There was a report on Thursday from NJ-ROI’s Tom Bergeron, not the Hollywood Squares host, noting via sources that New Jersey is trying to lure the Sixers to Camden:

“The state of New Jersey is making a serious push to convince the Philadelphia 76ers to move to New Jersey and into a new arena that would be built in Camden, four people familiar with the discussions confirmed to ROI-NJ.

Discussions between top state officials and leaders from Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment (which owns the team) have been ongoing for the last two months, the sources said.”

My journo brain tingles. Smells like a classic leverage play to get the City of Philadelphia to pick up the pace here and release the months-late PIDC study and get serious by putting this thing in front of council. That’s what my gut says, though you can never rule out any kind of crazy shit, like the general manager’s wife using burner accounts to go after Sixers players.

One thing this report brought back is the QAnon of Philadelphia sports conspiracy theories, and that’s the belief that the Sixers don’t actually want a Center City arena. They’re using 76 Place as a sympathy front to take the taxpayer money and move to New Jersey. The allegation is that they’d make a good faith effort to build in Philly, but when the plans get shot down they say something along the lines of, “Well we tried, but the city wouldn’t do it, so we’re left with no choice.” And then you go across the river and build in Camden.

It’s one thing to set a smokescreen, but this misdirection amounts to burning down the Amazon rain forest. Why? Because:

  1. the Sixers have spent millions of dollars over the past two years on this project
  2. they have gone to dozens and dozens of meetings with Chinatown, Washington Square West, Philly’s black clergy, and everyone else under the sun
  3. they were shouted down in one of those meetings and David Gould walked out the door
  4. they are funding the PIDC study
  5. they’ve been crushed nonstop by the Philadelphia Inquirer and other media outlets
  6. they reportedly gave $400,000 to Jeff Brown’s failed mayoral campaign
  7. there are lobbyists and a PR company in the mix
  8. they’ve accused opposition members of antisemitism and battled publicly with people like Faye Anderson and Howard Eskin

And last, but not least, David Adelman is on the record saying that the Sixers will not go to New Jersey. Have people broken promises before? Yeah, of course, but this amounts to painting yourself into a corner. You can’t self-sabotage yourself to the point where you’d be taking an even bigger reputational hit to get what you allegedly always wanted in the first place. It would be the dumbest and most expensive smokescreen of all time. They could have just gone directly to New Jersey and absorbed the tax money and criticism. There would be no need for this entire song and dance in the first place.


People will say, “yeah, well the tax break in New Jersey will make up for the money they spent lobbying for Market Street.” Counterpoint: See above. You could have just gone there directly and taken the same reputational obliteration without having to go through all of this shit in the first place.

So no, it does not seem plausible that the Sixers are using Center City as a ruse to ultimately wind up in New Jersey. If that’s the plan, they’ve done a horrendous job of executing it. Plus, like I mentioned on Thursday, the biggest Sixers fan in Pennsylvania is Governor Josh Shapiro, and he’d step in if it ever got to the point where Camden became something more than tinfoil hat territory.