Philly sports is in its worst state since the 90s

Hope: it's what every sports fan craves. Especially in times like these in the midst of a pandemic, where you need a little something extra to get you out of bed in the morning; the excitement and hope that your sports teams are good enough to win a championship can bring that additional boost you need to get through the day. This is why, as bad as the 2012-2016 period of Philly sports was, one thing it gave the fans was hope. All four teams sucked at the same time. Yes, it was brutal to endure. There were many losses. But most fans realized that all four teams were in the process of cleaning the slate and rebuilding, so sometime soon all four teams would be good at the same time... if only they didn't blow it.

Unfortunately, this is exactly what happened, sans the Flyers. The Sixers via Bryan Colangelo and Elton Brand squandered asset after asset, the Eagles allowed an organization that seemed unbreakable to be pulled apart at the seams via bad drafting and meddling, and the Phillies' owner got cheap and decided to cut off the funding needed to better his baseball team. Obviously, those are brief summaries as to how we got here, a lot more went into it, and I'll dive more into how we got here and where we are going.

Philly sports sucks right now collectively. The only team that has a chance to bring the city a championship are the Flyers and I don't think anyone would call them the "favorite" to bring home the cup. Still, the Flyers are an up and coming team and deserve the excitement around them. Even with that, only having one of the four teams in the city with any chance to bring a parade to Philly makes for a bleak situation in our sports landscape. Let's go through the teams one by one and dissect what makes it all so depressing, and give each team a prognosis on their future and how long it will take to get back to a championship contending level.

The Eagles:

The Eagles are going to be upwards of 70 million dollars over the cap. They're an old roster. To get under, they are going to have to cut key players, restructure deals which will hurt future cap years, and won't have the ability to do much of anything in free agency. The team has very little young elite talent, if any, as they've drafted one Pro Bowler since 2016. The main culprit of the poor drafting and roster is Howie Roseman, who Jeff Lurie has an unfathomable attachment to. So much so, that he completely skirted Roseman of any blame in his recent zoom conference with reporters. He made excuse after excuse for poor drafting and the organization's steady regression. He refuses to acknowledge the level of dysfunction that has taken place under Roseman's watch. From 2001-2010, the Eagles had 6 seasons in which they won playoff games. Between 2011-2020?  Two. Howie Roseman took over as full-time GM in 2010. Since then, there have been organizational squabbles left and right, a decline in drafting, and no longer being the yearly Super Bowl contender they for most of Reid's tenure.

The previous two coaches had disagreements with Roseman and both were driven out of town. Executives and scouts from the personnel department are routinely driven out, yet Roseman continues to be the last man standing every single time. He is apparently untouchable and infallible in Lurie's eyes. They've gotten lucky in their previous two coaching searches where they targeted Chip Kelly and Gus Bradley in 2013, both of whom ended up sucking with their respective teams. They targeted Adam Gase and Ben McAdoo in 2016, where again, both candidates ended up being total disasters. They lucked into Doug Pederson, and according to reports tried to fire key offensive coaches after the 2016 who went on to be key voices for the 2017 Super Bowl run. Doug Pederson reportedly saved their job, and hysterically, even Pederson's job status was reportedly on the line after 2016, a sure sign he was never their first choice once they settled on him. How can this dynamic be trusted to lead another coaching search? Nevertheless, it is going to.

The culture of the franchise is toxic, there's finger-pointing and a general feeling of distrust among many key people in the organization, leading to multiple leaks out of the Novacare Complex on a weekly basis. They may not even have a QB on the roster who is worth a damn, and they currently have two they invested significant draft capital and resources into. 

This situation requires a multi-year rebuild even if they nail their head coaching search as well as the draft. And if they don't, which is a big 'if' who knows how long we could be looking at to get this team back into contention. If everything goes absolutely perfect, they're looking at 3 years minimum into becoming a team that can make a deep playoff run. At the very least, they will need to find a franchise QB at some point, if that guy is not currently on the roster, and given the Eagles' poor drafting and talent evaluation under Roseman's watch, that is no guarantee to happen any time soon.

