Is it Negadelphia to Point Out That We Went Through Years of Intense Sixers Arena Controversy Just to Land on The Spectrum 2.0?

The Flyers and Sixers released the first renderings of the new South Philly arena on Tuesday, noting in the press release that the rounded oval design pays homage to The Spectrum of years past. It’s also being built on the spot where The Spectrum stood between 1967 and 2011:

Today is a major day for the city of Philadelphia.

We’re unveiling the first renderings of our proposed new arena, the future home of the @sixers, @NHLFlyers and Philadelphia’s @WNBA team, on the historic site of the former Spectrum grounds in South Philly.

Fans will have the…

The powers that be will do a great job with this. I have no doubts. It’s going to butt up right against the recently expanded Stateside Live!, which will create the first semblance of this mixed-use, Atlanta Battery-like complex that Spectacor really wants to build. There will be public gathering spaces and easy access to the Broad Street Line. It will be a modern arena hosting the soon-to-be world champion Philadelphia Flyers, Philadelphia 76ers, and expansion WNBA team. We will leave the cursed Xfinity Mobile Arena, where zero championships were won, in the dustbin of history.

But something is sticking in my craw about this whole thing, and it may be Negadelphia. Or maybe not, but I couldn’t get this feeling out of my head on Tuesday:

“We went through all of this, just to end up with The Spectrum 2.0? We went through years of nasty argument and adversarial debate just to settle on both sides going 50/50 on a new arena located a few hundred feet from the current arena, which was recently renovated at a cost of $400 million?“

The latter is worth pointing out, the renovation to Xfinity Mobile Arena. You often hear people say “what’s wrong with the current arena?“, and the answer is nothing. Nothing is wrong with it. Spectacor did a wonderful job upgrading it. But the question is somewhat of an N/A at the same time because the Sixers were never staying past 2030. The reason we went through this saga is because the Sixers’ lease was expiring, and they didn’t want to be a tenant anymore. They wanted to own the building that they play in, or at least have partial ownership in it. Spectacor knew this when they began dumping money into Wells Fargo Center in 2016, and they’ll get about four more seasons out of the nice and still-relatively new building by the time Spectrum 2.0 is finished. So it’s not like the $400 million was a waste. I don’t see it that way.

But what I do see is an incredibly circuitous route to essentially bring us back to square 1, a route that included:

That’s just off the top of my head. There’s so much more that went on publicly and behind the scenes during this years-long shitshow.

It feels like we went so far off the reservation just to finish right where we started, which is the Flyers and Sixers playing in the same arena in South Philly. Only Harris Blitzer Sports and Entertainment gets 50% and Spectacor keeps a longtime partner in the house, with no competition for events at a Center City arena. I don’t know if anybody on either side is really truly happy with the outcome, like are we supposed to believe that David Adelman’s magnum opus is going half and half with Spectacor in South Philly? I don’t. But that’s the essence of compromise. Nobody is going to get everything they wanted. Maybe Josh Harris, Adam Silver, and Brian Roberts are satisfied in the end, but we’d be naive to believe it’s universal among executives at both organizations, people who care #1) about Philadelphia and #2) about other pursuits.

Maybe I’m a burned out and jaded asshole, but something about these mentions of The Spectrum triggered me, like “This is it? This is the endgame? It’s a modern Spectrum?” A lot of people spent a lot of time and energy and money talking and writing and reading about 76 Place, and/or lobbying for it, and that all would have been a total waste if not for the fact that it spurred years of useful conversation about urbanism, politics, labor, mass transit, development, race relations, and Philadelphia at large.

Who are we? What do we want? What do we need? What is our level of ambition?

So it’s less about the outcome, and more about the process that got us there. The new arena will be very nice. Don’t get me wrong. Spectacor and the Sixers will do a good job with it. Stateside looks really nice after the expansion, and will remain until Knocked Loose turns it into rubble in early October. RIP Stateside in October. But we took such a complicated, serpentine, ass-backwards route to get here. I have to admit that I rolled my eyes on Tuesday when I realized that we went through that incredible saga just to end up with… The Spectrum.

Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - [email protected]