If you have deluded yourself into thinking the Sixers are a good basketball team, congratulations. I admire your ability to watch a few wins against mediocre teams at home and extrapolate that to mean they are improving.
Blame a few lucky four point plays.
Blame a couple shots that rimmed out.
Blame some lucky bounces for the other team.
But at a certain point, how does it not become evident to everyone who watches this team play that they are simply a mediocre basketball team?
I can't take any more writers or analysts saying "they should have won 6 more games! If you give them those, they're over .500!" Well they didn't win those games. If they won them, then they would have won them. You can play the What If game until you're blue in the face but it won't get you anywhere. All it will do is delude you into thinking the team is something they are not.
No more "what if", no more "so close", no more excuses. This is not a good basketball team. And if you don't believe me, they'll just continue proving it to you.
Games like this are why taking Elton Brand and Andre Iguodala off the trade table is mindless. Everyone, I repeat, EVERYONE is tradeable. They are not competing for a championship, they will not win more than one game in a playoff series, and they should not be in a playoff series to begin with -- in the West, they wouldn't be smelling the 8th seed.
I wanted to see three things coming into this season. One, play Evan Turner as much as possible. Two, play Turner with Jrue Holiday. Three, not overplaying the veterans to win meaningless games. I can't say I'm exactly thrilled with how things have turned out. Tony Battie should never see a minute of game time. Spencer Hawes has no business starting on a basketball team and to do so is just posing like there is a center on this team. Craig Brackins shouldn't have to go to the D-League for minutes when he could be getting 10-15 a night here.
There's no sense focusing on the 10 turnovers the Sixers committed in the 4th quarter. No reason to talk about how stagnant the offense became when Louis Williams was running the point. No point in telling you how the Sixers could set a season high in three's made (11) and still lose to the Memphis Grizzlies (a team with a 9-17 road record) at home. No justification in reminding you they let up 42 fourth quarter points to a below-average offense on the last game of a 4-game road trip without one of their best players in O.J. Mayo. Because I'd be wasting my time.
This is a bad team. A bad team that occasionally plays better than they are because they can outrun teams and catch better teams off-guard for a few quarters. When things boil down, this is an undisciplined team that lacks the talent to overcome their mental mistakes game in and game out. The wrong players get the ball at the wrong time. The coaches matches the players in their inconsistencies. There is one player on this team who could start for a championship team right now, and that's Andre Iguodala. Holiday, Turner, and Speights could become those players, but we may never know because Lou Williams and Tony Battie are the guys on the court with the game on the line.
Keep fooling yourself if you want. I'm not here to tell you what to think. For me, though, every game this Sixers team wins is to the detriment of its future success. And it makes me nauseous.