It's also not surprising that the Sixers reportedly haven't found much sympathy for their complaints from other teams around the league. When a franchise spends more than a decade making bad draft picks and bad signings and bad trades and bad hirings, when it never adopts a fresh and thoughtful strategy for success, when it assures itself of remaining trapped in the NBA netherworld between genuine greatness and abject awfulness, how many of its competitors are going to stand up and say, Hey, we really don't approve of what you guys are doing without snickering? There's a reason that one of the league's biggest recent laughingstocks has been the New York Knicks. It's not just that the Knicks have generally been lousy. It's that they've tried so hard to be good, and that they've been so lousy at trying to be good.