Eagles prognosis: 3 years - 5 years/indefinite(depending on how long Roseman remains)

 

The Sixers:

The Sixers are a good team. To call their situation "dire" would be hyperbolic and unrealistic. Their problem is not the quality of the team, it's how far they are from winning a championship. The NBA is unlike other sports. It's one of the hardest to build a team in, given that you need a very specific thing to win and almost nothing else will suffice: top 10 players. And more than one. This is what wins in the NBA, it's what has always won in the NBA. You don't build a roster full of well-coached overachievers and expect to outplay a talent-driven team with hard work. You either have multiple top 10 players on your roster or you don't. And if you don't, you better at least have one of the top 3 guys or you aren't making a championship run. 

The Sixers currently have one top 10 player, and their next best player is borderline top 25. In a league driven more and more by scoring, it's not ideal their second best player is a below average offensive player. In a guard and wing driven league, in the playoffs, other teams with more and better stars at the guard and wing positions, are simply going to be too much for the Sixers. The Sixers are not built to compete with the NBA's elite. The problem is, they don't have a clear path to reaching that elite level.

Once Bryan Colangelo and Elton Brand used up their stockpile of assets, and allowed Jimmy Butler to leave, the Sixers relegated them back into a luxury version of purgatory. They aren't in the Iguodala-led Sixers purgatory, which topped out as a .500 team. The Sixers are good enough to be a top 5 seed and win 50+ games, but are not good enough to win a championship. And in a sport where the cream of the crop almost always wins the title, good enough is not good enough, whether you win 40 games or 53 games.

The Sixers blew an opportunity on Wednesday to acquire one of the NBA's 5 best players. It would have given them a duo of multiple top 10 players that is so critical to winning championships in the modern NBA. As I've written in my previous blog post, that may not be so easy. The Harden market was surprisingly very thin, and to acquire a player of that caliber with their lack of tradeable resources is going to be very difficult. Especially if a bevy of other teams get into the mix for said players. Their most likely options are going to be filling in more role players, which will not put them above the top NBA teams, leaving them improved but still short of their ultimate goal. Joel Embiid is 27 and has a long history of injuries. Who knows how long he is going to play at an MVP level. Big men typically don't play at an elite level for long, so his window might be smaller than fans would want to believe. With the clock ticking, if Daryl Morey can't bring them that missing superstar within the next 3 seasons, we may be looking at a situation that needs to get blown up all over again and rebuild. The prognosis of the Sixers easily has the most variance of any team. If Morey works his magic and lands that player they could win one within a year. If not, who knows?

Sixers prognosis: 1 year to indefinite

 

The Phillies:

The Phillies have the luxury of playing in a sport where wildcard teams can win championships. Granted, you still need great players, but if you get hot at the right time, you can make a World Series run. The Phillies were not the favorites to win a title in 2008, and found themselves on the wrong side of this in the ensuing years where they were among the favorites and were bested by lesser-talented teams.

Unfortunately for the Phillies, to make a wildcard run, you kind of have to make the postseason, and right now the Phillies are a last place team in all likelihood, and at best a 4th place team. The other teams in the division simply have too much talent in key areas, and we don't even know if two highly important pieces in JT Realmuto and Didi Gregorius will be back in 2021. The Phillies aren't great in any one facet of the team, be it pitching, hitting, bullpen or defense. They don't have a stacked farm system to bring up players and lead them on an unexpected pennant run. To rub salt in the wound, all the teams in the division have superior farm systems to the Phillies, putting them at an even greater disadvantage.

