5 Philadelphia 76ers Stories That Will Get Old Very Quickly

Oct 16, 2014; Philadelphia, PA, USA; Philadelphia 76ers guard Tony Wroten (8) drives past Boston Celtics guard

(11) during the first half at Wells Fargo Center. Mandatory Credit: Bill Streicher-USA TODAY Sports

5. Anything related to tanking

We get it. The Sixers are tanking. They’re bad by design, looking to acquire good draft picks and building that way. It doesn’t result in good, fun, or even watchable basketball, and that’s not great for fans.

However, the Sixers are not bad for the NBA, they are not an afront to basketball, and they are not morally wrong for taking this path, as many have posited. The 76ers are bad by design, but is that worse than being last year’s Milwaukee Bucks, who tried to be good and failed hilariously? There are always going to be bad teams. That’s how you can have a league with good teams.

Whether those bad teams are bad by design, like the Sixers, or bad by accident, like last year’s Bucks and Cavs, doesn’t really matter. I’d even argue that being bad with a plan to be bad is more fun than watching a team suck because they’re an incompetent organization (See: Cubs, Chicago, and Browns, Cleveland).

This won’t stop the thinkpieces and Twitter analysis of how the 76ers are ruining basketball. Even though the incompetence of other bad teams is probably worse for the league than the planned uselessness of the Sixers, people will still harp on how the NBA needs to prevent what the Sixers are doing, even though it’s probably going to end up being pretty effective in turning the team into a good squad in a few years. This line of thinking is going to get infuriating as the season wears on, and I plan on ignoring the tanking discussion fully.