RON CORTES / Staff Photographer
The 76ers' Andre Iguodala grimaces after the Magic's Dwight Howard blocks his shot. The Sixers had trouble drawing even when Wilt, Dr. J, and Sir Charles were here.
Morning Bytes
Why can't 76ers draw?
An enduring mystery shrouds the 76ers, one that has little to do with why they so rarely identify the right coach, draft the right player, or make a three-pointer.
Why, in a city convinced it's a great basketball town, have the Sixers – and the Warriors before them – had such trouble filling their arena?
Don't blame the franchise's recent legacy of losing.
Pro basketball drew erratically here even when our teams were annual contenders and two of the game's most dynamic attractions - Wilt Chamberlain and Julius Erving - wore the local colors.
On an Inquirer Sports Department wall, there is a photo that captures a 1967 moment in one of those memorable Convention Hall battles between Chamberlain and Boston's Bill Russell.
Think about the attractions inherent in that photograph:
The legendary duel between the greatest defender and greatest offensive machine in NBA history. The best team rivalry in sports at the time. A world-class villain in Red Auerbach, Boston's gloating, cigar-smoking coach. The dynastic Celtics. And a 76ers team that would go 68-13 and win a title that year.
You'd think the ticket line would have stretched from 33d Street to Second and Shunk.
Instead, as the photo clearly shows, there were big chunks of empty seats in the West Philadelphia arena's upper level.
That game was hardly an aberration.
Six years earlier, the contending Warriors were loaded with the best talent Philadelphia has ever produced - Chamberlain, Paul Arizin, Tom Gola, Guy Rodgers. Chamberlain averaged 38 points and 27 rebounds that year. The Warriors finished 13 games over .500.
And yet the '60-61 Warriors averaged only 6,700 fans a game in 9,600-seat Convention Hall – a modest figure that even so was their second-best ever. A year later the team fled to San Francisco.
The 76ers arrived from Syracuse in 1963, and when they won that NBA title in '67, their average crowd was 8,800. The following season, the team moved into the new, much-bigger Spectrum and attendance improved – but only by 800 fans a game.
Remember the Mother's Day playoff game between Milwaukee and a 76ers team that included Erving, Mo Cheeks, Andrew Toney and Bobby Jones?
If you do, you probably watched on TV because the Spectrum was half-empty.
Don't bother checking the team's attendance history. As anyone who's ever been to a game knows, the 76ers are more adept at miscounting than Katherine Harris. Anemic crowds in half-filled arenas regularly undergo loaves-and-fishes transformations into respectable gatherings of 15,786.
Why do the Sixers continue to have more attendance woes than the city's high schools?
Various theories arose over the years to explain away the embarrassment: race, high ticket prices, the NBA's often plodding style, uninspired marketing, too much competition for the entertainment dollar.
None of them, of course, explains why pro basketball sells better elsewhere, even in places like San Antonio and Phoenix, where the game's roots are as shallow as the cacti's.
The Sixers have tried all kinds of ways of lighting the locals' fire:
