December 5, 2007.

The Billy King chapter of the Philadelphia 76ers has closed and frankly, it was a long time coming.

There are a few stages of going from a winning team to a losing team for a professional sports franchise and its fans. The first stage of a team’s decline is the shock felt by the fans when the stars that have shined brightly for them, either don’t shine brightly anymore, or have moved on to give the fans in another arena the chance to be wowed. Most of us just sit there gazing uncomfortably at what was once a good, exciting team. “This isn’t the team that I paid my season tickets for,” creeps into our minds. While the annoyance builds, at least fans aren’t angry, yet.

The second stage is the obvious outrage felt by fans towards the team they so faithfully support for allowing the team to become so sub-par, even though the cost of the team hasn’t gone down. This is when we boo.  At this point, we feel disgusted at paying $5 for an undercooked hot-dog and another $4 for a beer, that now doesn’t seem as cold as it did last year. It has gotten bad and doesn’t look like it’s going to get better any time soon. Fans can sense it. Especially the drunken fans that swear, curse, streak or fight just enough to get thrown out by the team, yet cannot bring themselves to feel bad about it, because after all, “they’re a bunch of losers anyway, who wants to go and watch them?”

This all leads us to the stage that most sports franchises dread: apathy. It’s the point when fans no longer care enough to spend their money to go and boo a bad team. No more jumping over cliffs like lemmings, just to support their team. Now, walks in the mall, or watching another sport, or even “chick-flicks” seem more enjoyable. The idea of that dental surgery that some have been putting off seems like a better option than watching a bad team. Heck, some fans even decide that the grass that had grown close to 34 inches must now be cut immediately. Immediately, because watching their sports team is comparable to watching dust form, only to get mad when it doesn’t form ‘right.’


Sadly, the stage of apathy is where the Philadelphia 76ers franchise seems to be deeply entrenched in. This stage is exactly why GM Billy King was fired and why former New Jersey Nets GM Ed Stefanski was hired to replace him after only 17 games into the 2007 season.

Why not wait until the end of the season, you ask? The 76ers couldn’t wait another minute after realizing that they had more retired jerseys of former players and banners of rock-stars who had performed at the “Wachovia Center,” than fans sitting in the seats. They had come to the point where keeping Billy King meant that losing money would be in the forecast, and we all know that no sports owner can tolerate that. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, even though the 76ers had furiously defended King for the past few seasons. After all, no one cares if you’re a nice guy if your smile and ‘quick wit’ only amount to money going down the drain.

Much like most change that occurs in sports, the decision to fire Billy King probably should have happened a few years ago. Frankly, while King is a tremendously nice guy, he has never really amounted to much of an NBA GM. All anyone has to do is look at the fact that he gave ‘barely-average’ Kenny Thomas a seven-year contract worth over $50 million. Moreover, fans could’ve taken a look at his seven-year deal with Samuel Dalembert, only to watch Dalembert regress to a below-average offensive player, an average rebounder and a defensive player who often appears to be in a fog on defense. Or, maybe it was Billy King’s decision to trade Allen Iverson because he was a small shooting-guard who while a consistent scoring threat, didn’t posses the ability to be a point-guard, because he shot the ball too much, only to decide that his immediate replacement, and the point-guard of the future would be Louis Williams, a small shooting-guard who isn’t very consistent offensively, except for his tendency to shoot too much. Huh??!!

Could the reason that Billy King was fired, be because he decided to build his team around Andre Iguodala, a player who cannot seem to figure out that a star shooting-guard in the NBA  must average more than 17 points a game?


Let’s be real here…


Billy King, nice guy or not, was fired because he failed to do his job as Philadelphia 76ers GM.

He failed to give fans a reason to hope, or care and thus, he failed to keep them interested in watching the Philadelphia 76ers. Even with a losing team, fans knew that with a talent like Allen Iverson, that winning was only one or two players away, because Iverson was a tremendous player, regardless of his size. He brought excitement. Even when the best player that Allen ever had the opportunity to play along side of (Chris Weber), could no longer jump over a folded piece of paper, he was at least fun to watch. Now, fans have to watch the aftermath after the Iverson trade: a losing team that couldn’t compete with the excitement of watching water boil.

More than that, King was paid to be an expert. He was paid to be right, not give us excuses like ‘the player hasn’t developed like we had anticipated.’ Any fan can go into an NBA draft, and pick the wrong players.

It’s a good bet that the $6 popcorn is starting to taste awfully stale, eh?

Instead of picking players that could turn out to be good NBA players right away like Julian Wright (who by the way is the early front runner for ‘rookie of the year’), he picked Thaddeus Young, who is almost guaranteed to be a “project” for most of the next five years. Young has yet to play even one minute of significant basketball for the Philadelphia 76ers.  Sadly yet Ironically, Wright is only one-year older than Young.   

Indeed, 76ers fans have been led through all three stages of winning to losing in professional sports, and all the team could do to get the fans to notice that there was even a basketball team still in Philadelphia, and give them enough hope to ignore the high price of tickets whose seats seem to be parked on Pluto, was to fire the person most responsible for that awful transition: Mr. Billy King.