Four-for-Four: The Spring Cleaning Edition

76ERS

76ERS PRESENTED WITHOUT COMMENT Ok, one comment. If there’s anyone on this team that has earned the right to pull one of these off, it’s MCW. Hang in there rook. Season’s almost over and help is on the way.

FUN SCIENCE

Personally, I find ESPN’s ‘Sport Science’ segments to be particularly comical and mostly useless. Half of the time it seems like they are making up some of the terms they use and it’s just a lot of bells and whistles. That being said, their piece on Andrew Wiggins is enough to make me want to suit up and ensure the 76ers do not win another game.

Drool, Philadelphia. Drool. SIMMONS SLAMS SIXERS Grantland.com Senior Editor Bill Simmons is as much an NBA fanatic as there is in sports media. He made his name writing about the NBA, is on ESPN’s pre-game NBA show, and sometimes even joins the game broadcast to provide banter. In his weekly mailbag regarding all things NBA this past week, a focal point of several of the questions regarded some of the teams toward the bottom of the standings in the league as they pertain to the upcoming 2014 Draft. There was one question and answer in particular that stood out, especially coming from someone so knowledgeable about the game.

"Q: How far would the 2014 Sixers go in the NCAA tournament? —At Least 50 Readers This Week SG: That was the most popular question in a while. Philly wouldn’t get past the Sweet 16 — this is the worst NBA team I’ve ever seen. I think every 1- and 2-seed would beat them; I think Syracuse, Duke, Louisville and Michigan State would beat them; and I think Arizona and Florida would blow them out. Maybe this would be a good NBA lottery wrinkle: Every NBA team that can’t win 20 games has to play the NCAA champ in a 40-minute game. If they can’t beat the college team, they can’t get a top-three pick."

Almost every sport has had the debate as to whether a college or junior team could beat a professional squad going through a miserable season and the answer almost always is that the professional team would win. Not only did Simmons say that multiple college teams would beat the 76ers, but he said they would blow them out. I’m a fan of Simmons work, but this, as evident by the result of some of the aforementioned teams Simmons said would handle Philadelphia, is page-view fodder in its purest sense. Both Louisville and Duke saw a well-coached team at a severe talent disadvantage take them to the wire. The Blue Devils ended up losing and Louisville needed some late Luke Hancock heroics to continue what would have been a very short title defense. At the end of the day, if an NBA team were ever to play in the NCAA tournament, the deciding factor would always come down to the ‘Men vs. Boys’ discrepancy. Not only are NBA teams coached in a way that is meant to deal with the physical grind of facing other world-class athletes, but they focus their entire lives on basketball. Say what you want about the ‘one and dones’ in college hoops, but some of them still have to worry about classes and the struggles of being a student. NBA players are paid to do one thing and one thing only, perfect their craft. Sorry Sports Guy, you’re off on this one.