The Sixers, Mostly, Just Make Me Mad

It’s Oscar season, so I’ve had movies on my mind as of late. One of my favorite films of this decade is Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days. With a loaded soundtrack, it features the Velvet Underground song, “Pale Blue Eyes,” perhaps the greatest song the legendary Lou Reed ever wrote. It’s a song I’ve adored for years. It opens with this verse…

Sometimes I feel so happy
Sometimes I feel so sad
Sometimes I feel so happy
But, mostly, you just make me mad
Baby, you just make me mad

The song itself touches upon a love that can never fully come to fruition, one that is ultimately bittersweet in the end.

That’s how I feel about the Sixers as I grow older in life and with every successive game this season.

I’ve no doubt had fun moments with this specific team. VJ Edgecombe’s early season emergence had me dreaming of brighter days for the franchise that has seen so few in the last 40-plus years. The Joel Embiid experience, when the big fella has actually been on the court, has been revelatory. Who doesn’t want to see Tyrese Maxey drop bucket after bucket too?

It hasn’t ultimately resulted in something fully cohesive though. In fact, it feels like we’re on the final descent of a plane ride that we thought would take us to a championship parade, but mostly just flew in circles, landing us back in the hellscape of mediocrity.

I no longer possess the bandwidth in my early 30s to argue about the Jared McCain trade every second of the day online nor to get bogged down in the minutiae of internal debates that have defined this fan base over the last 15-or-so years. At the end of the day, the Sixers, mostly, just make me mad!

In a cruel twist of fate for a city starved for meaningful basketball, the Sixers were rewarded with one of the most talented players to ever pick up a basketball for their initial tanking efforts more than a decade ago, but, as disheartening as it is, the guy hasn’t been able to completely put together a healthy regular season and postseason enough to carry the Sixers to a championship, let alone an Eastern Conference Finals appearance. I had always held out hope that Embiid would have a 1977 Bill Walton run in him, an oft-injured, but downright transcendent big man who could deliver a championship to his city. It hasn’t happened and feels increasingly unrealistic whenever I think about this franchise. It doesn’t matter if I’m sitting on my couch, at the arena or lying in bed at night unable to sleep. I continue to dwell on unfulfilled promises and, frankly, the feeling that I may have wasted so much of my life in an all-consumed state about the Sixers.

The ups and downs are a part of the journey, sure. When the Eagles won their first Super Bowl, all the heartbreaks and losses from throughout their history only made that final breakthrough that much sweeter. I always expected to be on South Broad Street on one balmy summer night, spraying champagne everywhere and bullshitting about the random faces that populated the Sixers’ leanest years, the Furkan Aldemirs, the Francisco Elsons and the Brian Skinners of the past. Now? I’m just a walking encyclopedia of names that will be lost to history, much like the Sixers’ title hopes in this era.

I thought the culmination of the Process would be a cinematic triumph. It ended up being a film left in development hell.