The Lakers made believers out of people who had stopped believing, and the run lit up sports television for six straight weeks.
Two years later, the 2025 Golden State Warriors did what last year’s version could not, also sneaking through the play-in and into the second round before their own postseason ended.
That brings the count to seven. And now Philadelphia makes eight.
What separates the 76ers from every team on that list is the manner in which they got here.
The others all advanced through relatively straightforward first round series, winning from ahead or hanging on at the end.
The Sixers trailed 3 games to 1 to the second seeded Boston Celtics, a team they had not beaten in a playoff series since 1982.
They were without Joel Embiid for the first three games after he underwent an emergency appendectomy. They lost Game 1 by 32 points. They were 14.5 point underdogs going into Game 2.
And they won four straight.
Embiid returned and averaged 34 points per game in the final four contests. Tyrese Maxey played the best basketball of his career when the stakes were at their highest, and a 20 year old rookie named VJ Edgecombe proved that whatever experience is supposed to give you in situations like this, some players are simply born with it instead.
The 76ers became the 14th team in NBA history to come back from a 3-1 series deficit. They ended a 44 year Celtics curse in the most emphatic possible fashion.
And they did it on the road, in Game 7, in a building that had swallowed them alive in every meaningful moment since the Reagan administration.
Now they face the New York Knicks.
New York beat Atlanta in six games during round one, including a 140 to 89 blowout in Game 6 that belongs on a list of most lopsided playoff wins ever played.
The Knicks then opened the conference semifinals against Philadelphia by shooting 63 percent from the field and 51 percent from three, winning 137 to 98. Jalen Brunson scored 35 points.
The Sixers looked exactly like a team that had spent everything it had just getting to this stage.
The historical record for 7 seeds in the conference semifinals is not encouraging. Of the seven teams to reach this stage before Philadelphia, only two won a single series once they arrived.
Everyone else went home in round two. No 7 seed has ever won a conference championship. No 7 seed has ever played in the NBA Finals.
But none of them beat the Boston Celtics in Game 7 on the road after trailing 3-1 to get here either.
The 76ers are not the 1989 Warriors or the 2010 Spurs. They are a team with two All-NBA caliber players, a coach who has won at every level, and a rookie who has already done things that rookies are not supposed to do in playoff basketball.
The ceiling question is real and the history does not offer much comfort. But the 76ers have spent this entire postseason doing things the history said they could not.
There are eight 7 seeds in NBA conference semifinals history now. Seven of them went home without doing much damage. The one that did not was built around a 38 year old who will not see another postseason quite like that one.
Philadelphia has a different argument to make entirely.
Yes. The 2026 76ers already showed the path is possible by reaching the conference semifinals, and the Warriors did it in 2025 as well.
in 2025, The Warriors became the seventh No. 7 seed in NBA history to reach the semifinals.