On top of all that, John Middleton has shown a total lack of competence running his organization. He's decided to cut off the funds after promising to do everything he can to bring a World Series back to Philly, and that he'll "die trying." He showed no willingness to improve his front office until his team became the laughingstock of the sport, finally hiring a new president of baseball operations, who seems like a poor fit for this current organization that desperately needs a man known to build programs rather than get them over the top. Middleton has shown indecisiveness in handling his front office, flip-flopping on decisions he's made, and sometimes admittedly, allowing fan sentiment to affect his decision-making. He's shown a total lack of conviction in any aspect of his ownership tenure. The Phillies seemed committed to sticking with Andy MacPhail and Matt Klentak... until they weren't. With the Phillies' lack of a deep farm system, it would have been ideal for them to hire someone know to build from the ground up. Dave Dombrowski is a closer. He gets teams over the top that are close, with boom or bust trades. The Phillies don't really have a ton to trade, so he has always seemed like a poor fit, but if nothing else he's better than Matt Kentak and Andy MacPhail.

Still, it's hard to be optimistic about their chances both currently and in future. With other teams being deeper, younger, and with better prospects, and having ownership more willing to spend, the Phillies have the most dire future in Philadelphia sports.

Phillies prognosis: 5 years to indefinite

 

The Flyers:

Full transparency: I haven't watched a Flyers game in 5 years. I keep tabs on them from afar. What I can tell you is they finally found a legitimate goalie, which they've lacked for decades, and they're a young up and coming team with exciting players and promise. Alain Vigneault has pushed all the right buttons in motivating his guys, and in a sport where bottom seeds can get hot and go on a cup run, the Flyers, while maybe not the favorites, are the only team in town capable of bringing this team a championship any time soon.

Flyers prognosis: 1 year to 3 years

The current landscape of Philadelphia sports reminds me of the mid to late 90's. During that stretch, the Flyers were the only team that had a real shot to bring Philly a championship. The Eagles were mediocre, the Sixers were floundering until they got Iverson, and even then took a while to build something, and the Phillies were poor. Our teams were leaderless and directionless and were relying on luck to improve, rather than planning, brains, and competence. Once that dreadful era of Philly sports reached its conclusion, we never really had a hopeless stretch of Philadelphia sports until the year 2012.

And like I noted earlier, even then it was only hopefully in terms of short-term winning. All four teams just happened to be rebuilding at the same time, so you had hope that at some point within a few years all would get good again and be on the rise. But what do we have now? I see one team in the city with a clear path toward a possible championship and a whole lot of murkiness. Much like in the late 90's. Teams that are either totally dysfunctional, don't care enough, or are backed into such a corner where any realistic chance of getting out will require an unbelievable masterstroke of roster moves and luck.

If this city gets one championship in the next 5 years from any of our teams, I would gladly take it, because if things play out the same way they did in the 90's, it could take us more than a decade to get our next. The sports gods need to shine down something on Philadelphia and fast, or we have a rough era of Philly sports to come. At the very least, to give us hope once again.

While not without risk, the Sixers blew a once in a lifetime opportunity by missing on James Harden

Acquiring James Harden was not without risk. He allowed his weight to get out of control just to force his way out of Houston, he stopped caring on the basketball court, and became such a detriment to the locker room that teammates publicly said they don't care if he leaves. James Harden has been known to sometimes clash with teammates, and coming to Philadelphia, getting along with Joel Embiid would've been paramount, as well as dropping that excess weight he tacked on during the winter.

Even having said all that, barring the trade demand from Houston being so extreme, as in something like Ben Simmons, Tyrese Maxey, Matisse Thybulle, three first round picks and four pick swaps; I think the Sixers made a major mistake in not bringing the superstar to Philadelphia.

James Harden is a top 5 player. There are only so many of them available... um, 5 available to be exact. And not only was he available, but he wanted to come to Philadelphia. That is the first time in my life a top 5 NBA player had Philly as his preferred destination, and I'm approaching 40 years old. Those opportunities in this city pretty much never happen. Not only that, but allowing him to go to the Nets strengthens one of your eastern conference rivals, making the road to the NBA Finals that much tougher.

Pivoting away to other stars isn't going to be as seamless as people make it out to be. The Colangelos, and Elton Brand left the Sixers with very little tradeable commodities. They have two significant ones: Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons. The former, you need to keep and build around and the latter, whose value depreciates by the week as he continues to show that he is just a below average offensive player in a league built around scoring guards and wings. The price in trading for star caliber talents is exorbitant. The benchmark was set months back when Jrue Holiday was traded to Milwaukee. The compensation included multiple first round picks and swaps for a player who isn't even close to James Harden's ability.

