The Philadelphia 76ers saved their season from the brink of elimination against the Boston Celtics. An overtime Game 4 tied up the series and gave them a chance to keep their season alive past the second round. After the Sixers' frantic win, Stephen A. Smith is relitigating a failed decision from their past the involved Jimmy. Butler.

Letting go of Butler cost the Sixers a potential championship, according to the ESPN hot-take artist.

“If the Sixers don't win, one of the biggest regrets they will live with in franchise history is letting Jimmy Butler walk out that door,” he said. “If Jimmy Butler had never departed from the Philadelphia 76ers, the 76ers would have been back in the Finals and they probably would win the title.”

While Stephen A. is not wrong that the Sixers would be in a better spot with Butler, it's odd for that to be the talking point following a game where James Harden had another remarkable performance and Philly and Boston booked two more games of the series. Nonetheless, he did so as Butler leads the Miami Heat to a second-round series lead against the New York Knicks.

Kendrick Perkins chimes in to say that the Sixers chose Tobias Harris over Butler, which isn't totally correct. Philly chose to target Al Horford to complement Joel Embiid (as a great backup center) and Ben Simmons (as a floor spacer) and add Josh Richardson in the trade that sent Butler to Miami to improve their defense at the shooting guard spot. The front office also, of course, re-signed Harris to a max contract.

Butler's famous shout from last year's playoffs that the Sixers chose Harris over him gets it wrong: the Sixers chose Simmons over him and added Horford in his place. Keeping Butler could have created more tension between him, head coach Brett Brown and an ascending star in Simmons. The team didn't want to be in a situation of choosing one guy over the other. Plus, Butler was seen at the time as having a nuclear personality that ruins teams.

Of course, with hindsight, it's extraordinarily obvious that Butler has been way more valuable to winning than Brown, who was fired after the subsequent season, or Simmons, who…yeah. You would be hard pressed to find a Sixers fan who doesn't wish the team had found away to keep Butler. A tandem of him and Embiid would have been great one that could have easily gotten he Sixers into at least the Eastern Conference Finals by this point.

Stephen A.'s point will be more topical of the Sixers and Butler's Heat see each other in the next round of the playoffs.