The Best Season Ever
One fan’s look at the joys to be found in being bad.
My favorite basketball team is currently 8–33 and is historically bad on offense.
It has (maybe) 5 healthy legit NBA rotation players, a first round pick who will most likely sit out the season with a broken foot, and another first round pick who is currently playing overseas and not likely to join the team until at least next year.
It’s lost games by 35, 40, 36, and 53 points among other large double-digit defeats and has the worst point differential in the league by more than 3 full points.
So why am I enjoying the 2014–2015 Philadelphia 76ers so much?
As professional sports have taken on similar models to each other—parity, some form of salary control, flattening of competition, national exposure, etc—there are so few true underdog stories anymore. One of the reasons the country galvanized around the Kansas City Royals last year was their status as a true underdog: a sad-sack franchise that hadn’t experienced real success in so long in a sport thought to be dominated by big market teams with hundreds of millions to be thrown around.
The 76ers, in large part due to their stated goal of tearing the team down in order to acquire draft picks and try out as many players as possible, have a motley crew of contributors this year, including more undrafted free agents (3) than lottery picks (2) in their top-8 in terms of minutes played. Guys like Henry Sims, Robert Covington, and others are NBA underdogs, and the Sixers’ season feels, even moreso than last year, like a chance for a bunch of fringe NBA players to try out and show off their skills to both the Sixers and every team that plays against them this season. Chances are that Sims won’t be a Sixer when the Sixers are good. He plays a position that may wind up being a surplus, with the Sixers having already invested 2 lottery picks in big men, but you wouldn’t know it by the way he, or anyone else on the team plays. There are definitely days when the Sixers are overmatched. The offense, especially, struggles to stay afloat in most games, particularly when Robert Covington sits, and I can usually tell within the first few minutes whether or not a game is going to be competitive. However, when the Sixers win, things like this happen:
Very rarely do you get that kind of unbridled joy after your 7th win in 36 tries, and a lot of it is a testament to the coaching job done by Brett Brown and the players’ ability to buy in and take their shot at the NBA dream.
Of course, the team’s current 2-game losing streak has brought about some frustrations on the part of both coach Brown and Nerlens Noel, mostly pointed at point guard Michael Carter-Williams, and that will happen when you lose 2 straight games by an average of 21.5 points, but there’s far less infighting here than on teams like Cleveland, Oklahoma City (poor Reggie Jackson), or even other bad teams.
In a way, many Sixer fans feel like sports parents. Recently, Spike Eskin compared every Sixers game to a 15–2 matchup in the NCAA tournament, and that feels about right. They aren’t going to be in every game, and they’re expected to lose most of the rest of them, but they are going to keep grinding away, unknowns and cast offs, fighting until they can’t any more.
I’ve been a fan of a handful of great teams, but this Sixers team is the most fun I’ve had following a sports team’s season in quite a long time. Dance on, fellas.
