Let's Talk For a Minute About Booing the Home Team
You have the right to boo the Sixers, but should you boo the Sixers?
Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and is now writing for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey As Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.
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Sixers fans probably owe Amir Johnson and his cell phone a slight debt of gratitude this weekend. Whether he was really dealing with a medical emergency as Joel Embiid suggested or is still struggling with a 20-year-old addiction to playing Snake, the sight of him briefly fiddling with his phone on the Sixers bench while they were losing at home to the Brooklyn Nets yesterday proved the lasting takeaway for rubberneckers, demonstrating just how bad the game really was. If not for him, that demonstration probably would’ve been us.
Through the first ten minutes of Game One, things were going fairly swimmingly: The Sixers were up 22-19, Joel and Boban were feasting, and D’Angelo Russell couldn’t get loose for anything. Then, the Nets seemingly flipped the switch, ending the quarter on a 12-0 run. By the time that had extended to 15-1 a minute and a half into the second, the booing at the Wells Fargo Center had gotten loud enough that Doris Burke was commenting on it on the ESPN broadcast. When Caris Levert hit a three to make it 18-1 and necessitate a Brett Brown timeout, the crowd’s displeasure became unignorable. The Sixers would fight back to cut the deficit to eight to halftime and two in the third, but never retook the lead, with the boo birds reappearing after misses throughout.
Talking about booing in Philadelphia sports is always going to be a sensitive subject, because it’s so deeply baked into our identity as a sports city. It might be the only city in North America where even a casual sports fan from outside the area can rattle off multiple infamous historical examples of our crowds letting their voices be heard: Michael Irvin, J.D. Drew, Santa Claus. Some of it’s fair and some of it isn’t, but if you were watching the game at any non-local bar -- or just watching it unfold on Twitter -- the reaction was undoubtedly the same: Typical Philly sports fans. It’s infuriating, and pretty much guarantees that any discussion of the matter begins with everyone’s blood already up.
If at all possible, though, I wanna try to ignore our home city’s rich history with the stuff. I just want to have a discussion about the booing yesterday, and why I wish we hadn’t done it.
Of course, I’ll need to start by at least attempting to pre-empt the immediate reaction most RTRS readers will likely have at this point in the article: If I’m a fan and a paying customer, you can’t tell me not to boo. True! I cannot tell you not to boo, and I will not try to. I am also not suggesting that you should be publicly shamed or face any other consequences for your booing. If I am sitting behind you at a game and you are booing, I will not tap you on the shoulder and ask you to keep it down, nor will I ask an usher to do the same. If you read this article and show up to Game Two more intent than ever on booing as you see fit, may our Dark Lord Sam Hinkie bless you and keep you forever in throat lozenges. I won’t stand in your way.
And I should also probably qualify that I am not pretending this is the most important matter for us to be discussing a day after largely getting embarrassed at home in Game One. The poor performances of J.J. Redick, Ben Simmons and Tobias Harris are far more important, the questionable rotation choices of Brett Brown are far more important, and most certainly the health of Joel Embiid is far more important. But these are things far beyond our control as Sixers fans, and though we voice our opinion about them -- loudly -- we can’t actually do anything about them. The booing, we can do something about, if we want.
I don’t like booing the home team. In my live sports viewing lifetime -- which I’ll admit, is not as extensive as many -- I’ve booed opposing players, returning players, halftime shows and commercial-break entertainment. I’m not immune to the joys of booing. But I don’t think I’ve ever booed a home team, because I just don’t see the point in it. To me, it’s ineffectual at best and potentially actively harmful at worst. It makes the team feel shitty, sows discontent and distrust between players and fans, and has never in any experience I can recall inspired a player or team to a dramatic turnaround in performance.
Now, plenty would argue that booing isn’t supposed to be constructive, but merely a form of emotional expression that it’s the right of the passionate fan to express. Fine. Do you think, though, that perhaps we exercised that right a little early in the game yesterday? This started with 10:30 left in the second quarter of Game 1, at the end of a very long regular season, with our best player and franchise leader playing through a painful knee injury, and the team only down by 11. The Nets had called time out to collect themselves down 22-19 with 2:30 to go in Q1. That means that in response to four minutes of subpar basketball, we deemed it necessary to let our home team know just how fucking pissed we were. Seems a little heavy on the trigger to me.
Many will explain the booing as casting judgment, perhaps even righteously, on a perceived lack of effort on the Sixers’ part: They just didn’t show up. This, I’m straight up calling shenanigans on. I’ve said before that I often think we as fans are way too quick to blame poor performance on poor effort, and watching it back after the game, I believe this to be particularly true of that four-minute stretch. It wasn’t a comedy of errors, of sloppy turnovers, unjustifiable shot selection and lackadaisical defense. Embiid and Simmons had one turnover each that wasn’t quite head-smacking but probably could’ve been avoided, and Caris LeVert was left open for that final three in the scramble following a Nets offensive rebound. Otherwise, the Sixers basically played fairly competent basketball.
So what happened in that stretch, then? Simple: The Nets hit shots and the Sixers didn’t. They went 0-6 from three -- Jonathon Simmons and J.J. Redick both missed on good looks, Mike Scott bricked a wide-open shot, and Embiid whiffed on three wide-open attempts. Embiid also missed a short hook, and Simmons sailed an easy layup high. Meanwhile, the Nets went 4-4 from three over that period, including some tough ones: Spencer Dinwiddie pulled up in transition, DeMarre Carroll faded to the corner, LeVert even bounced a pull-up around the rim and in. The Nets outplayed the Sixers over that stretch, but not nearly as dramatically as the shift in score would indicate: Sometimes, one team just makes shots while the other doesn’t, and more often than not that’s really what we’re booing. You can insist that those shots would’ve gone in for Philly if our guys were just more focused on them going in if you want, but I’m not buying it.
