The optimist's guide to being a Philadelphia 76ers fan

As a people, Philadelphians are accustomed to losing. The Phillies lost 10,000 games before any other professional team, ever. The Eagles lost three consecutive championship games before getting to the 2004 Super Bowl, which they lost. The Flyers often finish with a winning record, but haven’t won it all since 1975. The Phillies won the World Series in 2008 – the city’s first championship in any major sport in 25 years – and proceeded to field a worse team every year since. We lost Wilt Chamberlain to the Lakers in 1968, Will Smith to Bel Air in 1990 and Tina Fey, who’s not even technically from Philly, to New York in 1997. We lost the US capital to Washington DC in 1800. We cherish hoagies, Allen Iverson and Mummers. You could generously call us partial to underdogs and uncharitably call us losers.

But the current state of the Philadelphia 76ers is something new: never before has one of our beloved teams or athletes – not even our fictional boxer – thrown the fight. The Sixers’ top brass want to lose so badly that top draft picks fall into their laps over several seasons, giving them an elite, young team after a few years of misery. You might expect fans to accept the logic of a plan that plays the system, but logic only goes so far when the misery is already historic.

This year the Sixers, at 0-17, are already at their worst in team history – they could also be the first NBA team to lose their first 19 games, just a season after the team finished 19-63 and lost a record-tying 26-straight games. They have lost blowout after blowout, including one that saw them down 58 points before narrowing the margin to 123-70.

The numbers only begin to capture just how bad this team is. Michael Carter-Williams, the Sixers’ point guard and last year’s rookie of the year, wrote an essay about how “losing sucks”. On court Carter-Williams sometimes looks like he’s just been told the Titanic’s hit an iceberg and he’s got to save it, on the double. Alexey Shved plays with an abandon more appropriate to Dostoevsky than the NBA, all flailing arms, flinging shots, gambling defense. The team’s new hopes, Joel Embiid and Dario Saric, may not even play this year. In an almost perfect expression of this team’s personality, guard Tony Wroten races around in a frenzy, swindling the ball from opponents and cannonballing through traffic, only to miss layup after layup on the other side of the court. He is 21, the team’s leading scorer and out with a sprained knee.

The team is so young, awkward and inexperienced that Phoenix Suns guard Eric Bledsoe said that Kentucky, the nation’s best college team, could beat the Sixers, a comment that prompted at least a dozen analyses. (Kentucky probably couldn’t; the Sixers starters, no matter how terrible, have a tougher regimen and experience against the best in the pros.) But the Sixers are so bad that Philadelphia’s forever overwrought sportswriters have taken to interviewing sad Sixers fans and scraping for vague silver linings like “small steps are happening – together.”

How bad are the Sixers? The New Jersey Nets hold the record for worst start, with an 0-18 in the 2009-10 season. The Charlotte Bobcats have the record for worst full season, finishing 2012 with seven wins and 59 losses (a player lockout truncated the season). Right behind them with the worst record ever in a full 82-game season: the Philadelphia 76ers, 1973: nine wins and 73 losses. Like that team, today’s Sixers run a fast-paced, scrambling offense but can barely score – the 2014-15 team is dead last in points per game. Coach Brett Brown and his young team stand poised to bring the ignominious crown back to Philadelphia.

What’s had the Sixers called a “mockery” and “humiliation” is that bad teams, especially Philadelphia’s, usually fight tooth and nail – with a sort of dignity, even if of the dingier variety. What’s unsettling about the Sixers is that the team’s front office has apparently sacrificed that dignity for future goals. But looking for dignity among executives, whether in the NBA, NFL, Fifa or a bank has always been a fool’s errand.

For fans, this plan to gut the team, to win by losing, both embraces and perverts some part of Philadelphia’s identity. Fans tend to end up in “Team Tank” and “Team Try”, as Grantland’s Chris Ryan put it, obsessing about how this grand strategy will turn out rather than how it’s playing out right now, which is ugly. If it works, a team of misfits and hidden talent could someday be fighting for Philadelphia’s first championship since Michael Jackson was singing about how “the kid is not my son.” If it fails, the team wastes not just a few years but risks wasting the talents of Carter-Williams and his team-mates, not to mention the respect of its fans.

But as humiliating as the Sixers might be abstractly – grotesque management, cynical strategy, bad basketball – the players and coach still have that dignity, 16 losses and all. The sloppy Sixers play poorly but ferociously, picking up experience where they can’t find points. Players like Wroten, Nerlens Noel and KJ McDaniels seem to enact the cliche of leaving everything they have on the court – they’re playing for a career and future, not just a win. In the fourth quarter, when opponents rest their superstars, the Sixers keep chuffing, pushed by Coach Brown’s antics and shouts.

And like the atrocious Phillies-Mets games of past and present or the Eagles’ endless disappointments, fans will still show up and cheer. We will gripe and boo and shout unprintable things, just like we would if the Sixers were undefeated and started LeBron James. Perfect wouldn’t be good enough. Unlike fans of the Yankees, Patriots or Lakers, we know defeat better than victory, and that it’s both more fun and more meaningful – if also more painful – to win by overcoming failure. We are losers who love to beat up on winners. The long, sorry experiment of the Philadelphia 76ers may give us our best underdog story yet – and that should be enough to keep hope alive, historic losses and all.