New York douchers are having a field day talking about Sixers ownership + Michael Rubin buying 2,000 tickets to keep Knicks fans out of the Wells Fargo Center. You see a lot of stuff like this floating around:

“The Sixers are worried. They are doing loser things. They are worried about the Knicks fan coming in and taking over the building for a second time, so you see the ownership group buying up 2,000 tickets just to distribute to Sixers fans so this Knick fan base doesn’t take over the building. That is a loser thing to do if your fan base can’t buy those tickets themselves.”

I feel like we’re beating a dead horse at this point, but we’re talking about a city of eight million people that’s excited about their #2 seed team, playing against a city of 1.5 million people and their #7 seed team, which, by the way, has failed year after year and sucked the life out of the supporters who have been on this rollercoaster ride going back more than half a decade now. Anybody with one iota of a brain can understand why there’s infinitely more enthusiasm for the Knicks right now, because they’ve sucked butt since the turn of the century and are only just getting good again.

For people with short memories, you may recall that Philly went through the same exact thing in 2017 at the end of the Process era. The Wells Fargo Center was full and it was rocking night after night because the team was exiting the suckage epoch and had more momentum and hope than anyone. Eventually, the energy wanes, and here we are. It’s naive to see this series as some referendum on Philadelphia sports fandom as a whole.

The thing New York media will never admit is that their fans are traveling to Philadelphia in part because they can’t get in the door at their own arena. All they talk about is how well they travel, but they never say why they travel. Joey from the Bronx is stoked, but he’s also priced out of Madison Square Garden. He can’t find a ticket for less than $500 because countless finance bros and D list celebrities like Turtle are taking all of the tickets. It’s kind of like a sporting caste system where New York’s blue collar fans get the short end of the stick. They’re forced to travel if they want to see their team play. That’s why the deplorables portion of the Knicks fan base found its way to the Wells Fargo Center:

It was President Donald Trump who noted that when New York sends their fans, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with them.

Some, I assume, are good people, but this is such a simple concept that we continue to overcomplicate. It’s 50% supply and demand economics and 50% Zeitgeist. The Knicks are just starting on the bell curve of eagerness and Philly is somewhere between the climax and denouement.