They Were Never Gonna Win the Ring the Bell Game

Thanks for understanding, Daryl.

"Just so you know, there's no chance that we're going to win tonight." 

My mother and I were driving on 76, about an hour before Mike and Spike were scheduled to take the Wells Fargo Center floor to Ring the Bell for the first time in RTRS history. It was going to be an historic occasion, and it was absolutely going to precede a four-quarter ass-kicking from the New York Knicks. Did not matter that they were down a couple starters while we were finally getting a couple back, or that Maxey was feeling it in his first game as an officially minted All-Star, or that Kyle Lowry was making his career-long-awaited Sixers debut. I needed my mom to know and be OK with the idea that we were going to watch Mike and Spike Ring the Bell, and then we were going to watch the Sixers get their own bell rung for 48 minutes. 

Luckily, she seemed to understand: Decades of Philly sports fandom will make you agreeable to accepting such statements without follow-up questions, and it certainly helped that nearly every Philly sports event we've attended together (The Confetti Game, Game Six last year against the Diamondbacks) has ended in catastrophe anyway. And so, as Bojan Bogdanovic started ripping off sick guitar solo after sick guitar solo from the corners last night, all we could really do was look at each other and shrug. They never win the bell-ringing game. 

Still, what a thing. Spike and Mike at center court, mallets in hand, ready to ring that fucking bell until everyone from HoopsCritic to Bryan Colangelo to Mike Muscala's racist dad could hear them. To go from The Artist Better Known as Sixers Fans Gathered to a formally recognized Sixers cultural institution given the team’s greatest meaningless honor was significant in a way I’m sill struggling to properly grasp. It was a moment of triumph for all things Ricky -- even as the bell was 85% inaudible, and even as 95% of those in attendance seemed confused and disinterested in why a sports broadcaster and screenwriter were the esteemed Philly representatives for this evening's pre-game. And man, the combination of frightened and excited I got when it seemed like that's all Matt Cord was gonna intro Spike and Mike as: What a legendary, all-time Not Saying the Name that would have been. I still get a little tingly thinking about the extra juice it would've provided all of us for years to come. 

We were all there, by the way. Well, not all of us -- MOC couldn't make it, and I think Abbie and Leo might still be stuck in traffic on 95 somewhere. And those of us who were there were spread out among a couple rows of Section 113 like wisecracking kids at synagogue who you couldn't trust to not start shit if they were too close together; I would've had to scream across three or four people just to make a crack to Zo about Tobias Harris still being on All-Star Break PTO. But he was there, as was The Danny, as (eventually) was CJ, as even was Alyssa -- who, I was happy (though unsurprised) to learn from her screaming in the third quarter, is maybe even more of an Anti-Ref Guy than Mike. It was a lovely and appropriately scattershot RTRS family reunion.

And if I hadn't warned my mom that the Sixers were absolutely going to lose, the Knicks did a pretty good job of that right away. They were up 15-3 in a blink, shooting the lights out and grabbing every rebound while we struggled to execute a guard-to-guard pass in the backcourt. The Sixers got the leeway of a very generous whistle and a couple lucky bounces in the first quarter and still ended it down 11; it was 0% surprising when the Knicks opened that deficit to 26 in the second. Tobias was wah-wahhhh trumpet bad. Nicolas Batum had five fouls and zero shots (not an exaggeration). Paul Reed was perfect and beautiful as always and watch your back Nick Nurse for not playing him at all in the fourth quarter but also he kinda stunk and couldn't grab a rebound and yeah. Down 23 at the half, it seemed like you could pretty much change the channel from there. 

But I'm glad that the Sixers had enough respect for Ring the Bell night to at least give us a second half worth talking about. Tyrese Maxey shot and drove his way to a 35-point scoring night. Kyle Lowry returned from the war bruised and bandaged but not beaten, winning a million little third-quarter battles and ending the game (of course) as the only Sixer with a positive plus-minus. Kelly Oubre.... some tough misses in there, but goddamn the man gets to the rim. The last eight minutes were brutal and fuck Josh Hart and Precious Achiuwa forever, but all you can really ask for on a Ring the Bell night with a podcast after-party is to have a game eventful enough for about two segments' worth of discussion (though having not yet listened, I'm guessing Spike and Mike didn't actually end up giving it even that much). 

In any event, Ring the Bell Night felt a lot of the last 11 years have felt: thrilling, confounding, jarring, hilarious, profoundly discouraging, never totally satisfying and still ultimately deeply rewarding. Jalen Brunson got MVP chants; Joel Embiid was not in the building. The only time the Knicks fans got totally drowned out was when Precious Achiuwa won us Chicken Nuggets. Darius Bazley apparently played for a minute. It felt like early-Process, late-Process and post-Process all at once. And on a hard-earned, long-overdue, jumbly-feeling night of celebration for the Ricky, it was a good reminder that with everything that's come and gone over the past decade-plus, the one constant has been us. We are the continuity. We were never gonna win last night, but no one can say we totally lost, either.