Mike Missanelli: The 76ers need to make a trade to compete for title

Before your Philadelphia 76ers rattled off four wins in that recent killer span of six tough opponents, they were merely an interesting curiosity. Now, they are the talk of the NBA.

You can tell when a team has arrived. It's when the glitterati start filing in. In the last two weeks, celebrities sitting courtside at a Sixers game have included Will Smith (though the eminent Fresh Prince holed up in a suite after just one half of sitting with the people), actor Terrence Howard, and rapper Meek Mill. The jockocracy has also been represented in the persons of DeSean Jackson and Shady McCoy, and, the other night, Raul Ibanez. Even porn star and political candidate Mary Carey has attended a Sixers game.

When the Sixers play the good teams in this league, the Wells Fargo Center has actually become a cool place to be. With every Sixers win against these good teams, the mind wonders. Before our eyes, the Sixers have become a contender. They have created a window of opportunity that is cracked open a bit. And the only question is whether it would now be prudent to attempt to squeeze another superstar player through that crack in order to go all in for a championship.

Oh, don't chuckle, basketball-breath.

The 2012 version of the NBA is like a fragmenting hard drive. It's all over the place. The lockout, the late start, and the four-games-in-five-nights schedules, with back-to-backs all over the joint, has made it impossible to tell who's good.

Even the best team in the league - by all accounts, and with much disdain, the Miami Heat - shows a cracked foundation. Some nights, the Heat dominate. Other nights, they go through the motions and lose to the likes of the Milwaukee Bucks. The Chicago Bulls are a nice team, but they aren't any better in personnel this season, and this was a team that lost four straight to the Heat in the playoffs last season.

And is there really anybody who scares you that much in the Western Conference? The Mavericks aren't the same team that won the NBA title last season. With all due respect to Kobe Bryant, the Lakers don't look anywhere near championship caliber. And at the end of the day, the Oklahoma City Thunder still have only two players.

There are two ways to go here.

One is to ponder whether the Sixers, in their current form, can actually win something. It is a team without a superstar, where the sum is far greater than its individual parts, coached brilliantly by an all-world competitor in Doug Collins.