
10 Thoughts on Josh Harris, the Sixers, Commies, and Why Anybody Would Have Been an Improvement Over Dan Snyder
It’s funny going through the Josh Harris and Washington Commanders discourse on social media. Eagles fans hate the guy because they think the Sixers’ managing partner shouldn’t own a rival NFL team. Sixers fans hate the guy because they think he cares more about the Commies. Then there are New Jersey Devils fans, allegedly, and they fit into this stupid puzzle somehow.
On the other side, Washington football fans are lauding Harris because he’s turned this franchise around in no time. His Commanders have more playoff wins in 20 months than Dan Snyder had during the entirety of his 20+ year ownership. How’s that for a statistic?
This whole thing is interesting, and there are a lot of little wrinkles to it, so let’s go one by one:
- Of course Josh Harris is an upgrade over Dan Snyder. You could have replaced Dan Snyder with a tin can and it would have been an upgrade. Harris isn’t some football genius, he just hired non-idiots to run one of the most mismanaged franchises of the last 20 years. You and I could have succeeded in a Washington Football Team turnaround. Hire a veteran former coach, hire San Francisco’s assistant GM, use your suckiness to draft a franchise QB, then fill out the roster with veterans. Done and done.
- The Commanders’ ownership and the Sixers’ ownership are not actually the same. I’m not sure how many people know this, or care, or if it even matters, but the Washington setup features Harris as managing partner and then a bunch of limited partners with him. One of those LPs is David Blitzer, who is a MANAGING PARTNER of the Sixers. But Washington is not a Harris Blitzer Sports and Entertainment Property. The HBSE brands are the Sixers, Devils, the Prudential Center, Utica Comets, Delaware Blue Coats, and then some random entertainment and consulting properties. It’s true that Josh Harris is the de facto public face of both the Sixers and Commies, but Blitzer is a Commie LP while David Adelman is not involved at all.
- We’ve been over this before, but it just doesn’t bother me that Harris owns both the Sixers and Commanders. Why? Because I don’t think the Sixers are lacking anything from ownership. They have top facilities, a sous chef, soft tissue specialists, and all of the assorted bells and whistles. They were gonna move to Center City and partnered with Comcast instead, but there’s not enough reporting out there to suggest that they folded or capitulated to Comcast, and even then, their about face is going to result in the Wells Fargo Center going the way of the Dodo Bird and Passenger Pigeon, while we get a brand-new indoor arena in South Philly and a mixed-use development surrounding it. There’s just nothing in terms of resources where I’m thinking, “you know what, the Sixers need X, Y, Z, and ownership isn’t providing that.” I think the basketball people have been given what they need to win.
- If, however, it is ever revealed that the Sixers’ budget or priority is diminished because Harris is focused on the Commanders, then he can take a hike. Right now there’s no hard evidence to prove that true or false. Twice since the Process ended have the Sixers had teams that were good enough to win it all, maybe three if you include the Jimmy Butler squad, but I don’t blame Harris for Ben Simmons forgetting how to dunk, or Joel Embiid and James Harden failing to close out the Celtics at home. On the hierarchy of Sixers blame over the years, ownership is fourth on my list behind the players, Doc Rivers, and Daryl Morey.
- Say what you will about the Process itself, and the beginning of the HBSE years, but in the last seven seasons we’ve been given multiple, competitive, 50-win teams that just couldn’t get it done in the postseason. You wanna see mediocre basketball? Watch the post-Iverson, pre-Process Sixers, or go back to the 1990s and the halcyon days of Sharone Wright and Clarence Weatherspoon. Did you prefer the Comcast era, when the team didn’t even have a practice facility? No matter how much Ed Snider put into the basketball team, we all know the Flyers were his baby.
- There were very few people in this area who seemed to have an issue with Harris owning a Flyers rival while also owning the Sixers. It goes to show that there’s little crossover between basketball and hockey fans. Of course, the Flyers have also been dreck during Harris’ Devils ownership, and the Devils only have one playoff series win going back to 2013, so there’s no vitriol because the stakes are low. If the Flyers and Devils met in the conference finals (imagine that), then yeah, it’s probably different. I’m old enough to remember when everyone here hated the Devils.
- If Harris wanted to win over more people in Philadelphia, all he would have to do is repeat the lines that John Middleton and Jeffrey Lurie use. Talk about emotional intelligence, talk about team ownership being the stewardship of a public asset. He’s just not a charismatic person and he’s not a strong public speaker, so even if he was more present, he’d never connect with the type of fan that lives here. They look at Lurie and Middleton as guys who get it, while Harris is businessman.
- If you want to see shitty ownership, try being a Union supporter. That’s why all of this makes me laugh. Union fans would kill to have HBSE come down there and take over that team.
- These guys have stakes in so much more than the Sixers, Commanders, and Devils. Blitzer owns 25% of the Guardians and has ownership or co-ownership of six European soccer teams and Major League Soccer’s Real Salt Lake as well. Then there’s Crystal Palace in the Premier League, where Harris and Blitzer have a joint 18% share. When you talk about focus and distribution of time, energy, and resources, it goes far beyond just the handful of teams in the Mid-Atlantic United States.
- God help the HBSE public relations staff if the Commies win on Sunday and Harris goes down on the field wearing a Commanders hat. They might need Big Dom to smuggle him out of the stadium in the same popcorn machine that Taylor Swift used in Kansas City. Allegedly.