Ffifty years in the past this month, the Philadelphia 76ers meekly misplaced through 19 issues to the Detroit Pistons earlier than a grand overall of one,937 fanatics at Pittsburgh Civic Arena to complete the 82-game 1972–73 season with 73 losses, an NBA file for futility that in some way stillstands.
“The best part of this game was the end,” Kevin Loughery, the guard who had changed Roy Rubin as trainer in the midst of the season, informed the Philadelphia Daily News that day.
Loughery added of the season as a complete: “It’s been like some nightmare, in slow motion.”
Five NBA groups, maximum just lately the ten–72 Sixers in 2015–16, would later limp alongside to lose no less than 70 video games. The Charlotte Bobcats received simplest seven video games in 2011–12, however they misplaced 59 video games as a result of that season was once curtailed and compressed as a result of a lockout.
Those 1972-73 Sixers set the usual for stinking – and it might have in truth been even worse, as a result of they virtually inexplicably received 5 of 7 video games that February to spice up their file to 9-60. Then they reverted to the horrible Sixers, shedding their ultimate 13 video games.
Fred “Mad Dog” Carter, a Philadelphia local, led the Sixers in scoring that season with a 20-point reasonable, incomes the workforce’s Most Valuable Player award, a doubtful athletic honor if there ever was once one.
“My thing was, did I lead us to nine wins, or did I lead us to 73 losses?” Carter, now 78 years previous and retired, tells the Guardian from his house within the Philadelphia suburbs. “It’s not something I wear proudly on my chest.”
He recalls strolling via airports on highway journeys that 12 months. The avid gamers carried their shoes in team-issued health club baggage, and Carter made positive to position the 76ers brand dealing with his leg so no person would understand it.
However, Carter says the nineteen avid gamers at the 9-73ers, as they got here to be identified, did get along side every different as a result of they’d come to the conclusion that “we knew we weren’t good enough. I’ll tell you what really helped all of us: We had no dissent.”
In fact, Carter says he doesn’t mind retelling old stories to help reporters put together retrospectives on anniversaries, or when other NBA teams close in on 73 losses. The 2015–16 Sixers dragged out the drama for a while, posting their 10th victory in the 78th of their 82 games that season.
He says of his team’s record: “I still want it to stand. As long as it stands, we stay relevant. You’re talking to me now. If [9-73] wasn’t relevant, you wouldn’t be talking to me.”
The 9-73ers did have characters, none more notorious than John Quincy Trapp, an ominous power forward known as “Q,” who was acquired from the Los Angeles Lakers, who had won 69 of 82 regular-season games and taken the NBA championship the last season.
The best “Q” story came when Trapp was told by Roy Rubin, the team’s woefully overmatched coach who lasted only a half-season, to come out of a December game in Detroit, Trapp’s hometown. Trapp told Rubin to check out his friend in the meager crowd of 1,646.
Rubin turned around, legend has it, to see Trapp’s friend open his coat to reveal a handgun. Rubin decided to keep Trapp in the game, which the Sixers lost by 28 points, dropping their record to 3–31.
That was the seventh game of a 14-game losing streak. The Sixers opened the season with 15 losses and later lost 20 straight games. Trapp played only 39 games for Philadelphia before the 76ers cut him with two months left in the season.
“I don’t know what happened to Q,” Carter says of Trapp, who is believed to have passed away, though records of his death can’t be found. “Interesting player. I didn’t see that [gun incident]but my teammates told me about it later.
“And I refrain from saying too much, because John probably has kids and grandkids now. I think if he’d been on a more talented team, his skills would have come out a little more.”
No athlete gains a whole lot from winning just 11% of their team’s games, but Carter says a half-century later that he was much better equipped to handle the 1972–73 season than he would have thought. He had been toughened up for the experience.
He was one of four children to a mother who was a domestic worker and a father who was a junk dealer. Fred often helped out his pop: “We were Sanford and Son before there was Sanford and Son,” he says, referring to the sitcom starring Redd Foxx.
Carter dropped out of Benjamin Franklin High School in Philadelphia and was ready to join the army, but there was no one at the enlistment office the day he showed up. So he went with his girlfriend that Sunday to her freshman orientation at nearby Cheyney University.
He saw many familiar faces that day, and he thought he was smarter than many of them were, so he went back to school to earn his high school diploma. The legendary coach at Mount St. Mary’s, the late Jim Phelan, recruited Carter to play at the school in rural Maryland.
“I said, ‘Coach, how many Black students are in the school?,’ and he said, ‘Well, look in the mirror, and that’s the only Black player you’ll see there,’” Carter remembers.
Carter thrived at Mount St. Mary’s. The Baltimore Bullets took him in the third round of the 1969 NBA draft. He played two full seasons for the Bullets, helping them reach the NBA finals in 1971. He was traded to Philadelphia early in the 1971–72 season.
Those Sixers won 30 games, then were jolted by the defection of their best player, Billy Cunningham, to Carolina of the American Basketball Association in June 1972 – around the same time the Sixers named Rubin, from Long Island University, as their new coach. Al McGuire and Adolph Rupp had turned them down. The Sixers put a help-wanted ad in the paper.
It turned into obvious that Rubin, who died in 2013, did not know what he was once entering. The Daily News referred to as him Poor Roy Rubin. Carter recalls how Rubin made an excessive amount of of a preseason victory over the Boston Celtics: “Kevin and I just looked at each other and said, ‘Boston had their third and fourth teams in there!’ Roy just didn’t understand that.”
With Cunningham gone and the hobbled guard Hal Greer at the end of his NBA career, Carter figured he had to take more shots for the Sixers. That was not easy. Their opponents took them quite seriously because losing to the feeble Sixers would be embarrassing.
“We were a band of misfits, you could say,” he says.
Carter would play within the NBA for 4 extra seasons, and he’d lend a hand the Sixers succeed in the playoffs in 1976 earlier than he was once traded to Milwaukee. He went on to train Philadelphia for the simpler a part of two seasons, later turning into an analyst for ESPN.
Asked a half-century later what he remembered in regards to the closing recreation of that traditionally dangerous season, Carter says, “It was once just like the word Dr. King mentioned: ‘Free finally. Free finally. What we went via that 12 months was once virtually just like the Bataan Death March.”