With the Spurs in town today, Gregg Popvich and his crew did their morning shootaround at the Palestra. Here’s what Pop had to say about the legendary gym that just celebrated its 90th anniversary:

“This is a real gym, not the NBA places we play. This is for real. It would be great to play every game in a place like this with its history. So, whenever we get here we do it.

It’s the acoustics. You hear the ball bouncing, you can hear everybody talking. Kinda like Butler Fieldhouse at Indiana. Always good to find a place like this that still exists. They’re dropping like flies everywhere, but it’s still here.”

The Sixers have held open practices at the Palestra, and even played playoff games there in the 60s. But imagine this: The 2018 Sixers, led by Embiid, Simmons, and [draft pick name here] take on the all-timer Gregg Popovich and the Spurs at the Palestra, in front of the smallest audience the NBA would see outside of a Denver Nuggets home game. They’ll put it on national TV. The crowd would be impossibly loud and incredibly passionate (proud too, I guess).

The Sixers would take a small hit on the gate, but they’d get something perhaps even more valuable: publicity. Give me Kevin Harlan on the call. Give me the Penn band instead of anything Franklin would be doing (seriously, imagine the band paying “Here Come the Sixers” during timeouts). Give me the talent level and production quality of an NBA matchup with an atmosphere than can’t be rivaled by any arena in the country. The Sixers would probably lose. But that wouldn’t matter even in the slightest. Joshua Harris, Adam Silver; you both owe us one. Make it happen.