Frank Capece felt a twinge of nostalgia last week when he heard New Jersey officials were trying to convince the Philadelphia 76ers to cross state lines and establish a new home in Camden, N.J.
A lawyer and deep-dyed sports fan from Cranford, N.J., Capece owned New Jersey Nets season tickets for two decades before disavowing the team, swiftly and permanently, when it became clear that it was moving to Brooklyn.
So when the owners of the 76ers announced that they were at least pondering the offer, Capece, 74, could only laugh.
“Been there, done that,” he said. “It’s like a divorce, and when a divorce happens, you don’t look back.”
The rumblings have caused consternation and curiosity on both sides of the state border. Sports fans are often knocked for being capricious, but owners can be, too. And a move, should one happen, would represent only the latest episode in the enduring history of professional teams unceremoniously fleeing their longtime homes.
The hypothetical arrival of the Sixers would also reaffirm New Jersey’s odd role as a kind of liminal space in the professional sports landscape. Five major teams play in the state, and four of them refer to New York in their official monikers. Could New Jersey host yet another out-of-state guest?
Michael Levin, 34, a television writer who co-hosts a long-running podcast about the 76ers, grumbled that the team’s owners, Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, would most likely do “whatever makes the most money” and therefore be tempted by the generous offer from New Jersey officials: tax breaks and incentives totaling more than $1 billion to support the construction of a new arena and development on the site of a former state prison near the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.
“Philadelphia has made fun of the New York Giants for so long for not playing in New York,” said Levin, his voice rising with indignation. “And then the Philadelphia 76ers — named after 1776! — are going to go from Philadelphia to Jersey because of a tax break? And then we get to be made fun of? That’d be embarrassing.”
Levin noted that the team in the last several years has generally underachieved on the court and had already produced a “list of public scandals and embarrassments” (and proceeded for several minutes to enumerate a catalog that was, in fact, far too convoluted to include in this article).
“So I don’t think that people are going to renounce their Sixers fandom because of this, if they haven’t already,” he said, laughing, “because there’s been plenty of reasons to do so.”
The Sixers, who have leased space at the Well Fargo Center in South Philadelphia since 1996, are openly searching for their own place. Their proposal for a $1.3 billion arena in the Center City neighborhood of Philadelphia has not progressed since it was revealed two years ago.
It’s no surprise, then, that New Jersey’s early overtures, first reported last week by ROI-NJ, have caused fans to start pondering certain practical matters.
Randy Childress and his bandmates, for instance, believed they had achieved a level of timelessness back in 1975 when they composed “Here Come the Sixers,” a rally tune still played at the team’s arena today.
They named no players in the lyrics — a safeguard against injuries, trades and the relentless passage of time — and never really even mentioned basketball. But Childress realized last week that the song wasn’t as future-proof as he thought: The word “Philadelphia” is uttered 14 times.
“I don’t know what they’d do, because ‘Camden’ doesn’t really fit,” Childress said, laughing. “There was no way of foreseeing this.”
Then there’s the matter of what the team would be called.
Nicholas, 45, a Sixers fan from Camden who opposes a move to New Jersey because of the hefty tax breaks (and who asked to withhold his last name because he is employed by the state), proposed the Camden Soup Cans, pointing out that Campbell’s Soup was founded in the city.
“New Jersey is weird,” he said. “It’s just in the middle. It has its own identity, but it’s also in the shadow of New York and Philadelphia.”
Geography in the context of sports has proved a particularly fluid concept in the state.
Aside from the New York Giants and the New York Jets, the N.F.L. teams residing in East Rutherford, N.J., there are the New York Red Bulls and NJ/NY Gotham F.C., soccer teams who play in Harrison, N.J. (It’s not unusual, of course, for a city’s team to have their home stadium in a neighboring locale. See: the Dallas Cowboys, who play in Arlington, to name just one example.)
The championship match of the 2026 World Cup will take place at MetLife stadium, which FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, for the occasion has elegantly renamed “New York New Jersey Stadium,” even though it is very much in New Jersey.
The New Jersey Devils are the only major sports franchise in New Jersey that solely identifies with its home state. Their owners? Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment.
And the Devils are not the only connection that the 76ers owners have to New Jersey. The basketball team’s offices and practice facility were moved to Camden in 2016, which gloomy segments of the Sixers fandom had already viewed as a half-step toward a full relocation across the river.
The 76ers in a statement identified their Center City proposal as their ongoing priority, but reiterated the urgency they felt to establish a new home before their current lease at the Wells Fargo Center expired.
“As a result,” the statement concluded, “we must take all potential options seriously, including this one,” the team said about the offer from New Jersey.
Capece, the former Nets superfan, said his beloved state had nothing to lose by going after the Sixers. It would be a coup for the governor, he said, if it actually happened. And if it did, he would convey this simple message to Philadelphia fans: Life goes on.
Freed from the financial burden of their season tickets, Capece and his wife remodeled their kitchen. He still cherishes artifacts from the golden years of his Nets fandom — jerseys autographed by Keith van Horn and Kerry Kittles, among others — but hardly spares a thought for the current team.
“Even if you came and offered me $1,000, I don’t think I could name a player on the Nets,” said Capece, who added he certainly would not join the 76ers bandwagon if they moved to Camden. “The only thing northern New Jersey and southern New Jersey have in common is the license plates.”
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