For the Sixers to pivot and land a guy like Bradley Beal, the price is going to be astronomical. We're talking Simmons, Thybulle, and multiple first round picks and pick swaps. And the Sixers will be operating from a disadvantage this time around given that Harden actually preferred to want to come to your team, and his antics, age, and contract(2 years plus player option) remaining turned off a lot of other teams who had more assets than the Sixers to trade. This came down to the Sixers and Nets - the one team the Sixers had more assets to offer in any trade, and were steal beaten out by them. Good luck acquiring Bradley Beal when teams like the Warriors, Pelicans, Thunder, Heat, Nuggets, Celtics, and others will likely be in the mix this time, while Ben Simmons' value continues to decline.

Then when you look at other players maybe a couple tiers down from Harden and a tier down from Beal, you get to players like Zach LaVine. Guys who are in that "niche" spot where trading Ben Simmons is too much, but you don't really have that other piece to get those players in deals. The Sixers were always going to have to rely on trading Embiid or Simmons to get that missing piece, as their roster consists of very few valuable pieces to bring in an impact player.

I trust Daryl Morey generally. Most people should, he's a tremendous executive. But great executives make mistakes. Daryl Morey pursued Jimmy Butler a few years back, and lost out on him. A move that may have propelled them past the Warriors and winning an NBA title. I think this is one of those times he made a mistake. Arguably the biggest of his career. I think it's highly unlikely an opportunity will come like that again, and I actually think the most likely scenario is Simmons and Embiid remain your two top guys going forward and the team cycles through complimentary pieces every offseason hoping one gets them to a championship level.

NBA superstars at peak greatness when traded very seldomly don't work out. Sometimes the trades work out well for both teams, but not often in the NBA does a top 10 player get traded at a good age and health, and the team that acquires them come to regret it. And I don't believe you necessarily have to win a championship for the deal to work out either. The Sixers wouldn't have just acquired a top 5 player by landing Harden. They wouldn't have just kept him from the Nets. They would've acquired a minimum of two years of hope for a championship the fans haven't legitimately had for 20 years. Think about that. The last time this city had legitimate NBA championship hopes was two decades ago when Iverson's Sixers took on the Lakers. Hope in itself has value to a sports fan and a city.

I don't know about you, but I'm tired of Philadelphia always finishing as the runner-up for superstars. I'm tired of seeing cities like LA, NY, and Boston land big fish, while Philly punks out when the price gets too high, and see the trades lead to championships for their cities. I said it in a previous blog piece: Philadelphia operates like a small-minded sports town. We had our chance to land a big fish and puff our chests out for the first time in a while, and that opportunity was squandered yet again. Such is the present day norm for Philadelphia, it seems.

The Poisoning of the American Mind, Weak American Leadership, a New Norm in America, and What To Do About It

 As I sat in horror watching Wednesday's events unfold at the Capitol in DC, I, like many others probably asked themselves "What could possibly lead to behavior this radical?" Maybe part of the answer at least is sitting there right in front of us and we don't even realize it.

I've said for a long time that social media is toxic, and is creating an army of sociopathic individuals devoid of empathy and compassion. When you spend all your time conversing and interacting with other individuals through short bursts of text other than real conversation, you become detached. Humans were designed to interact face to face. To see emotion in another person's face. To read their body language. It's what invokes empathy and feeling. However, another byproduct of mass social media use is propaganda. Never before has there been a tool so effective at spreading misinformation, and our addiction to these platforms leads to constant inundation of this rhetoric, causing more people to eventually believe a whole lot of nonsense.

Our politicians, media, pundits, scholars, celebrities, and entertainers all push blatant information out into the social media sphere, for gullible people to gobble up. It distorts the perception of reality and creates a culture of anger and division. In other words, the American mind is being poisoned.

