Hand up. I’m sitting on the other side of the planet right now in Bali, pretending responsibilities do not exist, and somehow the most heart-warming sight I’ve seen all week is a picture of a billboard on I-95 telling Joshua Harris to sell the Sixers.
Sixers: Sell The Team Billboards on I-95:
That is where we are as a fan base.
You do not get to that level unless people feel ignored for a very long time. You do not get there unless frustration has fermented into something way more organized and way more personal.
The message is simple. Sell. The. Team.
Here is the part that keeps smacking everyone in the face.
Since the day Joshua Harris arrived, the Sixers have felt like another chip in a stack of investments that can be shuffled, optimized, leveraged, whatever fancy MBA word you want to use this week.
Yes, we all understand professional sports is a business. Nobody is naïve but in Philadelphia, Sixers fans want an owner who actually cares about winning.
They want someone who is bothered by second round exits and they want someone who treats banners like oxygen. I don’t think that’s too much to ask of any sports organization but instead, year after year, what do we hear?
Patience. Optionality. Future flexibility. Financial prudence.
Meanwhile the seasons keep ending the same way and the emotional bill keeps getting passed to the fans. It is exhausting.
Joshua Harris has a lot going on. He’s built a massive sports empire and has stretched his company across the NBA, NFL, and NHL, but that is exactly the problem.
When your attention is split across a sports and entertainment portfolio the size of a continent, how can anyone in this city believe the Sixers are the obsession?
It feels transactional. It feels distant. It feels like if this works, great, and if it doesn’t, well, onto the next quarterly report. That is not how Philly operates.
Oh. Not to mention, he’s all over the Epstein Files, which is probably helped get this billboard over the finish line.
What makes the billboard hit so hard is that it represents something fans have been screaming for years. Stop managing this like a spreadsheet and start acting like the clock is ticking. Because it is. Every time a move is framed through the lens of staying comfortable financially instead of pushing chips in, people see it.
They might not know the cap mechanics, but they know hesitation when they smell it.
Would a new owner magically deliver a parade? Of course not.
There are no guarantees in sports. But at minimum people want to believe the person cutting the checks is as desperate as they are. Right now, that belief is gone. Completely torched. Replaced by cynicism and highway signage.
When your customers are buying billboards begging you to leave, you have lost the room in historic fashion.
From Bali, from Broad Street, from wherever you’re reading this, the vibe is identical. Fans are tired of feeling like extras in someone else’s investment strategy.
They want a lunatic owner with some urgency. They want somebody whose top priority is hanging a banner instead of protecting the balance sheet.
Until that changes, the signs are going to keep going up. Good.
Like this:
Like Loading…