PHILADELPHIA — Maybe it’s the Christmas decorations in the atrium of the Center or the recent schedule that the 76ers have endured. Either way, the ghosts of Sixers’ past have been so tangible the last week that you can nearly hear Jacob Marley’s chains rattling, though it may be just another wayward Eric Gordon 3-pointer. Friday brought Ben Simmons and his Brooklyn Nets back to Philadelphia, to serve as only the third victim of the battered Sixers season. But Sunday supplied James Harden, his L.A. Clippers bludgeoning the hosts, 125-99. Along the way, the Center faithful got plenty of chances to practice booing, Harden and Simmons serenaded at every touch. That muscle stretched, they then turned it on the 76ers Sunday, an affair with such silver linings as a successful fourth-quarter brickin’ for chicken, Justin Edwards’ first NBA points and a lopsided enough decision that not too much of the Eagles game was missed. The parade of former hopes through Philadelphia begs a question. Simmons and Harden each cycled through stints as potential saviors, then malcontents. Each was at one point labeled the solution, then the problem in Philadelphia, always in the wrong order. Yet both are gone and the Sixers are 3-13 and Joel Embiid’s knee won’t stop swelling and what exactly was the problem to begin with? Any hopes that dysfunction would leave town with either surely can’t stand in the face of the Sixers’ current reality. Neither former Sixer is much closer to a championship. Harden and the Clippers last year finished fourth in the Western Conference and were dumped out in the first round by Dallas. That team had Russell Westbrook and Paul George, both now gone. The Clippers are standing vigil for Kawhi Leonard’s knee in a way Sixers fans will find gallingly familiar. In the deep Western Conference, the Clippers are a potential challenger but nothing more, unless the Toronto version of Leonard rises Lazarus-like from the cave. Simmons is part of a Nets team in full rebuild. After decades with limited draft capital, they could have four first-round picks in 2025 and have rights to stockpile eight additional first-rounders through the end of the decade, including the Sixers’ 2027 selection. And for the 2024-25 Sixers? They’ve just nudged ahead of the Wizards to climb out of the NBA basement a fifth of the way through the season. The ineptitude that remains seems … all kinds of perplexing. The franchise is currently led by two guys who could be all-time Draft Night steals in Tyrese Maxey and Jared McCain. They have an NBA championship-winning coach, who replaced an NBA championship-winning coach, who replaced a coach who won three NBA titles as an assistant. They doubled down on Embiid as the cornerstone in the offseason, then invested in an on-paper ideal counterpoint in George. And yet … The promenade of former 76ers have returned with few bad things to say about their time here. Mo Bamba, underused last season, and Nicolas Batum spoke well of their tenures here, Batum going so far as to encourage fellow Frenchman Guerschon Yabusele to sign here. Harden’s opinion was not obtained. Philly was attractive enough of a location for several high-profile veterans to pick it among ample suitors last offseason. Thus the dissonance that, afforded an outside lens via the Clippers, had to be bridged within about 15 minutes Sunday evening. On one hand was Batum, veteran of 17 seasons and 1,000 NBA games, extolling his time in Philadelphia. “It’s a historic franchise, and to be part of that even for a year – it’s nice to get my jersey, and my son has my jersey in his room so I see it every day,” said Batum, who subsequently got Maxey to sign a jersey for his son, a big fan of the All-Star guard. “So it’s just cool to be part of something historic for a little while. I love basketball, I’m a fan of basketball. So to say I was a Sixer for a year, that’s special.” On the other was Clippers head coach Tyronn Lue, an assistant for Team USA at the Olympics, stepping over a question about his experience with Embiid in a manner not unlike Lue was once stepped over on this very same floor. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to answer that,” Lue started in response to how Embiid looked in Paris, followed by: “I don’t know. He’s a really, really, really, really, really great basketball player. So I don’t know if he was supposed to be healthy or not or whatever. So I don’t know. He helped us win a gold medal is all I know.” The “I don’t know” seems appropriate, since a lot of people around the Center don’t seem to know how the 76ers have started so poorly, or how many games George or Embiid might play, or what level at which Embiid in particular might play when his knee’s load has been sufficiently managed. It would be too much to say that being in the 76ers’ orbit creates such mystification. But the scar tissue keeps building, in metaphor and in the flesh. The Process, its aftermath, the umpteen roster rebuilds around Embiid, four decades without a championship, two decades without so much as back-to-back playoff series wins – it’s enough to lose the plot of it all, to not know if you’re nearer the top or the bottom, to maybe yell at a child passing by with a question of what day (or year) it is. And it’s certainly enough to wonder just how merry things might feel for the foreseeable future. Contact Matthew De George at [email protected]