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.
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