The Sixers have been abandoned again.  It was another three seasons of wasted basketball instead of moving closer to the ultimate goal of a championship.  There were risks taken, hearts broken and blood vessels busted.

Yet, taking a trip down memory lane, what if I told you that the Sixers’ woes began way before the Andrew Bynum trade last summer?  What if I told you that if the Sixers had just taken my advice that they’d be in the hunt for an NBA Championship right now as you’re reading this?

Without tooting my own horn too much, I’ll just let you see for yourself…
http://philadunkia.com/?p=263

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When Andre Iguodala stepped to the foul line with 2.2 seconds left last night — the Sixers trailing 78-77 and their grip on a series that seemed won just days ago slackened, if not broke entirely — he was thinking about his son.

With the Wells Fargo Center roaring — reaching, and exceeding, the sort of decibel level that makes reporters with sensitive ears wonder if cochlear implants hurt — he imagined himself, he later told the press, explaining to his boy how to shoot free throws: It’s alright son, it’s easy work.  Bend your knees, he said he hummed at the eye of the storm.

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A win tonight and the Sixers advance to the second round of the playoffs for the first time since 2003, where they’ll square off against one of a pair of teams they went 5-1 against in the regular season.

So that’s the good news. The bad is this: to get there, they still have to take a game from a prideful Bulls team that is, while profoundly depleted, formidable.

And to do that they’ll probably need the benefit of the continuation of some recent trends that don’t look entirely sustainable.

(Free throw shooting, Spencer Hawes eating people’s faces, terrible injuries to integral members of the Bulls; these things come to mind.)

But get excited Philadelphia. We certainly are.

Five and a half hours out from tip-off, here are some links to whet your appetites.

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Spencer Hawes giveth. Spencer Hawes taketh away.

And Spencer Hawes just gaveth the Sixers an ugly 79-74 victory to take 2-1 series lead.

Game 3 of the first round series between the Sixers and the Bulls was a perfect crystallization of a Philadelphia season that has had extreme highs and near-bottomless lows.

And right in the middle of that emotional rollercoaster was Hawes.

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My uncle spent an afternoon in the emergency room around a decade ago after his dog bit through his hand. “Denny” was a mild animal of what vets admitted was uncertain ancestry, loved and lovable, but he’d been hit by a car and so spent the last hours of his life in a terrified frenzy. He didn’t know where he was, or what he was doing. My uncle had seen him get hit—he was chasing a bird, I think, and ran right into the path of some kind of sedan—rushed to his side to comfort him, and the dog bit deep into his palm. Denny was, in those last moments, gripped by fear, capable of anything. That was how he died.

The lesson: be very weary of wounded animals, even, maybe especially, the ones you think you know.

Its corollary: be very weary of the Chicago Bulls.

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As a basketball fan, and a human being who likes to see decent, hardworking, people succeed, I’m crestfallen by the Derrick Rose injury. The NBA Playoffs is, to a unique extent, a space where the very best in the world compete. And to see that competition reduced is a loss.

In the interest of honesty though, I should also acknowledge this: I’m a Sixers fan. And the fact that this injury significantly improves my team’s odds of continuing to play on in this tournament is a silver lining I can’t help but see and feel.

So, ambivalence deep set, I turned to the Internet to help clarify my feelings on the biggest playoff injury of my lifetime.

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“Jesus, everything ends badly. Otherwise it wouldn’t end.”

-Cocktail

Only four times in NBA history has an 8-seed lived to see the second round of the playoffs—the most recent survivor being, of course, the 2011 Grizzlies—and if the Sixers want to make it five, they have their work cut out for them.

Starting this afternoon at 1 p.m., the 7-6 begin a seven-game set with a Chicago squad that’s now twice consecutively finished the regular season with the best record in the East, boasts the Association’s top defense and its reigning MVP, and has enough depth across the rest of the lineup that it withstood…no, thrived during Rose’s extended absences this season.

But while the Sixers more than held their own against the Bulls in 2012, outscoring them by two points in three head-to-head matchups, Philadunkia’s own fearless forecasters see an uphill climb for the home team.

And according to our fab five, it’s a really steep hill:

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There is no doubt in our minds that Michael Jordan is the G.O.A.T. and we genuflect out of respect for his basketball skills and accomplishments at both the NCAA and NBA levels. Outside of former Philadelphia Warrior legend and City of Brotherly Love native Wilt Chamberlain and possibly Bill Russell, perhaps no individual is more deserving of induction into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame then Michael. Hoops web sites all over the world will be paying homage to #23 today and rightly so.

However, Philadunkia is a blog dedicated to the Philadelphia 76ers – the good and the bad; on and off the court. So even though we realize that MJ absolutely owned our home team during his playing days – from the 56 he dropped on Barkley back in 1987 to the “Stackhouse Game” to the 30 spot he hung on Iverson as a Wizard – we still felt that since this is a 76er loyal site, we should “flip the script” as they say and run down a list of the best moments in 76ers history that occurred at the expense of Air Jordan and his teammates.

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