The Sixers Have Ruined the Rest of the NBA Playoffs For Me
How can there be basketball right now when we don't even know how the James Harden contract situation is gonna resolve itself? It's unseemly.
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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Say what you will about the pre-Process Sixers, but they got out of the way early. They might win a first round Game One and give you a little jolt of Well Maybe If Then So, but by Game Six, they'd have restored order and let you move on to bigger and better things. Then, you'd have your pick of the litter: Wanna cheer on LeBron as he tries to finally get over the hump? Or are you invested in Kobe reclaiming his legacy and getting out of Shaq's shadow? Could this finally be the year the Steve Nash Suns get past the Tim Duncan Spurs? Do the Big Three in Boston have one more title run in them? Maybe you cared about these things, maybe you didn't, but if you wanted to, you could find drama and excitement and rooting interest beyond what the Sixers had to offer, without feeling like you were betraying the home team by doing so. They were all in a different galaxy than the Sixers anyway.
Now? No such luck. The Sixers are done and so may as well be the rest of the NBA playoffs. There are four teams remaining and I wish happiness on none of them. The Sixers not only have offered me pretty much nothing but postseason devastation the past half-decade, but they've also left me totally unable to enjoy the rest of the postseason once they invariably make their premature exit.
It doesn't help, of course, that the conference finals -- when shit really gets real in the NBA postseason, often giving us our best and most suspenseful hoops of the whole playoffs -- always has to come immediately after the conference semi-finals, where the Sixers have bowed out four of the last five seasons. Now, that's pretty much all the conference finals are to me: the series immediately after the Sixers are eliminated, where we're all still busy nursing our wounds and fretting about next year and talking ourselves into OK Yeah But If This Then That scenarios for things not actually being as bad as they seemed a week earlier. The fact that other teams are still playing seems annoying at best and downright rude at worst. How can there be basketball right now when we don't even know how the James Harden contract situation is gonna resolve itself? It's unseemly.
And then there's the actual teams playing. I mean, what is there to say about a Celtics-Heat Eastern Conference Finals -- for the second time since 2020? Should we root for the team that's eliminated us twice from the playoffs in the past five years, or the team that eliminated us most recently? For the team that currently employs Jimmy Butler, or the team that's giving Al Horford a second tour of duty? For the team who conned us into thinking that Josh Richardson was a legitimate return for a star sign-and-trade, or the team who generously offered us the rights to take a can't-miss prospect in Markelle Fultz so they could settle for lowly old Jayson Tatum? There is no good result from these two teams playing each other; I can't even enjoy slandering one during this series since it just praises the other by implication. All you can hope for is an unmemorable series that one team wins just because someone has to.
The West should be better -- a vacation series from us for a rooting perspective -- but I can't really enjoy that one either at this point. Why should I root for the Warriors, a team that's already won the championship three times in the past eight seasons, to win a fourth title when we can't even get out of the second round? And the Mavericks -- are we really gonna pull for Luka Doncic, a mere fourth-year-player, to get to the finals when Embiid is technically eight seasons into his career and still has yet to even make the conference finals? Being a Sixers fan in the late stages of the playoffs tugs on all your pettiest instincts, your least-forgiving tendencies: Like Daniel Plainview, you want no one else to succeed.
That's really the bargain all of us have made as Process-era Sixers fans. We've gotten exponentially more joy -- more misery, but also more joy -- out of Joel Embiid and the rest of this Sixers team than we had in the several years of Andres Iguodala and Miller mostly running the show. But investing all that emotion in the Sixers has left us tapped when it comes to the remainder of the league; the idea of finding a second team to root for even temporarily becomes too daunting to contemplate. And we've been doing this long enough that we have some Sixers-related grudge or another with nearly every team in the NBA; at this point I think it's basically only the Spurs and the Grizzlies left among all NBA franchises who don't cause me to reflexively shudder and/or ball my fists at their mere mention.
It's too bad: I used to love the NBA playoffs no matter who was playing, and once the Sixers were eliminated I was rarely more than one column away from making my peace with their mediocrity and moving on to more high-octane hoops. But after a half-decade of heartbreak, once the Sixers are done, so basically am I -- I can't watch either of these series without finding 20 different ways to get Process-mad about it. I'd very much appreciate it if one of these days, the Sixers could actually put together a postseason run long enough for me to have to maintain interest throughout, without me having to seethe at my entire Twitter timeline for having the audacity to acknowledge that these playoffs are in fact still ongoing. If not, just let me ignore the NBA postseason in peace, without forcing me to remember a time when I could actually watch the NBA without the sight of any of the 29 other NBA franchises leaving me screaming for vengeance.