Santa Klaus came earlier this year

…and brought Sixers fan a nice gift: THE FIRING OF BILLY KING.

Yes, King got the axe in the late night in Philly, as David Aldridge and Phil Jasner reported.

I’ve read it this morning on the best Sixers blog, Passion & Pride, (congratulations guys), and could not believe it.

But it’s actually true. Ed Stefanski, former GM of the New Jersey Nets, replaces King, and a press conference is about to be held in Philly in few hours to introduce the new general manager.

I am happy. I never liked Billy King.

The second post of this blog, more than a year ago, was about his flaws. Since then, nothing changed.

I wanted him gone after the Iverson trade (a move that I liked, though), I confirmed that he doesn’t have a plan, that he sucks, and I repeated it few days ago.

To his credit, I liked the Hunter-Evans trade and I thanked him for not being Danny Ainge (LOL).  Damn, the Internet is nice…

The overall record of his 10 years tenure in Philadelphia speaks for itself: Sixers lack of accomplishments, current mess, cap hell situation is all on him.

It would be stupid to repeat all his mistakes one by one. It would also be too long. We can make just a short summary, a sort of epitaph (LOL):

* horrible decisions on coaches: Ayers, Ford, Cheeks… he even brought back Larry Brown last year. To do what, nobody still knows..

* bad signings (I refer both to free agent and extentions), overpaying average players and/or jacking up too long deals, killing our financial flexibility: Greg Buckner, Eric Snow, Aaron Mc Kie, Derrick Coleman, Kenny Thomas, Brian Skinner….

* bad trades: Van Horn, Glenn Robinson… I’ll give him Webber, because we gave up three stiffs to get an all star, and Iverson, because what we got back was ok in my opinion

* totally absence of int’l scouting while the NBA was going global. Frachises were  bringing in the Yao Mings, the Ginobilis, the Parkers, the Nocionis, and we were getting Efthimios Rentzias, or drafting Edin Bavcic.

* idiotic decision of NOT tanking in the second part of last year = no playoff, no high pick. He lately tried to trade up, and of course couldn’t do it…. so what was the purpose of those 30 wins after Iverson was gone? “Create a winning culture”? LMAO !!

You put this beside the team’s record over the last 5 years (after Larry Brown left) and you draw your conclusions.

Actually I am surprised it think it took this long to fire him. I would have done it after he fired Jim O’Brien, a good coach, coming off a positive, winning year; but at that time he was clearly (still) backed up by Ed Snider.

But the boss had enough of the losses, the low attendace, the money wasted. About time.

Hey, do you know that Sixers are still giving around 28 millions to Chris Webber and Aaron Mc Kie this year? One is probably sunbathing, the other is an assistant coach but gets a 7 million salary as a player…. and we have Ollie on our books for another 3 millions: make it three guys paid more than 30 millions for NOT playing.

And guess who is giving them the money? The one who (finally) had enough of that.

I don’t know much about the new GM honestly, but I am sure of this: it will be hard to do worse than Billy King.

It’s a pleasure to create the new “Stefanski” category on my blog.

Welcome home, Ed. Clean your new desk, you have a lot of work to do.