Things are just different when it comes to sports in Philadelphia. The microscope players are under and the feedback they receive from this fervent fan base, through both good times and bad, is unparalleled. For a city that’s been relatively light on championships for the last century, goodwill is hard to come by.
It’s what makes the discourse around the Eagles, across the street from the Sixers down at the Sports Complex, so confusing. The Eagles have won two Super Bowls within a decade. They won a championship just 14 months ago with Jalen Hurts garnering Super Bowl MVP honors and Nick Sirianni rightfully receiving the iconic Gatorade shower when the game was out of reach.
Now? Well, those guys have been receiving nonstop heat since. A new story from ESPN’s Tim McManus and Jeremy Fowler regarding Hurts, featuring hard-hitting, legitimate reporting for sure, dropped on Wednesday morning. It showcases that, both within the walls of an organization and for fans across the region, winning doesn’t actually cure everything.
“Win it all and you’ll never pay for a drink in this town again.”
Uh, that went out the window pretty quickly in this city, huh? Portions of the fan base still lob a ton of criticism Hurts and Sirianni’s way.
That brings me to Joel Embiid, the Sixers’ MVP-winning center who is more known, both locally and in the greater basketball community, for his health woes and his inability to even rack up a Conference Finals appearance than for his historic scoring touch.
Embiid is one of the most talented players who’s ever picked up a basketball. Even still, his tumultuous injury history and lack of playoff success are the things that have defined him the most. While I’m not proclaiming it’s happening this spring and summer, but if, somehow, someway, Embiid could string together a healthy postseason and carry the Sixers to a championship and an ensuing parade down Broad Street, how much would it really change the way people talk about the big fella?
For anyone with the slightest clue in this world, it should change everything. It would be a triumph more than a decade in the making, a capstone for a player who’s battled injuries year after year. A ring paired with his scoring titles and accolades would make him one of the definitive athletes in Philadelphia history and give him an unassailable achievement, the thing that we’re all supposed to value the most. An Embiid-led Sixers title would also make the ever-controversial Process a smashing success, too.
For everyone else, however, I can’t imagine it would change much, as sad as that is to say.
I’m sure Sixers fans would be subject to social media posts about how it’s a “Mickey Mouse” championship or something outrageous along those lines. The narrative would shift about how Embiid has “only” won a single title compared to some of the all-time great big men that the NBA has seen. That’s before getting into how, in the time following a hypothetical Embiid championship victory, people would complain about the slightest things that go wrong right here in Philadelphia.
That’s the nature of sports in general and the great city of Philadelphia specifically. The Eagles are a clear-cut example of winning is only a temporary respite from criticism. If Embiid and the Sixers ever win it all one day, and I certainly have my doubts on that front, they would find that out the hard way as well.
