Six Reasons to be Excited about the 2015-16 Season

For about the past month, there has been a lot of sad and negative vibes surrounding the Philadelphia 76ers. Those negative vibes mainly stem from the team announcing in mid-July that Joel Embiid is going to miss all of the 2015-16 season as a result of a bone graft surgery that he underwent this past week.

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The sadness that spread to fans as a result of the surgery may have been trumped by what followed in the aftermath. A couple weeks after the Sixers announced that JoJo would undergo a second surgery on his foot that they claimed was not healing, Bob Cooney of the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Embiid actually re-broke his foot. Upon the time of the setback, the team claimed that Embiid had not re-injured his foot.

During all of this Embiid speculation, the team has fallen under criticism for offering the ‘Sam Hinkie Special’ to their camp invitees, Scottie Wilbekin and T.J. McConnell. The Sixers are not the only team that does this, as Rakeem Christmas just signed the same deal with the Pacers earlier in the week, but they have done it enough times to gain a bad rap about it around the league.

Some folks around the league are not fans of these multi-year, partially-guaranteed deals because it essentially gives the team full control over a player. People can rag on the Sixers about offering these contracts all they want, but at the end of the day the players are still agreeing to the deals. And it does not even stop there, as more recently the Sixers TV ratings from last year were released and they revealed that an extremely low amount of fans watched their games on average.

But enough with the bad stuff. I am putting an end to talking about the negativity surrounding the Sixers and instead focusing on the positives. We are just a little over two months away from Sixers regular season  basketball being back at the ‘whatever they’re going call it’ Center (can I suggest the WaWa Center?).

This will be the third year of the Sixers rebuild and some fans may be thinking too themselves, “I don’t know how I can make it through another year of 50-plus losses”. But there actually is a lot too look forward to with this Sixers team in 2015-16. Coincidentally, there are six things that I can’t wait to see with this year’s Sixers team.