Remember when the Philadelphia 76ers were actually fun?

The Philadelphia 76ers will never be the same.

There was a time, a long, long time ago, when the Philadelphia 76ers were fun to watch.

Granted, at this point, most would settle for watching any new, live basketball regardless of where it’s played or who is playing, but that’s beside the point. Once the season does return, whether that’s in late July, mid-October, or even Christman Day, the Sixers will be back, and fans will return to their tried and true tradition of hating their favorite team with a burning passion.

But there was a time, an even longer time ago, when that wasn’t the case.

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Call it the logical result of an organization-wide effort to gaslight fans into ‘Trusting the Process’ for no reason other than to still sell ultra discounted tickets to the Wells Fargo Center on Stubhub, but from 2013-17, it was really fun to be a Sixers fan – most even wore it lie a badge of honor.

Yeah, the team was bad – really bad – for much of that tenure, but it didn’t matter. Players like Tony Wroten, Hollis Thomas, and K.J. McDaniels played their hearts out for 82 games a year, even if they never really deserved extended tenures in the NBA. When a player like Michael Carter-Williams went off against LeBron James in his glorious first game back in a Cleveland Cavaliers jersey, the team felt unbeatable – even if said win was one of only 19 the team mustered in 2013-14.

And here’s the thing: Sam Hinkie‘s crazy plan largely worked.

The 76ers did find quality staters from the G-League (Robert Covington), via undrafted free agency (T.J. McConnell), in sign-and-stash overseas prospects (Dario Saric), and even by drafting underappreciated players with very real question marks about their long-term futures (Joel Embiid). Sure, Hinkie wasn’t perfect, and he missed on a ton of prospects during his tenure (Jahlil Okafor) but who doesn’t? All player acquisition is risky but the idea of accumulating extra assets to have more bites at the apple was so sound that the NBA literally had to change the draft’s rules to prevent another general manager from pulling off a similar caper.

The Sixers landed their marquee, true-blue first overall pick (Ben Simmons), got exponentially better, and even landed the sort of good-to-great free agents (J.J. Redick) that Hinkie swore would eventually view South Philly as a destination.

And it all culminated in the 2017-18 NBA season.

Ah, 2017-18. It was truly the best of times for fans of the Philadelphia 76ers. The motley crew of players fans had come to love had finally come into their own and the additions of a finally healthy Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons sent the rebuilding ‘process’ into overdrive. The Sixers almost doubled their win total, earned the third seed in a then-down Eastern Conference, and even pulled off 16 straight wins to close out the season.

That team overachieved, in part because of the buyout additions of Marco Belinelli and Ersan Ilyasova and made it all the way to the Eastern Conference semi-finals. They didn’t win, they were actually pretty handily put away by their division rival Boston Celtics, but that was expected. In the NBA, teams very rarely go from 20 wins to 50 wins, let alone from 20 wins to the NBA Championship. As pretty much any basketball-related 30 for 30 has clearly shown (This Magic Moment, Bad Boys) it usually takes a team a few years to come into their own and develop into a championship contender.

In 2018, the 76ers starting five was an average of 25.2 years old, 22.6 years old if you swap out J.J. Redick for Markelle Fultz. Outside of Redick and maybe Covington, none of those players were in their NBA prime and with a few hundred games to get work out their kinks as a unit, it’s entirely possible said team could have developed into the kind of homegrown dynasty Hinkie envisioned when he took over for Tony DiLeo in 2013 – even if he Bryan Colangelo was going to be the guy to bring it all home.

But the Sixers, and the league as a whole, got antsy.

Colangelo was fired, Elton Brand was hired, and just like that, the team’s core of players started to peel away. Out went Saric and Covington for Jimmy Butler, then Landry Shamet and pick for Tobias Harris and Mike Scott, and finally Fultz was shipped to the Magic for Jonathon Simmons – a player the Sixers had to attach a pick to to get off their books some six months later. Add in one final free agency period that saw fan favorites like McConnell and Redick handed their walking papers in favor of worse-fitting pieces like Al Horford and Raul Neto and it’s hard to find a Sixers who was even on the team in 2016.

Fun fact, there is one player from that team still on the roster, Joel Embiid. Let that sink in.

Eventually, basketball will return this year and our Philadelphia 76ers will retake the court for our viewing pleasure, for better or worse. As sad as it is to say, this current team is barley a team; it’s nothing more than a collection of mercenaries who will play out their contracts and move on when the season ends to play for the highest bidder this fall. The family atmosphere that brought fans out in droves despite a near-guaranteed loss is now a distant memory and it’s been replaced by top dollar season tickets that continue to get disproportionately more expensive with each passing season. Call me a romantic, but three months removed from the NBA has made it clear: These aren’t our Philadelphia 76ers, not anymore.