Hopefully, win was one to grow on

If you looked at the NBA standings by order of appearance Thursday morning, nothing really changed for the 76ers. They started Wednesday with the worst record in the NBA, and they ended the day with the worst record in the NBA. In fact, odds are way, way long that the Sixers will be anything other than 30th out of 30 come Christmas, Kwanzaa, New Year’s Day, Chinese New Year, St. Patrick’s Day, or Tax Day, which is when the Sixers conclude their season and the IRS forces them to give you all a refund (just kidding, you will get nothing and like it).

However, if you look in the win column, there is a major change in the Sixers’ status. That number under the “W,” which had been stuck on “0” for the first five weeks of the season, turned into a “1” when the Sixers went to Minneapolis and knocked off a Timberwolves team that looked like it would be underdogs to the Prince & The Revolution Blouses.

That, however, is inconsequential. The Sixers will not go 0-82, which was fairly important since no team that has ever gone winless for an entire NBA season has won a championship within the next 100 years, or however long the Sam Hinkie Rebuilding Plan Sponsored By NASA’s Mars Mission is scheduled to take.

Mockery has become a common descriptor of the 2014-15 squad, and when a team wins once every 17 games, it doesn’t have much of a defense against it, let alone against any five random basketball players.

But Wednesday night served as a reminder: The players did not construct the team, nor did coach Brett Brown. This was Hinkie’s doing, and any disgust with the overboard tanking involved should be directed at him.

For all the grief Philadelphia sports fans receive for their behavior, the city’s treatment of the Sixers players and coach has been heavy on empathy. Social media lit up with genuine joy and relief that the players had ended their winless start to the season.

Even the most ardent Hinkie detractors would tell you that they don’t want to see a collection of kids — 12 of the 15 players to see action this season are 24 or younger — subjected to relentless failure. For four of the 10 Sixers who played Wednesday, it was the first NBA win of their careers. Technically you could throw Robert Covington into that group, as well, since his NBA experience prior to this season was 34 garbage-time minutes in nine games with the Houston Rockets last year.

It won’t be the only win of their careers. There will be more than one win. But for this group, it really is the biggest win.

A few years ago, the NPR show Radiolab did an episode named “Numbers.” One off the segments discussed how even infants have quantitative recognition. However, for newborns, that ability isn’t based on counting. It’s through logarithmic thinking — that is, to infants, the distance between the numbers one and two seems massive compared to the difference between, 10 and 11. While as adults we see that gap as one, infants recognize that two is twice the size of one, while they can’t discern a difference between 10 and 11 because 11 is only 1.1 times the size of 10.

In a way, this Sixers team are professional basketball infants. And that one in the win column is infinitely bigger than the zero that had been there. Eventually, winning a single game will become less of a big deal. But Wednesday, it really was a huge deal to them, for them.

The key will be whether they can build on it, mature from it, and do so at a healthy rate. Babies use rudimentary skills to mature and move on to bigger and better things. If not, they are stunted. That is the worry when it comes to the Sixers. Will the key components for the future be stunted as players because Hinkie is leaving them malnourished? Will players like K.J. McDaniels and Henry Sims want to stick around and endure a growth process that is destined to be slow, when perhaps restricted free agency offers them a shot to escape?

For one day, and one win, there was joy to be had for the Sixers. But the second win will come with less fanfare, less empathy. And if it takes another five weeks to go from one to two, that isn’t progress.