I am going to spit vicious fire today. I’ve had enough of the Sixers organization. They’re full of shit, in almost every regard, every day, each day more full of shit than the last. They ejaculated away all of that goodwill will from January, balled it up in a tissue, and tossed it in the trash, leaving the rest of us to wonder what might have become of it. Perhaps it would’ve been a baseball player, or a rocket scientist? We’ll never know. Tomorrow, they’ll do it again. They’ll overflow their trash can with hardened tissues and then tell us it’s a plant.

That press release, accompanied by this Tweet…

… is downright offensive. It’s patronizing bullshit. It’s FAKE NEWS. How stupid do they think we are? As surmised, Bryan Colangelo got the Mavs to throw in a first round pick that doesn’t really exist* just so he could save face and give the Sixers’ spinmasters something they could work with, because God knows they don’t have a stupid business magazine award to tell us about today. Fuck. That.

*There’s virtually no chance the Mavs’ pick lands outside the top 18 and conveys to the Sixers, who will wind up with two second round picks from the deal.

I sort of hate myself for pulling the ol’ District 12 card and feigning outrage against the Capitol like a hapless peon, if only because it portrays the Sixers has having some sort of power over me, or possessing the secret truth to which the rest of us aren’t privy. They’re undeserving. Specifically, Bryan Colangelo is a simpleton. But what he and the team have done over the past month is downright reprehensible.

In a vacuum, the Sixers might get the benefit of the doubt for this misleading claim about a first round pick. But Senator, you’re no Hoover. There is a pattern of intentional, needless, fan-hostile deception. Let’s just take the last few months:

  • The Sixers outright lied about Joel Embiid’s injury, calling it only a bone bruise and stating that he would be day-to-day. They apparently rushed him back (I don’t think there’s another explanation here) to play in a national TV game against the Rockets, and then were forced to sit him for the next month. Not until Derek Bodner reported that an MRI showed a meniscus tear were the Sixers forced acknowledge Embiid was more injured than they initially let on. Even Embiid himself was annoyed with the team’s communicating of the injury, telling reporters yesterday: “I was told that I was going to kind of miss two or three weeks. So I wasn’t happy with the way it was handled. I thought keeping my name out there was going to literally have people think about me all the time instead of saying when I was going to come back.”
  • Ditto for Ben Simmons’ injury. The day after his January 23 MRI, the Sixers, on their website, wrote, “the results of the scan… were clean.” Three weeks later we learned that the MRI revealed a bone in his foot was not fully healed and was anything but clean.
  • Even with these setbacks, the Sixers did nothing to quell rampant speculation that February 24 – today – the first game after the all-star break, was shaping up to be Simmons’ debut. And despite knowing that he had no shot of playing tonight (let alone the fact that Embiid won’t play either), they raised ticket prices, something we learned only because a ticket rep told us, since single game prices are hidden inside the mysterious black box that is the Sixers’ StubHub partnership. They didn’t bother to give a timetable for Embiid’s return – which is at least four games away – until yesterday, during the height of trade deadline hysteria. Maybe no one will notice if we do it now? This is the closest thing to a predatory sales tactic that I’ve ever seen from a sports team.
  • And then there’s our GM. Colangelo overplaying his hand with Jahlil Okafor, holding him out of a game and sending him home in an apparent effort to create faux demand and draw out potential trade partners, may go down as one of the most laughable maneuvers ever by a Philly front office executive. It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad. Colangelo couldn’t find anyone to take Okafor, so he fuck-panicked and traded Nerlens Noel for a haul that was less than what most people expected him to get in return for Okafor, and then spent the rest of deadline day trying unsuccessfully to move the expiring contract of Andrew Bogut(?). WELL DONE, SIR! WELLLLLLLLL DONE.

This has been an epic reversal of tide. The Sixers have done virtually everything wrong. With a series of tone deaf and incompetent maneuvers, they’ve destroyed all of the organic goodwill they had working in their favor just a month ago. And if that weren’t bad enough, they’ve intentionally misled us every step of the way. They are, in other words, full of shit.