The Sixers Season Is Over, But At Least I Got This Playoff NFT

The Sixers are done. Last night they trailed by one at halftime in an elimination game. They came out in the third quarter and scored a whopping 15 points. They finished with just 42 points in the second half. For the umpteenth straight season, the season ended in a fiery car crash.

All is not lost, though. For one, housing prices in Philadelphia should now plummet because of all the new rowhomes that can be built from the bricks the Sixers left behind. And, two, I got this sweet new NFT! It is from Crypto.com, the Sixers' jersey sponsor this season, and it contains a 15-second animation of a construction of the snake/bell Sixers logo. I have edition 175/688. You can view it here, unless I accidentally copied a link that allows you to steal my NFT. Please do not steal it. I do not want to be tweeting, “All my snakes, gone.”

Actually, maybe you can steal it. This isn’t worth anything. The 2021-22 Sixers season ended at 9:36 p.m. Just two hours and 24 minutes later, I received an email: “You've been airdropped a collectible!” I was worried that this worked like Apple’s Airdrop—that is, only occasionally—and I would miss out on whatever Angry Ape or Lucky Lion or Farting Ferret cartoon someone had sent to me. Fortunately, it went through. Unfortunately, it was this Sixers NFT.

This was my fault, of course. I attended Game 3 of the Sixers' second-round series this season. It was great. Joel Embiid returned, the Sixers won by 20, I bought my tickets before news broke that Embiid was going to play and so they were only like $60 each, parking was free at the casino, it had stopped raining for a bit when I walked back to the garage, I got a bootleg t-shirt outside the arena. Really, it was a great night.

I made one mistake, though. The Sixers splashed an ad up on the screen a few times to scan a QR code for a free “playoff NFT.” As a dabbler in NFTs at one time and a man who likes free things even when they’re worthless, I scanned it from my upper-deck seat. I signed up for Crypto.com NFT. I verified my identity. I realized it was a waste of time, but I’ve wasted time in stupider ways. And then I promptly forgot about it.

The NFT came to me at a very funny time, and not just because the Sixers' season ended just over two hours earlier. It has been a rough month for cryptocurrency and related stores of value. Basically every cryptocurrency has tanked this week. The NFT boom has also been declared “over”, with one report saying sales are down 92 percent from last year. (The NFT boom has been declared “bust” by various parties before, of course, and I suspect many cryptocurrencies will go up in value again, too. But they are still tanking now.)

The Sixers are not the only sports team in bed with a crypto company. Just this week, the Washington Nationals tweeted this.

In the two days since the Nationals tweeted this, Terra’s Luna cryptocurrency has plummeted from about 30 dollars to, ah, $0.000079 when I just looked it up. Terra‘s USDT stablecoin—a cryptocurrency that is supposed to remain at a value equal to $1—has fallen to 13 cents.

So the Sixers are not quite at this level of embarrassment. And it’s not clear that the Sixers can even be embarrassed. They clearly have no qualms about "partnering" with basically whoever will give them money. They’d wear a patch on their jerseys for a baby formula theft ring if the price were right. They definitely do not care that their jersey sponsor sent out Sixers NFTs just as the season ended and crypto is in freefall.

The person who should be embarrassed here is me. I requested this piece of shit. NFTs that have been valuable are ones that are scarce. What is more common than a Sixers loss in the second round? This is the fourth time in five years they’ve pulled that trick off! As it says on the page for my NFT, I am open to offers. More than $0.000079, please.