I Will Always Be a Regular Season Bitch
Give me the Regular Season Sixers and blast the Meredith Brooks.
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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Seemingly no matter the sport, people are always complaining about the regular season being too long. Baseball they might have a point, football, the more we know about the sport and the league the more you could probably argue even one game is too long. But basketball, I never saw it. 82 games? That's less than 22.5% percent of the calendar, not even 1 out of every four days. I don't even know what I do those other 283 (sometimes 284!) days of the year; I practically had an existential crisis last week when I had to go three-and-a-half days in between early Sunday and Wednesday night games. You could call me a loser for being this emotionally dependent on Sixers basketball and you'd probably be at least partly right, but by most standards I live a relatively full life -- I have a full-time, non-hoops job that I'm passionate about, a girlfriend I love who loves me, and a social life that rates somewhere north of Totally Pathetic in one of the greatest cities in the world. Still, too many itchy hours without them and I start watching Sixers reruns to feel slightly less adrift. It is what it is.
On a recent Ricky pod, Mike provided the rallying cry for a new era of Philadelphia 76ers basketball: "I'm not a regular season bitch. I'm a playoff motherfucker." The implication, as more or less directly stated before and after: With a still-elite James Harden now joining an ascendant Tyrese Maxey and an already-so-there Joel Embiid, the Sixers are now true championship contenders as they have never been previously, and it's time to put away childish concerns -- like about a home-and-home against the putrid Knicks in early March -- and retrain our focus to what really matters: the season that comes after the regular season.
Fine. Fair. If Mike can do it, I'm happy for him. He's earned the right, and it's gonna look great on the T-shirt. I won't be buying one, though, because I couldn't possibly wear it without feeling like a total hypocrite. I don't know if I'll ever be a playoff motherfucker, but I do know that I will never not be a regular season bitch.
Honestly, legit regular season basketball is actually one of the less-demeaning things I'm a bitch for. The preseason? Summer League? Garbage time when up 30? Garbage time when down 30? All still life-or-death. Protect that scoring differential, Isaiah Joe, and don't you dare let me see you start to dribble out the clock when there's still a good half-minute of potential game action remaining. I would probably still rank that Vegas game that the Too Good For Summer League Sixers dropped in heartbreaking fashion to the Timberwolves as one of the 10 most painful sports losses of my adult life. (Top 20, definitely.) Compared to all of that, hinging my weekend on a back-to-back against playoff-bound Cleveland and Miami teams probably doesn't seem so bad.
Or maybe it still does, which is also OK. Mike is right that objectively speaking, the Sixers have a lot less to gain the remainder of this regular season than they have to lose. The Sixers have proven they're already superdope with Harden in tow, and that anyone who expended energy predicting otherwise should go kick rocks. Embiid is the clear MVP frontrunner; as awesome as Jokic has been, he probably can't take it from Jo at this point unless our guy basically hands it off to him. East seeding doesn't much matter at this point; trying to duck all the teams we don't want to play would be like playing Stratego against someone who was actually good at Stratego. Joel needs some rest, Harden needs some quality time, the young guys need a chance to show they can do this shit better than the super-old guys. All the Sixers can do by going hard the rest of the regular season is hurt themselves, both literally and figuratively.
And yet, I insist that they win absolutely every game remaining. Sorry. To quote the guy coming to town this Thursday -- no, not that guy, the other one -- there's No relax in this line of work. I'm on 10 from when the opening tip goes up on the regular season (or really a couple seasons before the regular one) until the second the team gets eliminated. Harden needs half a back-to-back off to rest his hammy? Embiid wants to build in some DNP - Too Goods into his March schedule to help get his mind and body right? Do what you gotta do, just don't tell me about it until the last possible second. My reaction to the Sixers playing any game at anything less than full throttle will never be positive, and I will never be able to downturn my personal investment consequently. I can acknowledge and accept a lost season before the fact -- do it happily, in fact -- but never a lost game. Unhealthy no doubt, but that's what fandom is to me. You relax!!
Playoff basketball is great, and having a real chance to do very well in the second season (really the fourth or fifth season) is not something I take for granted by any means -- and I will not insult anyone reading by pretending like my memories of last year's Sixers are more about the sunshine, lollipops and rainbows of their 49-23 regular season than they are about the Lars Von Trier epic of their 3-4 second round defeat. But I can't go all-in emotionally on this year's or any other year's Playoff Sixers, because that shit is not guaranteed. It's tough and it's unpredictable and it's small fucking sample size, and it's just bad business and worse math to sacrifice a guaranteed 82 games' worth of just about anything for something that can be over in as few as four. I placed as low and can't-miss a spiritual wager as I possibly could afford to before last year's postseason run and it still nearly ruined me when we came up snake eyes at the table. The playoffs really can't be all it's about for me; I'm just not built to be that kind of motherfucker.
No, give me multiple first-quarter Tobias post-ups to try to get him going. Give me Harden waiving off Embiid because he wants one more shot at moving up the record books tonight, dammit. Give me Starter Furkan because, well, gotta try something with Furkan. Give me rooting for the Magic to keep it just close enough in the fourth quarter that Joel has to come back in and finish off his 50-piece. Give me getting pissy at the not-Center fans every time they cheer louder for saving 99 cents off a middling fast food desert over a big shot or cool dunk. Give me Tyrese hollering at the officials after a haywire fast break as he wonders when, when he's finally gonna start getting that whistle. Give me a DeAndre Jordan/Basketball Paul frontcourt at some point, why not. Give me yelling at my TV for a spot-minuted Isaiah Joe to MAKE THIS SHOT COME ON ISAIAH YOU'VE GOT TO HIT THIS ONE THIS ONE TIME. Give me the Regular Season Sixers and blast the Meredith Brooks.