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I don't know if I've ever seen a sports team be as invested in its post-game celebrations as these Philadelphia Phillies. Usually after the first couple locker room soaks a team core goes through, they tend to start phoning 'em in a little -- oh hey a champagne bottle wee we're all wet now isn't this fun OK now are there dinner plans I gotta be up early tomorrow. But the Phillies just fucking love celebrating; maybe even a little more than they love winning. Maybe they win so that they can celebrate after. They love beer, they love shirtlessness, they love the world's worst dance music. And they love each other. They love winning not only because they love celebrating, but because it means that they get to keep playing together. And they love playing together.
Vibes are a funny thing in sports. They don't matter until they do, and then they really matter. They're often more effect than cause, but if you start treating them like they're never cause, then the effects can be calamitous. Some GMs, good ones, treat them like they don't exist; others play lip service to them but will never prioritize them ahead of other interests. Rarely do you see a team explicitly constructed around them. I don't know if that was ever the express purpose with the building of these Phillies, but that's where they are now. They'd be good regardless; they have good players and that's not nothing. But the vibes are their superpower. The vibes are what make them indestructible; or at least uncollapsible. The vibes are what made the postseason Phils a hotter ticket than the Eras Tour, and what turned the CBP faithful into the baseball equivalent of Swifties. The vibes are why the Braves will be the betting favorites over them in the NLDS, but no gambler will actually want to bet against the Fightins. The vibes are why the Phillies will play like the best team in baseball until someone definitively proves to them that they're not.
And the vibes are why roughly one out of every four tweets on Wednesday night praising the Phillies for their togetherness and connection also had to take a swipe at the Sixers. Because that team does not fucking love winning or celebrating. That team does not love each other or their fans, at least not more than a team is obligated to. That team definitely has no crowd-activated superpowers. And it's hard to see a way that they'll be able to save or redeem their vibes before it's already too late -- though if there's any chance at all, the two guys in our backcourt will probably have a lot to do with it.
The Sixers' season starts in three and a half weeks, and a lot of us are dreading the date like we have a book report due that day. But it's not because we think the Sixers are going to be bad -- not really. Even with our disastrous offseason, even with the Bucks and Celtics getting demonstrably better, even with us still unsure if our second-best player next year is going to play for us (or if it's actually a good or helpful thing if he does), I can't really imagine the Sixers being worse than fourth or fifth in the East this year. If you told me they won 52 games and got the three seed, I wouldn't be shocked; I'm not even sure if "surprised" would be accurate. Hell, I think there's a world where they end up better than one of Boston or Milwaukee. That's how good Joel Embiid is, that's how much faith I have in Tyrese Maxey, that's how much I think Nick Nurse is gonna get out of some of these guys. The Sixers will win games. They'll be pretty good.
But the vibes will not be. The vibes were already quite bad last year, even with the Sixers entering the year with legitimate championship aspirations and with Joel Embiid still on a mission to secure his first-ever MVP award. Joel looked miserable for most of the first few months, and the energy at the Wells Fargo Center was decidedly mid-tempo. Once, Jo was a crotch-chopping, ear-cupping, shoulder-shimmying crowd-pleaser; last year he treated the home fans like a co-worker you pass in the halls and avoid eye-contact with so you don't have to exchange awkward pleasantries. He wasn't confrontational with the crowds or with his teammates, he just didn't really seem up for engaging with them. He woke up emotionally a little as the season went on, but the vibeless Jo is the one we saw in Game 7 against Boston -- not angry or sulking or disturbed, just kinda not totally there. And the rest of the team kinda tends to follow him; there's only so much fun you can have on a road trip where everyone's wondering why the driver is acting so quiet and weird.
This year, not only is there no reason to expect that the juju will be better to start the season, but there's every reason in the world to expect that it'll be worse. Embiid should be more at a remove than ever following the nuclear results of Game 7. The fans will take even more convincing this year that they have any reason to buy in; it might be impossible to make a convincing case until the postseason. Everyone feels how Daryl Morey failed to get either Damian Lillard or Jrue Holiday on the open market, and instead let them end up with the East's top two teams. Even Tobias seems to acknowledge that the collective on-court trauma of the Sixers is getting tough to eclipse.
Then there's James Harden. Unlike Ben Simmons two years ago, Harden appears to have been able to put his protest on pause for long enough to both attend practice and be mostly normal about it. He's here, and it looks like he'll be here, maybe through the start of his regular season. it's impossible to know exactly what his gameplan is from there -- whether he'll fake injury, whether he'll actively sulk through games, whether he'll just kinda play like himself but with the good parts a little less good and the bad parts a little worse. But the one thing for sure is that he will be absolute vibes anathema. Building any kind of team chemistry or identity or good feeling with Harden present will be like trying to build a canoe with a hole in the middle; you can try I guess but you're not getting far with it. This might be true even if he wasn't very publicly demanding a trade, now that he is, he will suck the air out of every room he is in and just leave everyone breathing toxicity.
If we are able to trade him? Then the vibes lift might be more important than any on-court improvements we're able to make. That's particularly true because our best path now to good (or at least decent) vibes is for Tyrese Maxey to make enough of a leap as a player that he becomes a legitimate emotional bellwether for the entire squad. If he can be a true co-star to Joel on the court, then maybe he can also help shoulder the load in the vibes department, allowing teammates and fans to feed off his always-positive energy and not pay too much attention to the tall guy down low who looks like he just wants to get home and catch up on Paw Patrol with Arthur. He could be a reason why we're not just trudging through this Sixers season but legitimately excited, about what he could be, about what he could do for us in the postseason, about the future with him in the spotlight. He's just about the only chance we've got, beyond Paul Reed turning into Kevin Durant or Nick Nurse becoming the most charismatic Philly-area entertainer since early-'90s Will Smith.
But even in a best-case scenario, they're not going to be these Phillies, or particularly close. I suppose they never were -- it's hard to remember a Sixers team where everyone felt especially close to one another and to the fans, especially because it's been seven seasons since we didn't have one of Ben Simmons or James Harden on the roster. But when your team is young, when they don't have shared trauma with each other or with you, when the future seems brighter than the present, you just don't need as much oxygen for the match to light. When your team is aging, when they've been through some shit (and not gotten stronger for it), and when they're much closer to the end to the beginning, all you can do is hoard what little CO2 you have remaining and hope for the best.
Maybe the Sixers don't need good vibes to win. Maybe they can be officially Not Here to Make Friends and still very professionally and respectfully rattle off 55 wins and a six-game trip to the Eastern Conference Semifinals in May. Maybe the good feelings will simply have to follow from there. It doesn't seem likely we'll get the chance, though: What the Phillies have shown us the last two postseasons is that that kind of emotional investment can be a great insurance policy against underperformance, against coming out flat in a big spot, against really feeling like you left one on the table. It doesn't mean that you'll never lose, but it means you're much less likely to lose with major regrets. Without that, you're just another team in a cold sports world where shit happens, where players, fans and execs all turn on each other, and where teams fall apart in an instant -- and where your fans don't even look forward to watching your 50-win regular season, because they know it's gonna be the other team drowning in Budweiser and Dom Perignon in the visitors' locker room before long.