Ask yourself would yesterday have occurred without social media? Would thousands upon thousands of people have descended upon DC yesterday if their only exposure to propaganda or rhetoric were sporadic statements by Donald Trump on TV? Or did it take weeks and weeks of rhetoric being pounded into the brains of Americans, not just by Trump, but my other users spreading misinformation and misleading rhetoric 24 hours a day collectively? There probably would have been some people down at DC yesterday without social media, but I highly doubt it would have been the massive sea of people it was without these platforms.

Ask yourself if factions like Q Anon would exist without social media. Without the ability to spread asinine conspiracy theories to a wide user base in an instant, would this entity even exist in its current form without social media?

This goes beyond just yesterday's events. Throughout 2020, the country was plagued with riots, insurrections, and looting. Social media was informing the public that police violence in America was out of control and people of color were being "actively hunted." If someone were to believe that, of course they would be freaking out. They would be terrified, panicked, and angry. The problem is, it's not true. Police violence against people of color was its lowest in decades... and those are just total numbers, not per capita, which make it even lower. The number of unarmed black men shot and killed by cops dropped by over 60% from 2015 to 2019. More bad cops are being prosecuted and sent to prison than ever. Crime in general has decreased, making the 2010 decade(2010-2019) the second greatest decade on record for crime in the United States. That's not to say there aren't racist cops. Of course there are. And when these scumbags are found, they need to be removed from the force, and if they commit wrongdoing they need to be charged and locked up.

Social media would have you believe otherwise, however. When you are constantly inundated with propaganda and rhetoric, you'd believe the opposite to be true. And many people do. A recent poll showed a significant portion of the population believes gun violence in the United States is the worst it has ever been in American history, when that couldn't be farther from the truth. 

Americans have been lead to believe falsities pushed by people with an agenda, and it's causing division and discord in our society. It's causing us to hate our fellow men and women who we likely agree on 95% of life issues with. It's unhealthy and unsustainable.

Weak American Leadership

Just last night, people were pushing a narrative that if the rioters and insurrectionists weren't a bunch of white people, things would have gone differently. Maybe. It's certainly possible. I'm not often one to write off the possibility of something until we know for sure. But maybe not. If you're going to make accusations, at least back it up with some evidence and data to support your theory. I don't know about you, but in 2020 I saw regular rioting and looting with very little repercussion. I saw a police precinct burned to the ground by a massive crowd of rioters of all races in Minneapolis, not to mention countless other buildings. A police precinct, the home base of a police department. Did they gun down the rioters and cause mass casualties? No, they ran away

I see weekly rioting and looting in Portland and Seattle. Again, people of all ethnicities going building to building smashing every window in sight and setting fires in many. The cops do absolutely nothing but make a few arrests, most of whom are released on bail the next day and never charged.

I saw Philadelphia get rioted and looted and the police doing absolutely nothing to stop it. People raiding a Walmart and picking the store clean without an officer in sight.

I saw insurrectionists, of all races and backgrounds take over a section of a city in Seattle, dub it an "autonomous zone" and operate unimpeded for weeks until police stepped in... only after innocent people(some kids) were murdered in its confines. 

I saw officers standing guard in front of a courthouse in Portland on dozens of occasions, having bricks, molotov cocktails, glass, stones, and explosives thrown at them by crowds of people of all races, and doing very little about it.

Yesterday's response was per the norm in this country. Rioting and looting goes unpunished. That's the precedent we set in 2020 and yesterday was a reflection of that. Do you honestly think that officers guarding the Capitol stopped to think about the race of these lunatics yesterday? Being assaulted, screamed at, having things thrown at them, all while knowing that it's the job of a few select officers to guard one of our nation's most precious building with its most important people... you really think during the madness, chaos, and carnage they stopped to think about race? If you do, then your mind has been poisoned.

