What a real Sixers fan should be rooting for

by Mike Prince

So you turn your TV on, see that your team is playing and think to yourself, “hmm I wonder what the score is.” So you put on the game and see that your team is losing. A sense of happiness fills your mind and you secretly are rooting for your home team to lose. You keep it to yourself obviously, and don’t let others know that you’d rather enjoy what people may call, “the victory of defeat.”

Some Philadelphia fans may already know what I am talking about, and why. Yes, I am talking about the Philadelphia 76ers. While diehards want to see this team win every game, that is obviously not even close to reality. For others, the reality is that the playoffs are out of the picture and we are already looking forward to the draft before the first tip-off of the first game even occurs.

The team stinks! There is no superstar. They can’t get make the playoffs. There is only one option: lose as many games as possible so you can get the highest draft pick possible.
That’s the scenario that most fans secretly think to themselves. There are great talents coming out of high school for one year of college before going to the NBA, so why not lose on purpose and try and get them before anyone else does?

Now, here’s the problem. For a fan, no one wants to be criticized for their loyalty to their team. I personally know that I love the 76ers as much as the next guy who may have season tickets and sit courtside and never miss a game. But the reality is such, we are going nowhere!

So why not pretend like we live in Montreal in the ‘90s and we don’t care whether our teams win or not, because all we have is the future.

Or, we could go the other way. Enjoy watching our team be bad enough to just miss the playoffs, but just be good enough to miss out on the lottery. This way, maybe we can get the 14th pick in the draft and get another Speedy Claxton. That’s all this team needs. Another sub-par player that will average five points a game only before being traded two years later and never being heard from again.

Besides, the Sixers are horrible when it comes to draft day. Maybe if we actually had a top-three pick, we could get a potential superstar, rather than someone no one has even heard of who will average fewer points than Shawn Bradley averaged posterizations per game during his underachieving career.

So for now, I know I am going to sit home and root for us to lose 60 games. Does that make me not a fan? In some people’s eyes, maybe. But I don’t care. I’m all for building a good team and then I’ll be sitting right next to that season ticket holder when we actually have a team worth watching.

Maybe that way we can draft the next LeBron James and not the next Mark Hendrickson. You may ask – who is he? My point exactly.

One final note: As a diehard Philadelphia sports fan, I would like to thank the Sixers organization for making my entire rant a non fail-proof theory. I’d like to thank them along with Sharone Wright, Shawn Bradley and Keith Van Horn for their hard work.