The Philadelphia 76ers are redefining tanking with 40-plus point losses to the Warriors and Clippers

The Philadelphia 76ers are only the second team ever to lose back-to-back 40 point games. They are very very bad at basketball.

by Rodger Sherman

Feb 11, 2014, 6:01 AM UTC

Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports

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There’s tanking in the NBA. Teams mired in hopeless seasons put out less-than-stellar players, and no matter how hard they try, they lose enough games to get themselves some seriously good lottery odds. Nobody officially acknowledges it, but there is tanking in the NBA.

And then, there’s TANKING, which is what the Philadelphia 76ers are doing. Sunday night, they lost to the Clippers, 123-78, in a game they trailed by 50.

Then, Monday night, they followed that up with an equally gruesome loss to the Golden State Warriors. Things started out alright, as they only trailed by eight after the first quarter, but a 37-12 advantage in the second got things out of hand.

The Warriors aaaaaaalmost got the lead to 50 at 107-58. And eventually, they won, 123-80, with Marreese Speights putting up 32 on just 15 shots..

The 76ers became the second team since basketball-reference’s tracks stats in 1963 to lose two straight games by 40 points. The other? Also the Sixers, towards the end of the 1993-1994 season:

Nothing is going right for them. They’re defending horribly, as evidenced by back-to-back 123-point outings by their opponents. They’re shooting horribly, going 3-for-28 and 2-for-17 from three in back-to-back games. They’ve been outrebounded, 119-72, and although some of this has to do with how many shots they’ve missed, their rebounding percentage is awful as well. This is what happens when you ask Michael Carter-Williams, Thaddeus Young and Evan Turner to win games by themselves, with Spencer Hawes as your starting center, against good Western Conference teams. Carnage.

The incredible thing is that at one point, this team was 3-0, with a team over the back-to-back champ Miami Heat. Somebody should tell them tanking doesn’t come with style points.