Who Had the More Soul-Crushing Season, the Sixers or the Phillies?
Let’s examine this necessary question.
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Well, that's it. The Phillies could’ve still back-doored their way into the postseason on some 2008 Eagles shit if they’d won today and both the Brewers and Giants lost — they’re on their way to getting the hard part, with the Brewers and most likely the Giants falling in their respective matchups, but couldn’t manage to win one stinking game in a three-gamer against the nothing-to-play-for Tampa Bay Rays. It's not their year, and perhaps it never was.
A shame, as earlier this month, it looked like the Phillies might have been able to provide the photo negative version of the Sixers' season: a team with middling expectations going into the season unexpectedly overcoming a slow start and overachieving to put together a real postseason run. But in the end, they were just another duplicate shot on the same film roll: a poorly assembled win-now team with legitimate (if occasionally uninspiring) star players, but still too many flaws in construction to actually win now. Experiencing their back-to-back collapses in short order at a time when many of us really need sports to provide some degree of escapism has been like following a shot of particularly unforgiving tequila with a chaser of Pine-Sol.
Which of the two seasons has been a more spirit-deadening, fandom-corroding experience, you may be wondering? Let's break it down.
Late-season collapse: I went from believing the Sixers had a chance to win it all to just hoping they could win a game against Boston in about two weeks' Bubble Time. (Spoiler: they couldn't.) Still, that was largely tied to one big ceiling-lowering injury, and didn't feel nearly as collapse-y as this Phillies team, who still had a 90+ percent chance to make the playoffs in early September, and went on to squander winnable game after winnable game until they just ran out of opportunities to further disappoint. Being the third such September swoon in a row certainly doesn't help the Phils much there.
ADVANTAGE: PHILLIES
Star underperformance: None of the biggest names on either the Phillies or the Sixers had bad seasons, exactly -- just minorly underwhelming ones that failed to show the big-picture development or consistency we were perhaps hoping for. For the Sixers, it was Joel Embiid still struggling to raise either his big-game dominance or his conditioning and Ben Simmons still refusing to expand his shooting range beyond five feet out. For the Phillies, it was Bryce Harper, J.T. Realmuto and Aaron Nola starting the season's first month like three of the 10 best players in the National League, then each hitting the skids from there until their numbers and performance leveled out to about their career averages. Honestly not sure what's worse: not making the leap, or seemingly making the leap and then quickly retreating back.
ADVANTAGE: TIE
Disappointing big-ticket offseason acquisitions: You know the resumé here for the Sixers already: Josh Richardson was brought in via trade to be the budget version of the outgoing Jimmy Butler, Al Horford was swiped from the Celtics for nine figures to fortify the Sixers up front, and Tobias Harris was re-signed for even more to be the middle-man connector on offense. This is one area where the Phillies can't really hope to compete, as their big offseason gets basically came through: Didi Gregorious played a solid shortstop and posted some of the best offensive numbers of his career, while Zach Wheeler was an All-Star-caliber No. 2 starter all season, at least until the 5th inning against the Rays last night. The work around the margins and the midseason acquisitions are both different matters entirely, but the one thing Matt Klentak probably can’t be faulted for was his bigger moves last offseason.
ADVANTAGE: SIXERS
Bad locker room vibes: There was obviously Something Off with the Sixers all season -- likely some combination of Joel Embiid losing his joie de vivre, Ben Simmons not loving being told what to do, and Brett Brown's voice increasingly falling on deaf-to-Bostralian-accents ears. Maybe there was with the Phillies, too, but if so it wasn't nearly as evident from their bench demeanor, post-game quotes or general interpersonal demeanor. Very possible I'm just not embedded deep enough into Phillies Twitter to know about all the drama there though, so if Jean Segura has been sending passive-aggressive tweets about Nola’s late-season nosedive, be sure to let me know.
ADVANTAGE: SIXERS (PROBABLY)
Tough injury luck: The Sixers might not have exactly been finals contenders anyway, but any grand ambitions for them were essentially severed with the news that Simmons would miss the rest of the season with left knee surgery, just a couple games into Bubble Ball. The Phillies had plenty of injury woes of their own -- hardly a coincidence that the Phillies' September tailspin began with the lineup losing Realmuto, Rhys Hoskins and a couple other game-to-gamers, while 2/5 of the starting rotation in Jake Arrieta and Spencer Howard left starts with non-contact injuries and were little heard from again. But every baseball team has a handful of such injuries, especially this year, and the Phils should've been equipped to at least tread water with the guys they lost. There was just no replacing Simmons.
ADVANTAGE: SIXERS
Crucial flaw in construction: The Sixers attempted to play high-level, winning basketball in 2020 essentially without shooters -- an oversimplification, perhaps, but one close enough to the truth to still be largely stupefying. That was bad, but at least there was some thought there, a zig-while-they-zag mentality that would have maybe made sense with sharper execution. The Phillies' bullpen, however, was probably never going to be anything but a tire fire, and it ended up being one roaring and high-reaching enough to offend the heavens. The Sixers still made more total threes than 11 teams this year, and a higher percentage than 21 of them. Meanwhile, with even an average league-worst pen -- and not, say, the worst one of any team in nearly a century -- the Phils probably would have made the playoffs this year.
ADVANTAGE: PHILLIES
Haunted by exes: I counted at one point that at least 11 of the 15 non-Sixers playoff teams this NBA season had Process alums on them, which meant watching this postseason has made all us Philly fans feel like George Strait taking a long and winding journey through the Lone Star State. The Phillies have been burned by a couple old flames themselves -- namely the scorching Sixto Sanchez, traded in the J.T. Realmuto deal when he was just a pup, who now seems all but guaranteed to torture us for a half-dozen starts a season for the next decade or so. But even if he Josh Becketts his way through this postseason for the Marlins, it's not exactly going to compare to Jimmy Butler likely powering the Heat all the way to the NBA Finals, while flashing the "call me" gesture to Joel before every TV timeout.
ADVANTAGE: SIXERS
Forever-impending sense of inevitable failure: At least the Sixers mostly kept it to road games.
ADVANTAGE: PHILLIES
Little hope for the future: The way out from the Sixers' mess is pretty far from immediately apparent, as you can tell from both the team trying through the media to sell us the fantasy of a Mike D'Antoni coaching hire being followed by James Harden's arrival, and a large percentage of Philly fans buying it despite their better instincts. The Phillies might be stuck on the treadmill of mediocrity themselves -- three straight seasons of flirting with.500 would certainly suggest as such -- but there's enough core pieces in place (especially with the emergence of my mother's newly claimed son Alec Bohm) and enough correctible concerns with the bullpen and rotation back-end that with a little more spending (and perhaps a new GM), there's at least the chance of new life next summer. Baseball's playoff randomness and lack of a salary cap always leaves room for hope that a team who isn't in a total rebuild will be able to figure it out. For basketball, and for the Sixers specifically, we're gonna need more than Twitter rumors to find a reason to believe.
ADVANTAGE: SIXERS
YOUR SOUL-CRUSHING CHAMPIONS BY A MARGIN OF 5-3-1: THE PHILADELPHIA 76ERS