This is Sarah Todd. She is the new Sixers beat writer for the Inquirer, where she will be teamed up with Keith Pompey, who records podcasts like he’s stranded on a desert island and leaving behind wandering missives on his lone worldly item, a tape recorder.

At first blush, one might have thought that Sarah could inject some NEW LIFE into Sixers beatdom, which has been lapped by new media voices and online outlets. Hey, she’s from the Left Coast and covered the Warriors from 2012-2015. She’ll TOTALLY get the Sixers’ progressive approach and for once provide the fan base with some semblance of sanity in the credentialed ranks. But the early returns are… not good.

Sarah had a bad first day.

After a Tweet announced her promotion from the Inquirer’s copy desk to covering the #hottest team in the city, Sixers Twitter got to work and dug through Sarah’s timeline with impressive speed and efficiency, at a nearly 30 PER rating, and uncovered some, ah, less than, ah, jeez, just some, ah, well shit, ah, these, just, REALLY BAD TAKES. This Tweet, from July 2, 2015, a day after Sam Hinkie made sweet, sweet Discovery channel love with the figuratively unclothed body of Vlade Divac and obtained Nik Stauskas, Carl Landry, Jason Thompson, the right to swap picks with the Kings in 2016 and 2017, and the Kings’ 2019 first round pick:

That Tweet may come to redefine the bad take. But perhaps worse is that yesterday, after Sixers Twitter went to town on Sarah’s mentions, she both denied the accuracy of the take and yet doubled down on it:

Woof.

She was, rightfully, lambasted for her massive logic skips and failure to comprehend what basically every other NBA observer on the planet has deemed a Sixers win. She leaned on the fact that Wesley Matthews never wound up on the Kings to nullify her entire take, which is wimp-ish, at best, and downright lying, at worst. Regardless of what becomes of the Sixers’ and Kings’ 2017 draft picks, never mind Stauskas or the 2019 unprotected pick, the Sixers moving up from 5 to 3 is quantitative win. What becomes of the actual picks is irrelevant to the fact that the Sixers have put themselves in a better draft position as a result of the trade. I feel like I’m condescending you, the reader, by even having to explain this, and yet here we are.

Her claims that the trade didn’t go through are disingenuous. As pointed out by several, her Tweet came 24 hours after Zach Lowe reported the gist of it…

… and after Adrian Wojoskdoksokskski’s confirmation. The only difference between the reported trade and the official one were the particulars surrounding the draft pick (the pick included in the official trade was unprotected). And yet, an Inquirer editor, Mark Perner, jumped in with some additional BS in her defense:

Yeah, there’s a big difference between “out there” and Lowe and Woj. The trade Sarah tweeted about was hardly a hypothetical. Saying otherwise insults our intelligence.

Anyway, everyone has bad takes from time to time – STEVE MASON IS A TOP 5 GOALIE! CHIP KELLY IS GREAT! – and occasionally they double down on them. But Sarah also has a couple of other anti-Process Tweets which portend that she’ll fit in just fine with the unfortunate group of Sixers beat writers:

Worse, Sarah fought back and was combative with her intended audience right from the jump. It’s not worth posting all of the exchanges, but suffice it to say there was a healthy give-and-take on her timeline yesterday.

You may see where this is going. Sarah is a young woman and there’s always going to be that guy. This guy:

That prompted the following Tweets from Sarah:

Oh shit, Sixers Twitter, don’t let your sexist nature get in the way of genuine, fair and spirited criticism, the likes of which every person who writes, talks, Tweets, sings or farts about sports gets frequently. Here’s the thing, though– as far as I can tell – at least on Twitter – no one threatened her, and exactly one person called her a cunt (and one called her a chick). I went through every publicly available reply, and this is the worst of what I found:

Harsh? Sure. But I can tell you, with some experience, that’s run-of-the-mill and actually pretty tame. I’m not defending assholes by any stretch, but this is routine. This is Day 1. Sarah will have to deal with much worse, and exaggerated claims about sexist trolls is a poor way to kick things off. Say nothing of her poor take.