Yesterday was a byproduct of weak American leadership more than anything. Officers have been undermined and abandoned by our leaders for months. Many have resigned because of it. Very few have stood up for them, while they endured months of ridicule and demonization. Our leadership in America is so weak, the very entity they rely on to protect us, were neglected in favor of violent extremists looking to burn our cities, telling them to stand down and don't engaged while their cities are torn apart. And naturally, these same leaders were the first ones to call the cops whenever their personal safety was compromised or threatened, while pushing for these same departments to be defunded.

Cries to strip law enforcement of any means to prevent rioting and looting came from all corners of the country. Banning choke holds, banning tear gas, banning pepper spray. Banning the use of rubber bullets. These tools used to deter and prevent mass carnage were condemned because some claimed "they violated the first amendment rights of peaceful protest" while many news agencies refused to condemn the rioting and burning altogether.

And some cities did just that. Some cities pushed and enacted policies to ban some of these methods. And the ones that didn't? Total demoralization of their police forces. Knowing their leaders won't have their backs and that if they so much as hit one rioter with a rubber bullet in the face, their identity will potentially be put on social media and mobs of angry people will show up at the officer's house threatening them and their family.

The New Norm

So, why did yesterday happen so easily? Because this is the culture that was created in 2020. By catering and cowering activists, we have stripped law enforcement with means to combat these angry mobs, both technologically and psychologically. It's a lose-lose situation for them. If they use tear gas or rubber bullets they're wrong, if they don't they're wrong. If they resort to lethal force they're evil and if they don't they're evil. We have created a culture that tells us destruction and violence is okay if you do it in the name of a certain cause; to quote certain media types "When did protest ever have to be peaceful?" Their duty as leaders and politicians is to protect our citizens and our cities. Yesterday, in part, is the result of those failures. I believe if not for the events of 2020, police would have been more aggressive and better equipped yesterday. I strongly believe if law enforcement didn't endure an entire year of attempted suppression of crowd control tactics, things wouldn't have gotten as bad.

We can't have it both ways. We cannot tell law enforcement that they need to do less, need to be responsible for less, be less aggressive in counter-measures, have less money, but also do a better job at preventing incidents they are ill-equipped for. I said it during the summer, that this was going to come back to bite the country in the ass and was going to weaken the foundations of our law enforcement departments around the country, leaving them vulnerable to a seismic event like at the Capitol.

Meanwhile, these criminals have become embolded after months of inaction. You don't think the people down in DC yesterday were watching on TV and seeing hundreds of cities enduring rioting and looting with very few arrests and say to themselves "Hey, if they can get away with it, so can we."

What To Do About it?

So what can we do about it? How do we prevent mass rioting, looting, anarchism, and insurrections every time something happens that people have a problem with? The only solution I can think of are policy changes.

We need to enact rioting and looting laws that bring heavy punishment. If a riot breaks out and you even step foot inside of a business or building that is being raided? Minimum 5 years in prison with no possibility of early release. I don't care if you're that guy who casually strolled into the Walmart in Philadelphia after it had been ransacked and peacefully wheeled off with a washing machine. 5 years in prison-gone.

If you take part in rioting or looting and you have any type of weapon on you even if it has not been used maliciously? 10 years in prison, mandatory. No possibility of early release.

If you are caught using a weapon or instrument of harm during any of these events, 15 years in prison, no questions asked, and no chance of early release.

Every single person caught is prosecuted. No leniency. No sympathy. 

If things turn outwardly violent and rioters are using deadly weapons to put innocent civilians in danger? Authorized use of lethal force by law enforcement. We cannot allow one innocent civilian life to be lost in lieu of violent radicals.

The only way to deter crime is with crackdowns, and we're way beyond the need for reform at this point. This insanity has gotten way out of control after an entire year of pandering and cowardice from our leaders. We need to get law and order back in our cities and things back under control. Maybe Americans will think twice about taking part in these if they had more reason to fear for their freedom. Crackdowns have worked before with violence, and they can work again. Violence is skyrocketing in our cities, approaching 90's level benchmarks. Violence rates are going in the wrong direction after a great decade of progress. We need our politicians, leaders, lawmakers to step up and quell this madness before it is too late. Otherwise, who's to say the White House won't be the next building extremists decide to storm?