Brand and The Sixers Remind Me of My First Car

Senior year of high school I bought my first car - a 2000 Chevy Cavalier. I had saved up some money over the years and was ready to buy a car and ended up deciding on buying the Cavalier because it was about the most expensive brand new car I could afford at the time. It was a pretty sweet ride in my mind.  It was black with a pretty bitchin’ racing decal on both of the doors and had a CD player which back in 2000 was still somewhat of a novelty for someone in high school.

Enjoy the ride Sixers fans!

I thought it was pretty sweet, and for a while it was.  For a while, I had the nicest car amongst my friends.  Then I realized something.  All I did was lock my self into a pretty crappy car for the next eight years before I bought something nicer last spring.

Instead of just buying something to get me by until I was out of college and working and could afford a decent car payment, I spent all I had saved up on the Cavalier.  Now I got some good use out of that.  Me and that car had some good times together.  I drove that thing to Canada multiple times and a bunch of other random road trips.

By the time I traded her in though, she was missing the stereo (stolen), had a dent in the hood (thank you route 76), had a whole lot of scratches to the bumper, and had a giant scratch in the back (thanks street parking).  I ended up holding on to that car for a while too because I wanted to get my money out it.

The current situation with the Sixers and Elton Brand is starting to remind of my Cavalier just a little too much.  After years of suffering through bad contracts and no cap space the Sixers entered last summer with tons of cap space and were ready to be major players in free agency.  The only problem was last summer’s free agent market was pretty weak.  So what did the Sixers do? Instead of being sensible and signing someone to get them by, they went out and spent all of their money on the best that was available at the time.

Now they’re locked into Brand for the next five years and he’ll be coming off a second major injury in two years when the 2009-10 season tips off next fall.  Nevermind the fact that it looks like there’s two perfectly good power forwards who are both much younger on the current roster in Thaddeus Young and Maresse Speights who fit the style of play the Sixers are best at.  What happens to those two when Brand comes back?  None can really play center.  Young might be able to play small forward, but so far that experiment hasn’t worked out all that well.

So what do the Sixers do with both of them when Brand comes back?  Do they trade one?  Can they even trade Brand?  Do they change their style of play to accommodate Brand?  Look how well that’s worked out for the Suns with Shaq.   If Isaiah Thomas was still running the show in New York, I would say maybe we could ship Brand up 95 next year, but he’s not and to my knowledge Billy King isn’t a GM anywhere either.  Who knows, maybe Ed Stefanski can convince Steve Kerr to take Brand off our hands - he took Shaq off of Miami’s hands and gave the Heat one of the best all around players in the game last year.