I'm Not Prepared For The Sixers To Be Relevant Again

Saturday night, the Sixers picked up their 11th win of the season, riding a big fourth quarter comeback and a game winning shot at the buzzer by lead dog Andre Iguodala to a win in Memphis. Coming a night after a surprisingly competitive 5-point loss at home to the startlingly competitive and cooperative Los Angeles Lakers, the team is now 6-6 in December, and just a game out of the last playoff spot in the East.



(By the way, you have to love the Sixes play-by-play guy going off for a game-winner in December. Yes, we're kind of hungry for a decent team here, really.)

If they can beat Miami on Wednesday and survive an upcoming six-game Western road trip (it starts tolerable with Sacramento and Seattle around the surging Blazers, before the auto-losses against Utah, Denver and the Lake Show kick in)... well, shoot, this is the East we're talking about here. While the top end has Boston, Detroit and Orlando to make everything seem a lot more balanced with the West than in past years, the bottom rungs of the playoff ladder are still a complete clusterf***, enough so that even the Knicks keep telling themselves that they aren't out of it. I could easily see 38 wins getting in.

More importantly, the way that the Sixers are playing actually has glimmers of this strange emotion that I'm not sure I'm familiar with. Let's check good old Dictionary.com... "the feeling that what is wanted can be had, or that events will turn out for the best..." yes, that's it! I think it's a Navajo word: hoap, or some such thing. Yes, hoap. With Sam Dalembert seemingly giving a damn, Reggie Evans doing what he will do, Andre Miller giving the team an edge by being an actual point guard (I'm not in love with him, but seriously, he's probably the first actual point that the team had since Eric Snow, and the first that you had to defend since Johnny Dawkins pre-surgery)... well, they resemble a basketball team! Light the candles and slaughter a hog! (Please note that any team where Iguodala, a classic Pippen type to someone else's Michael, is your best player... is a team with no real threat to go anywhere. But at this point with this franchise, and 0-3 playoff run against a high seed would be just fine, really.)

Having noticed this brief burst of competence, I'm sure that they'll go 0-for-6 on the West Coast trip, and that AI will torch them for 50 in Denver, the way that Charles Barkley used to ritually sodomize Armon Gilliam in this post-trade years when he was a Phoenix Sun. And just like in that trade, my Sixers fandom has taken many, many months to come back to any kind of awareness... but it's there, men. Go .500 on the West Coast swing, and we'll talk.