Supporting the Sixers seems to be like that shitty Katy Perry song from 10 years ago. You’re hot and cold and up and down and left and right and you know the lyrics. It’s like riding the world’s most rickety rollercoaster, shambling along on rotting wooden tracks.

Case in point, the Jayson Tatum buzzer beater that sunk Philly on Saturday night:

That was defended well by De’Anthony Melton, who got a hand up and had Tatum going to his right. Sometimes you just have to tip your hat to the other team, especially since Tatum wasn’t having a great night. He stepped up when it mattered most, and that’s one of the reasons (plus excellent bench depth) why the Celtics are the NBA’s best team.

“Good offense beats great defense all day,” said P.J. Tucker after the game. “That’s just how it goes. Tough skin, (Melton)’s a great defender, and you know that’s how it goes. (Tatum) is a great offensive player, made a tough shot, and you got to live with it. It is what it is.”

Still, it didn’t stop the avalanche of obvious reaction on social media. “The Sixers suck” and stuff like this:


https://twitter.com/nosxaj21/status/1629687408857071616?s=20

People can feel however they want, and keeping the Sixers at arm’s length is justified, considering how the past five seasons have gone.

Still, that was a super-tight game between two great teams, and it’s hard for me to overreact to that loss. We’d all be naive to blow that second-half Boston run out of proportion, considering the fact that the Sixers did the same exact thing in erasing a double-digit deficit just two nights prior, against a Memphis team with 36 wins. From a pragmatic standpoint, going 1-1 in a home series against the #1 team in the east and #2 in the west is perfectly reasonable and probably should have been expected coming out of the All Star break.

People seem to be out because they feel the inevitable – that Boston is just better than the Sixers. That’s a true statement because the Celtics are better than every other team in the NBA. You combine the uneasy feeling people have had all year with a third-straight loss to Boston, and it’s easy to see why the folks who got back on the bandwagon Thursday night jumped right back off on Saturday night.

It might not be a hot take to say that the best three teams are all in the east, because while Denver has a better win percentage than the Sixers, that team leads the weaker conference and lost the head-to-head with Philly. We’ll see what happens in March when the Sixers go to Colorado, where the Nuggets are currently 27-4, but the consensus now is that the 2023 champion is coming out of the east. That also depends on what happens with Kevin Durant in Phoenix.

Bottom line, it’s gonna be tough for the Sixers when they inescapably have to go through Milwaukee and Boston to get to the NBA Finals. Nobody should be surprised by this, though, because we always knew this was going to be the case. We knew this before the season even started. So we can watch the games and hope the Sixers go from tier 1B to tier 1A and become competitive with the Celtics and Bucks, or just don’t watch at all, and spare ourselves the angst. Just don’t find yourself stuck somewhere in the middle, because it’s like the Doug Collins era. It’s pointless.