Nope. It's the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association SPHAs (pronounced "spas"), a team that dominated the sport in the 1920s and '30s. The flashy shooter was set-shot expert Inky Lautman. David was the six-pointed star on the team's jerseys. And the savvy coach was Eddie Gottlieb, who was also the owner of one of the most successful teams in basketball history.

Today, the only thing Jewish about the current Sixer team is coach Larry Brown, who starred on the U.S. gold-medal team at the Maccabiah Games in Israel before launching his pro career. Brown was born in Brooklyn, that "other" Jewish basketball town. But there are plenty of parallels between the Hebrews, as the SPHAs were nicknamed, and today's Sixers.

Both were subject to sometimes egregious racial stereotyping. Once the bad-boy rap star of basketball, Allen Iverson has always been praised, even by his detractors, for his incredible athletic ability and lightning speed. But Iverson has never gotten credit for his basketball smarts. For all his athleticism, the wounded warrior and his Sixer teammates are winning with their heads. And anyone who has followed Iverson's remarkable career has witnessed a tremendous evolution in the quality and selflessness, not just the style, of his game.

But such stereotypes reflect a long tradition going back more than seven decades, when the game emerged from the ghettos of Philadelphia, New York and Baltimore. Then, as now, sportswriters used to go on and on about the gaudy skills of "natural athletes" -- but the stars had names like Dutch Garfinkel and Doc Lou Sugerman, and the top teams were the Philadelphia Hebrews and the Cleveland Rosenblums.

"The reason, I suspect, that basketball appeals to the Hebrew with his Oriental background," wrote Paul Gallico, sports editor of the New York Daily News and one of the premier sports writers of the 1930s, "is that the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind, flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smart aleckness." Writers opined that Jews had an advantage in basketball because short men have better balance and more foot speed. They were also thought to have sharper eyes, which of course cut against the stereotype that Jewish men were myopic and had to wear glasses, but who said stereotypes had to be consistent?

At the turn of the century, European Jews flooded off immigrant ships into the ghettos of the booming eastern metropolises. New York and Philadelphia were the epicenters of the basketball world, with the dominant team, the Hebrews, ensconced in South Philly.

"Basketball is a city game," notes Sonny Hill, an executive advisor with the Sixers who has run a high school summer league for more than 35 years. "If you trace basketball back to the 1920s, '30s and '40s, that's when the Jewish people were very dominant in the inner city. And they dominated basketball."

From 1918 onward, the SPHAs barnstormed across the East and Midwest, playing in a variety of semipro leagues that were precursors to the NBA. In an incredible 22-season stretch, the SPHAs played in 18 championship series, losing only five. In the early years of the Depression, the SPHAs surpassed both of Philadelphia's baseball teams, the Athletics and the Phillies, in popularity.

"Every Jewish boy was playing basketball," Harry Litwack told me a few years ago, before he passed away in 1999. Litwack starred for the SPHAs in the 1930s before moving on to coach Temple University for 21 years. "Every phone pole had a peach basket on it. And every one of those Jewish kids dreamed of playing for the SPHAs."

"It was absolutely a way out of the ghetto," said Dave Dabrow, a guard with the original Hebrews. Dabrow, who eventually took a job coaching Jewish phenoms at South Philly High, died in 1996. "It was where the young Jewish boy would never have been able to go to college if it wasn't for the amount of basketball playing and for the scholarship."

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