The most toxic commodity in Philadelphia sports is unfulfilled hope. The 76ers of this era have delivered little more than that. It’s no stretch to say that the collective reaction around here to the Sixers’ 99-90 loss Thursday night and their six-game, second-round flameout to the Heat goes beyond mere disappointment. There’s anger in the air: anger at James Harden, anger at Doc Rivers, anger at Daryl Morey, anger that the promise of The Process remains unmet.
Some of that anger is fresh, a byproduct of Rivers’ arrogance and revisionist history, Harden’s latest moment of postseason shrinkage, and Jimmy Butler’s I-told-you-so taunts at the team that traded him away. Some of it has been building like a river dammed for years, ever since Sam Hinkie told everyone that the Sixers would sacrifice several seasons for the sake of getting higher draft picks, clearing their salary-cap decks, and starting with a clean slate. The view is simple and satisfying: The Sixers are losing now because they aren’t tough enough and lack a winning culture, and those losses are forever linked to, and are karmic justice for, the franchise’s decision to tank in 2013, 2014, and 2015.
But some of the anger is also born of a dynamic that predates Rivers, Harden, and even Hinkie: For the better part of three decades, from the end of Game 4 of the 1983 NBA Finals to the moment Hinkie was hired in 2013, the Sixers were generally hopeless. I don’t mean that they were an incompetent franchise over that entire period, though at times they were. I mean that they rarely inspired any realistic optimism that they could or would win a championship. They won the Atlantic Division twice. They advanced to the Eastern Conference Finals in 1985 and to the NBA Finals in 2001. That’s it. That isn’t much. They spent those 30 years in one of three states: Very Good, Mediocre, or God Awful.
