As the first round of the NBA playoffs gets underway, I’m sitting here with no team to root for and reflecting on how glad I am that the Sixers’ season is over. 

I’m from Philly (well, actually, I was born in Houston and then grew up in a suburb outside of Philly) and basketball is my favorite sport, but this year the Sixers lost me as a fan. I was never a die-hard fan but I used to watch games semi-regularly and would always check the box score after games, but this year I stopped doing even that.

My earliest memories of the Sixers are when I was in middle school and they hit the rock bottom of The Process (former Philadelphia GM Sam Hinkie’s rebuilding strategy, which consisted of blatantly tanking to the point of setting league records for terribleness). Joel Embiid still hadn’t taken the court two years after being drafted due to injuries (red flag, anyone?) and Michael Carter-Williams was putting the team on his back night in and night out. At the time, I regularly tuned into games because, like a Duolingo streak keeps you coming back day after day, I wanted to see if the Sixers would continue their streak of consecutive losses and set the NBA record (which they did, at 28 straight games, and the 2023-2024 Detroit Pistons have since matched).

Fast forward a few years (I’m intentionally skipping past the 2017 draft because it still hurts to see or hear Jayson Tatum’s name): Joel Embiid finally takes the court, the Sixers become a competent basketball team, and Sam Hinkie–the mastermind behind The Process–looks like a genius. In 2019, the Sixers came a Kawhi Leonard quadruple doink away from reaching the Eastern Conference Finals and everyone in Philly thought it was just a stroke of bad luck; that surely we’d advance past that point the following year, and for many more years to come. 

Nope. Not even close. From 2020-2024, the Sixers lost in the first round twice and the second round three times. To try to finally get themselves over the hump, this past offseason they added Paul George alongside Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey. The Sixers were finally supposed to have their championship-level Big Three. 

Nope. Not even close. The Sixers finished the season 24-58, good for 13th place in the Eastern Conference, meaning the Sixers’ are sitting at home watching the playoffs (or better yet in Camden at the training facility). They didn’t even come within three places of making the play-in tournament to make the playoffs.

To quote Jake Tapper, this season was a hot mess… inside a dumpster fire… inside a train wreck.

In looking for silver linings, the best I can come up with is Jared McCain being in the running for Rookie of the Year for a while there (but he got hurt after 23 games). Or maybe the silver lining is that the Sixers will end up in the draft lottery, but I still have trust issues when it comes to the Sixers’ front office and the draft.

All I ask is that Elton Brand makes a logical first round pick and that someone takes Joel Embiid’s contract off the Sixers’ hands in the offseason. (He only appears in like 25% of the games every year, but when he does play, he scores a lot! And he will absolutely never get involved in any situations off the court, I promise.)

Can we please have the 2028 WNBA expansion team, Cathy, so that we finally get some good basketball in Philly?

Yours in hoops,

Katie