Raymond Lewis was once a first-round draft pick by the Philadelphia 76ers. But Lewis never actually played for the Sixers, or even in the NBA at all. A new documentary explores a legacy that’s all but forgotten.
Like Joel Embiid, Charles Barkley, Allen Iverson, Darryl Dawkins, Billy Cunningham, and other NBA legends, Raymond Lewis was once a first-round draft pick by the Philadelphia 76ers. But Lewis never actually played for the Sixers, or even in the NBA at all.
But Lewis, negotiating without an agent or attorney, agreed to a lowball contract that was mostly non-guaranteed and deferred far into the future. As multiple people in the doc and news accounts at the time say, Lewis outplayed Collins at the team’s rookie camp that summer. Lewis sat out, unpaid except for his signing bonus, for his first two years, and was eventually invited to training camp in 1975. But by then, the Sixers had acquired the likes of Darryl Dawkins, World B. Free, and Joe Bryant , and left Lewis less of an opportunity to make the team; he ended up walking out of that camp as well. Lewis had tryouts with other teams several times in the ensuing years but his lack of a signing is seen by many as evidence of league-wide blackballing.
Polomski arrived in Los Angeles in 2014 . He and Prator connected around then and started doing interviews, speaking with then-Sixers coach Gene Shue, some old friends, as well as ex-Laker Michael Cooper. “We knew we had a story just from those interviews,” Polomski said. What was challenging, however, was finding footage. Polomski said they had no video of Lewis playing, since high school and college programs in the 1970s didn’t typically preserve game footage.
“I think that it was… an extraordinary confluence of events that created this scenario,” Polomski said. If a variety of factors had been different, from Lewis being drafted to a different team, to ABA being an option for him, to if Lewis had an agent, Lewis’ story may have turned out very differently.
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