‘A slow motion nightmare season’: Mad Dog Carter and the NBA’s worst-ever group | Philadelphia 76ers

Those 1972-73 Sixers set the requirement for stinking – and it might have really been even worse, due to the fact that they almost inexplicably won 5 of 7 video games that February to improve their record to 9-60. Then they went back to the horrible Sixers, dropping their last 13 video games.

Fred “Mad Dog” Carter, a Philadelphia native, led the Sixers in scoring that season with a 20-point average, making the group’s Most Valuable Player award, a suspicious athletic honor if there ever was one.

“My thing was, did I lead us to nine wins, or did I lead us to 73 losses?” Carter, now 78 years of ages and retired, informs the Guardian from his home in the Philadelphia residential areas. “It’s not something I wear proudly on my chest.”

He keeps in mind walking through airports on trip that year. The gamers brought their tennis shoes in team-issued fitness center bags, and Carter made certain to put the 76ers logo design facing his leg so nobody would see it.

However, Carter says the 19 gamers on the 9-73ers, as they became understood, did agree each other due to the fact that they had actually concerned the awareness that “we knew we weren’t good enough. I’ll tell you what really helped all of us: We had no dissension.”

In reality, Carter says he does incline retelling old stories to help press reporters assembled retrospectives on anniversaries, or when other NBA groups close in on 73 losses. The 2015-16 Sixers dragged out the drama for a while, publishing their 10th triumph in the 78th of their 82 video games that season.

He says of his group’s record: “I still want it to stand. As long as it stands, we stay relevant. You’re talking to me now. If [9-73] wasn’t relevant, you wouldn’t be talking to me.”

The 9-73ers did have characters, none more well-known than John Quincy Trapp, a threatening power forward referred to as “Q,” who was obtained from the Los Angeles Lakers, who had actually won 69 of 82 regular-season video games and took the NBA champion the previous season.

The finest “Q” story came when Trapp was informed by Roy Rubin, the group’s woefully overmatched coach who lasted just a half-season, to come out of a December video game in Detroit, Trapp’s home town. Trapp informed Rubin to take a look at his friend in the weak crowd of 1,646.

Rubin reversed, the legend has it, to see Trapp’s friend open his coat to reveal a pistol. Rubin chose to keep Trapp in the video game, which the Sixers lost by 28 points, dropping their record to 3-31.

That was the seventh video game of a 14-game losing streak. The Sixers opened the season with 15 losses and later on lost 20 straight video games. Trapp played just 39 video games for Philadelphia prior to the 76ers cut him with 2 months left in the season.

“I don’t know what happened to Q,” Carter says of Trapp, who is thought to have actually died, though records of his death can’t be discovered. “Interesting player. I didn’t see that [gun incident], but my teammates told me about it later.

“And I refrain from saying too much, because John probably has kids and grandkids now. I think if he’d been on a more talented team, his skills would have come out a little more.”

No professional athlete acquires a lot from winning simply 11% of their group’s video games, however Carter says a half-century later on that he was better geared up to manage the 1972-73 season than he would have believed. He had actually been conditioned for the experience.

He was among 4 kids to a mom who was a domestic employee and a dad who was a scrap dealership. Fred typically assisted his pop: “We were Sanford and Son before there was Sanford and Son,” he says, describing the comedy starring Redd Foxx.

Carter left of Benjamin Franklin High School in Philadelphia and was all set to sign up with the army, however there was nobody at the enlistment workplace the day he appeared. So he chose his sweetheart that Sunday to her freshman orientation at close-by Cheyney University.

He saw lots of familiar faces that day, and he believed he was smarter than much of them were, so he returned to school to make his high school diploma. The famous coach at Mount St. Mary’s, the late Jim Phelan, hired Carter to dip into the school in rural Maryland.

“I said, ‘Coach, how many Black students are in the school?,’ and he said, ‘Well, look in the mirror, and that’s the only Black player you’ll see there,’” Carter remembers.

Carter flourished at Mount St Mary’s. The Baltimore Bullets took him in the 3rd round of the 1969 NBA draft. He played 2 complete seasons for the Bullets, assisting them get to the NBA finals in 1971. He was traded to Philadelphia early in the 1971-72 season.

Those Sixers won 30 video games, then were jolted by the defection of their finest gamer, Billy Cunningham, to Carolina of the American Basketball Association in June 1972 – around the very same time the Sixers called Rubin, from Long Island University, as their brand-new coach. Al McGuire and Adolph Rupp had actually turned them down. The Sixers put a help-wanted advertisement in the paper.

It emerged that Rubin, who passed away in 2013, did not understand what he was entering. The Daily News called him Poor Roy Rubin. Carter keeps in mind how Rubin made too much of a preseason triumph over the Boston Celtics: “Kevin and I just looked at each other and said, ‘Boston had their third and fourth teams in there!’ Roy just did not understand that.”

With Cunningham gone and the hobbled guard Hal Greer at the end of his NBA profession, Carter figured he needed to take more shots for the Sixers. That was hard. Their challengers took them rather seriously due to the fact that losing to the weak Sixers would be humiliating.

“We were a band of misfits, you could say,” he says.

Carter would play in the NBA for 4 more seasons, and he’d help the Sixers get to the playoffs in 1976 prior to he was traded to Milwaukee. He went on to coach Philadelphia for the much better part of 2 seasons, later on ending up being an expert for ESPN.

Asked a half-century later on what he kept in mind about the last video game of that traditionally bad season, Carter says, “It was like the phrase Dr King said: ‘Free at last. Free at last.’ What we went through that year was almost like the Bataan Death March.”