And as long as we’re talking about effort, let’s also talk about how Joel Embiid played over that stretch, apart from the shotmaking. He swatted two shots at the Nets’ rim, grabbed five rebounds (three of them offensive), and scored the Sixers’ only point of the run at the line -- after one of those O-boards led to him drawing a hard foul at the rim -- already marking his eighth and ninth free throws of the game. That seems like a hell of an effort to me, particularly from a guy who nearly didn’t play at all because the tendinitis in his knee was so painful. This is one of the five guys we’re booing?
Poll the WFC crowd and I doubt many of them would say they were booing Embiid specifically -- though I’m confident his cold three-point shooting was a contributing factor to the general bile level -- but more Simmons, Redick, and the other non-entities on the court for the Sixers. Sure, but booing doesn’t offer you any opportunity for specificity or nuance: Everyone on the court representing the home franchise gets painted with the same brush. So Embiid walks to the bench hearing the jeers cascading down on him after his hard-fought, tough-luck stretch, and he has every reason to wonder why he even bothered in the first place.
Now Embiid’s a mentally tough guy, one born and raised in The Process and all that entails, and he can probably take it. But not everyone will have his level of perspective -- as we saw after the game with Simmons, who offered a pretty pointed rejoinder when asked about the fan reaction: “If you’re gonna boo, then stay on that side.” This was a decidedly poor response on Simmons’ part: the mature, professional, smart thing to do would’ve been to deflect with some answer about how he understands that the fans are passionate and that he’s as upset about the way the team played as they are. But players are passionate too, and I’m not sure how reasonable it is to expect absolute decorum and empathy from our guys when we’re booing after one rough four-minute stretch in the second quarter.
And at the very least, Simmons’ response -- if not his subpar game on the whole -- should show some sort of demonstration of the fact that booing can have a deleterious effect on the players. Now, Simmons’ quote is a talking point, and his relationship with the fanbase going into Monday night will be as tense and as testy as it’s ever been. Sure, he could’ve avoided it by being less confrontational with his postgame response, but what’s the benefit of putting him in that situation to begin with? Is this really what where we want Simmons’ head to be at going into what’s already looking something like a must-win Game Two?
Embiid himself offered a much more thoughtful, reasoned response to the booing after the game, one in which he did express empathy for the high-paying fans who felt frustrated at the game. But he was also fairly honest about the kind of effect that boos can have on “some guys,” with Simmons likely in mind as one of them:
“It’s tough. You know, I heard a couple people yelling that it felt like a road game. You know, I love the fans, and I’ve never said anything about them -- they all show us a lot of love. I mean, it’s understandable. They come in, they pay a lot of money. They want to watch -- they want the game to be entertaining. They want to watch us win. So I understand why they boo. But the fact that it’s after every single miss, y’know, when shots aren’t gonna fall. They’re not gonna fall, and tonight they didn’t fall... for me, I’m fine. I’ll play through anything. But for some guys… it can be annoying. Just like, every missed shot, and then you get booed. And then so you get the next one, and so it kind of feels like, ‘Should I shoot it? Or should I not, because I’m about to get booed?’ I don’t know, some guys are like that. It’s hard. I think we all gotta do a better job. Us, the fans. But I don’t blame ‘em. We gotta bring the fun, and we gotta make shots.”
That pretty much crystallizes the whole thing for me. Like Joel, I get it. Playoff tickets are expensive, parking is expensive, non-crappy beer is expensive. It’s been a long, exhausting season that hasn’t totally gone the way most of us hoped. This is a nerve-racking postseason series to be facing so early, with high stakes for everyone involved -- including us as fans -- and to have so many of our guys come out flat in Game 1 is exceedingly frustrating. I wasn’t at the WFC yesterday, but I feel a lot of it, too, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t yelling at my TV for a lot of the game.
But there’s a difference between yelling at your TV and yelling en masse at the guys on the court within earshot, and Embiid sorta lays out why that is. It’s not like booing a bad movie when the credits roll: You’re not just offering a review of a subpar product, you’re potentially influencing the quality of the thing while you’re still watching it. Players get affected. Maybe they shouldn’t, but they do. And if we want them to be able to recognize why we boo when we’re pissed off, we should probably be able to recognize why they get pissed off when we boo.
And very likely you read all of this and you still think to yourself: Whatever, I paid for my ticket and it’s my right to boo when I want. Again, fine. You sound a little like someone who says they should be able to recline on a bus or plane whenever they want even if they’re squishing the person in back of them, but there’s plenty of largely reasonable people out there who make that argument on a daily basis, so fine. It’s your right.
To those people, I just ask: What’s more important to you? Your freedom to express yourself at a sporting event, however and whenever you see fit? Or your ability to do whatever you can -- however little it may ultimately be -- to put your home team, the team you’ve likely invested a great deal of time, money and emotion in the continued success of, in as good a position to flourish as possible? Is venting such a necessary part of the live sports experience to you that you’d be OK with it making the team play a little bit worse as a result?
Maybe it is. If so, I can’t relate, but I’m also not a season-ticket holder, and regardless, I can’t tell you what to do. Personally, I’m with JoJo in hoping we all -- players and fans -- do a better job for Game Two.