The Sixers Have Ruined Basketball for Me
I still care about our team. The Sixers have basically ruined everything else basketball for me, but they haven't totally ruined The Sixers so far.
Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and writes 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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When I was a younger man, rediscovering pro sports as an undergrad, I inhaled the NBA whole. I would tape up to 10 games a night and speed through as many of them as I could the next morning. I rooted for some players and teams, against others, but I cared about all of them in some way. I bought jerseys and hats for all kinds of teams. I loved the sport, the league, the culture. On my spring break as an NYU senior in 2008 -- presumably while other folks were out doing senior spring break shit -- I got my wisdom teeth taken out and spent a week on my parents' couch, high as a kite on vicodin and watching Western Conference basketball: the post-We Believe Warriors, the late-stage Seven Seconds or Less Suns, the Lakers just after the Pau Gasol trade. I am not exaggerating when I say it's one of the happiest memories I have.
All of this is foreign to me now. After 15 years, I still enjoy watching some amount of basketball at some times in some contexts, but my tolerance for doing it to excess is almost entirely gone. It's mostly a second-screen activity to me now, something to do while I'm doing something else. And every year my appetite for it lessens; every year it's tougher for me to get excited about the next season once the previous season ends. There's a lot of reasons for this: me getting older, the league heading in some directions I don't care for, my moving in with another person who's significantly less interested in watching 20 hours of basketball a day than I used to be. But the biggest reason is, of course, the Philadelphia 76ers.
I hesitated to write this article -- not because I feel like it's too dramatic or depressing (lol), but because I was fairly convinced I must have written it already during a previous offseason. Close, but not quite: Two springs ago, I wrote that the Sixers had ruined *the rest of the NBA playoffs* for me once they'd been eliminated. Just a year and a change later, I look back at May 2022 AU with a blank expression and go, "OK....and?" It's hard for me to remember a time now where that wasn't the case; the last five years of brutal Sixers postseason eliminations leave me in a fog when it comes to recalling specifics about anything that happened in the series that followed. I was a sweet summer child to have looked askance at the Sixers for ruining a mere month of the basketball year for me; now I realize they've taken me out for pretty much the whole calendar.
Case in point: Team USA recently embarrassed themselves in the FIBA Basketball World Cup, losing both the semi-finals game to eventual champions Germany and the bronze-medal game to our Canadian neighbors to the north. Or so I hear, anyway -- I didn't watch a second of the tournament. I couldn't even tell you most of the dudes who were on the team; they weren't Sixers so I didn't much care. The few names that I did note in passing were all dudes who fell into one of the three categories: guys who I hate for what they've done against the Sixers, guys who I hate because the Sixers could have had gotten them somewhere along the line but didn't, and guys who I hate because they've never played that well against the Sixers and are therefore total frauds. That's basically the entire NBA to me at this point. DeMar DeRozan is still OK I guess.
It's not even just the NBA. I can't remember the last men's college basketball game I watched; even March Madness holds zero appeal to me anymore. I used to watch mostly for prospect purposes, but the Sixers aren't getting the top lottery guys these days and the chances of me catching any of their eventual second-rounders or undrafted pickups is too slim to bank on. I did actually get very into the WNBA about a half-decade ago, and this summer I planned on watching a lot of the New York Liberty -- technically my current home team -- as they rose to a league superpower. But I haven't quite been able to get there, the recent wounds from caring about a professional basketball team still feeling just a little too fresh. The only non-Sixers basketball of the last year that I've genuinely enjoyed or been excited by has been Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese and the women's college Final Four; I guess that's far removed enough from the Sixers experience that I can still find dry-enough terrain to get a fire started. For now anyway. Ask me again next summer.
I still care about our team. The Sixers have basically ruined everything else basketball for me, but they haven't totally ruined The Sixers so far. This has been my toughest offseason yet in terms of getting back on the trolley just because usually I find my way back to the team by finding my way back to Joel Embiid. This year I haven't totally been able to shake that Game 7 and his shrugging postgame attitude about it yet -- nor can I see a way towards a better future with him as long as the James Harden situation remains unresolved. But I'll get there. Tyrese Maxey, Paul Reed, Nick Nurse and Furkan Korkmaz's size 22s will all help. I don't plan on being this much of a bummer all season; if anything, it's usually my role to go the other way with it. I'll enjoy watching this team play basketball again.
They're probably the only ones though. I'll end up watching some other NBA games for fantasy, standings-watching or score-settling purposes. Maybe at some point I'll find a shady co-worker to score me some pills, then punch myself in the mouth and try to recreate the halo of that magical 2008 spring break. But otherwise, those days of me being deeply emotionally invested in a Spurs-Mavs game because it is NBA basketball and hey isn't NBA basketball great are gone for me, likely never to return. It's a part of The Process I never realized I was trusting, and it's way too late for me to go back now.