PHILADELPHIA — There were extra black shirts packing walkie-talkies and extra blue shirts packing sidearms and just before Ben Simmons jogged out of the tunnel, there were four dudes holding up a yellow rope across the baseline as if the half-empty seating bowl might suddenly surge onto the court. Whether or not the extra ounces of precaution were justified, they did make you stop and marvel at the ridiculousness of it all.
In a building where four of the NBA’s most entertaining individual scorers were wearing basketball uniforms, the only person that anybody seemed to care about was wearing a Louis Vuitton hockey jersey and a hilariously gaudy diamond chain.
Not that the scorn wasn’t understandable. Or even warranted. The city of Philadelphia had waited five months for Ben Simmons to show up for a game, longer if you count last postseason. The gate receipts go to the villains as much as they do the heroes, and the paying customers were not unjustified in their desire to get a few things off their chest. They’d bought the right to unburden themselves, and unburden themselves they did. At the end of the day, though, the whole reason to care about any of it in the first place was the basketball. And it sometimes felt as if everybody was forgetting that there was an important game to be played.
