The Pathetic Cast Of Losers Who Make Money Playing Basketball For The Philadelphia 76ers Get Doc Rivers Fired
MediaNews Group/Boston Herald via Getty Images. Getty Images.Now I don't want that headline to take any agency away from Glenn Rivers getting himself fired. When it comes to the complete and total abject failure that is the Philadelphia 76ers, there is enough blame to go throughout the entire organization. The owners, the management, the coaches, the players, the concession workers, everybody. It's a failure from the tippy top all the way to the bottom. So I'm not going to get up here and say that firing Glenn Rivers was the wrong decision for the Sixers to make here.
What I will say, however, is that this needs to be far from their last decision. I know this decision has been talked about as being "linked" with a decision to keep James Harden or not. That the Sixers would need to make a decision on whether to bring back either Doc or James Harden, and that bringing back both wouldn't be possible. I'm saying the Sixers need to bring back neither of them.
This organization already made a horrific decision like this before when opting to stick with Ben Simmons over Jimmy Butler. That was easily a worse decision than something like trading up to draft Markelle Fultz over Jayson Tatum. But bringing back James Harden could be right up there with being equally crippling to this organization than choosing Ben over Butler. Because at this point in his life, we know exactly who James Harden is. He showed a couple of flashes in games 1 and 5, but he also showed us everything we need to know about him in game 7. He quit on this team and there's no other way around it. This is a guy whose version of flipping the kill switch is just flailing his arms around for 48-minutes trying to draw a call and not even attempting to actually make a shot.
So it's certainly a right move for the Sixers to move on from Doc Rivers. But it wasn't the only right move to make. There are too many losers within this organization. Players and coaches and executives whose careers up to this point have been almost exclusively defined by losing. The longer all of them stick around, the worse it's going to get. It's like a goddamn plague.