Around the start of the NBA season, to go with the re-design of Dimemag.com, I was planning on launching a 76ers-based blog as a space for daily rants and observations about my favorite team. Pretty quickly though, for the Sixers at least, things fell apart. I watched this season with a sort of apathy as my favorite player was traded and the top two picks in this summer’s draft slipped further and further away from us under a windfall of meaningless wins. I wasn’t really all that moved to pen something for the blog until this morning when something hit my inbox….

There’s really been nothing more upsetting/infuriating than the swift, brutal decline of my 76ers. I’m not going to document all of the awful trades, bonehead signings and coaching moves of a GM who should have been excused a long time ago, the long history of Larry Brown antics (somehow still able to manipulate front office moves when he wasn’t even a part of the organization! At some point I’ll document all of my grievances with him in this space), trading a Hall of Famer this season for 50 cents on the dollar and then promptly playing ourselves right out of any shot at nabbing Kevin Durant or Greg Oden while every other lottery team played the game to truly better themselves in the long run.

It’s been years of this and yet I, along with anyone else who’s probably ever purchased Sixers tickets, still receives stuff like this in my inbox to try and lure me to open up my wallet and buy tickets to watch an inferior product. Really? Hip-Hop’s birthday is supposed to put butts in the seats?

Or how about this one that i got this morning, pitching me on buying 2007-2008 season tickets? They’re selling me on Joe Smith? Really?? A guy who just last week was openly shopping himself as a free agent? Not gonna lie, that’s borderline insulting.

Maybe I should just take the same stance that my boy Wes took a year or so ago when a member of the Sixers marketing department called him on his cell phone to pitch him a buying a ticket package. Wes basically told him that as much as he’ll always love the Sixers, please lose his number until A) Billy King is gone and B) the franchise is clearly making moves to get better. I’d like to think that Wes won’t be waiting too long to buy tickets again, but really, is there any reason at to think otherwise?

Being a Philly fan though, I’m a glutton for punishment. It’s in my genes. So I probably won’t click “unsubscribe” on the emails from the Sixers, and as the summer drags on into the fall, I’ll be here talking myself into a Mike Conley, Marc Gasol and Aaron Gray draft haul. Conley would be great, if he stays in the draft and if, you know, we actually make the right pick.

And when we don’t? I’m sure I’ll get an email offering me a Hip-Hop bobblehead doll or something with my purchase of tickets that will make it all better.

– PC