Daryl Morey says ‘anger is all that drives Sixers fans’ — and right now they’re angry
The Sixers executive had an interesting take on Philly fans and their reaction to losing to the Knicks last postseason.
Daryl Morey opened his panel discussion with journalist Pablo Torre at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston by saying he’d been nervous about it all week.
Those nerves?
Morey said they stemmed from sitting next to an actual “genius,” MIT economics professor Sendhil Mullainathan. Morey, on the other hand, is only “sarcastically referred to as one,” Torre joked.
As the Sixers enter the final stretch of their worst season under Morey, with Joel Embiid shut down and the remaining players limping toward the NBA draft lottery, Morey said he felt “very vulnerable” on stage Saturday talking during his first losing season as the team’s president of basketball operations.
But Morey embraced the moment and poked fun at his and the Sixers’ failures — but also still managed to tick off the fans.
In the playoffs last season, “we lost to a Knicks team that was not as good as the Celtics team we lost to the year before,” Morey said.
“I was very down after the loss. I was like, ‘Man, people are going to be so angry.’ And, they were angry — obviously, everyone wants us to win — but they were less angry than the year before, and anger is all that drives Sixers fans.”
Morey later joked that “the aggregators are going to have a field day with this.” But if he wanted to drive Sixers fans’ anger, he had already done so to great success — not that the fans needed much help.
Last week, fans seemed more disappointed than anything else as they discussed their feelings about the team. But after another week featuring losses in three of four games, some fans are already canceling season-ticket packages for next year.
And Sixers players, including Paul George, were booed during a surprise appearance in their own building at WWE’s Friday Night Smackdown at the Wells Fargo Center.
But Morey didn’t just take shots at angry Sixers fans. Morey made plenty of jokes at his own expense during the discussion of algorithms and AI in sports. Compared to Mullainathan, whose resumé includes a 2002 MacArthur Fellowship — colloquially known as a genius grant — and a number of significant pieces of economic research, Morey joked that his resumé subject is “hasn’t won yet.”