Mad Dog Carter and the NBA’s worst-ever team

Photograph: Focus On Sport/Getty Images

Fifty years ago this month, the Philadelphia 76ers meekly lost by 19 points to the Detroit Pistons before a grand total of 1,937 fans at Pittsburgh Civic Arena to finish the 82-game 1972-73 season with 73 losses, an NBA record for futility that somehow still stands.

“The best part of this game was the end,” Kevin Loughery, the guard who had replaced Roy Rubin as coach in the middle of the season, told the Philadelphia Daily News that day.

Loughery added of the season as a whole: “It’s been like some nightmare, in slow motion.”

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Five NBA teams, most recently the 10-72 Sixers in 2015-16, would later limp along to lose at least 70 games. The Charlotte Bobcats won only seven games in 2011-12, but they lost 59 games because that season was curtailed and compressed because of a lockout.

Those 1972-73 Sixers set the standard for stinking – and it could have actually been even worse, because they almost inexplicably won five of seven games that February to boost their record to 9-60. Then they reverted to the terrible Sixers, dropping their final 13 games.

Fred “Mad Dog” Carter, a Philadelphia native, led the Sixers in scoring that season with a 20-point average, earning the team’s Most Valuable Player award, a dubious athletic honor if there ever was one.

“My thing was, did I lead us to nine wins, or did I lead us to 73 losses?” Carter, now 78 years old and retired, tells the Guardian from his home in the Philadelphia suburbs. “It’s not something I wear proudly on my chest.”

He remembers walking through airports on road trips that year. The players carried their sneakers in team-issued gym bags, and Carter made sure to put the 76ers logo facing his leg so no one would notice it.

However, Carter says the 19 players on the 9-73ers, as they came to be known, did get along with each other because they had come to the realization that “we knew we weren’t good enough. I’ll tell you what really helped all of us: We had no dissension.”

Story continues

In fact, Carter says he does not…


Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/slow-motion-nightmare-season-mad-080041214.html?src=rss

Author : The Guardian

Publish date : 2023-03-27 08:00:41

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