Staying With the Team That Never Wins
Elena Vasquez
2026-03-18 ·
On the final night of the 2011–12 season, the Charlotte Bobcats lost again.
The record finished at 7–59, the worst winning percentage in NBA history. ESPN reported the announced crowd for the final home game at Time Warner Cable Arena was just over sixteen thousand, although anyone watching could see that many of the seats were empty. The Knicks won comfortably, the season ended quietly, and the franchise slipped into the long archive of forgettable NBA campaigns.
And yet some people were still there.
They had watched the losses accumulate all year. They had watched them the previous year as well. They would watch them again the following season. At a certain point the obvious question appears: why remain attached to a team that rarely rewards that attachment?
Albert Camus once asked a similar question about life itself.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus imagines a man condemned to roll a stone up a mountain forever. Each time he pushes it toward the summit, the stone slips back down and the work begins again. The punishment is not the difficulty of the task but its repetition. Nothing is finally achieved. Nothing is secured.
Camus’s point was not that the task becomes secretly meaningful because success is just around the corner. The point was that meaning, if it exists at all, must come from the decision to continue anyway.
Oddly enough, the psychology of sports fandom—especially the fandom of losing teams—often lives in exactly this space.
When the Stone Rolls Back Down
Consider the Sacramento Kings before the 2022–23 season.
From 2006 through 2022 the franchise missed the playoffs every single year, a sixteen‑season drought that became the longest postseason absence in NBA history. Coaches changed, draft picks arrived and departed, front offices reorganized themselves, and every autumn the same familiar hope returned to Northern California.
The drought eventually ended. In 2022–23 the Kings went 48–34 under Mike Brown and finished third in the Western Conference with one of the most explosive offenses in the league.
But the interesting philosophical moment was not the breakthrough. The interesting moment was the years before it.
Those were the years when the stone kept rolling back down the mountain—another missed playoff race, another lottery pick, another rebuilding plan that promised to fix everything next time. The fans who stayed during those seasons were not operating on reliable evidence that success was imminent. If anything, the evidence pointed the other way.
Camus calls the confrontation between hope and reality the absurdThe absurd is Camus’s term for the tension between humanity’s desire for meaning and a universe that remains indifferent to that desire. . Human beings want the world to be orderly and rewarding. The world, unfortunately, has no obligation to cooperate.
A losing franchise makes that collision unusually visible.
The Kings eventually won again, but their fans did not know that during the drought. Their loyalty existed before the reward arrived. That difference matters, because it reveals something about what the loyalty actually is.
It is not simply optimism.
Returning After Disappointment
The Minnesota Timberwolves offer another version of the same pattern.
After Kevin Garnett carried the franchise to the Western Conference Finals in 2004, the team vanished from the playoffs for thirteen straight seasons. Year after year the standings looked roughly the same. Draft prospects were debated, young players were developed, injuries intervened, and April arrived without postseason basketball.
Then, on April 11, 2018, Minnesota played Denver in a winner‑take‑all game for the final playoff spot in the West. The Timberwolves won in overtime, 112–106, ending the drought at last.
For Minnesota fans the night felt dramatic and cathartic, but the real philosophical question had already been answered long before that game tipped off. It had been answered during the seasons when nothing changed.
Camus believed that the meaningful response to an absurd situation is revoltRevolt, for Camus, is not violent uprising but the persistent refusal to surrender one’s values and commitments despite knowing the world offers no guarantee of reward. —not rebellion in the violent sense, but a clear‑eyed refusal to abandon one’s commitments simply because the world refuses to guarantee success.
In basketball terms, revolt looks surprisingly ordinary.
It looks like buying the ticket again next season.
The Temptation of Consoling Stories
The Philadelphia 76ers during the “Process” years complicate this picture.
In 2015–16 the team finished 10–72, one of the worst records in league history. The losing was deliberate. Management had adopted a long‑term rebuilding strategy that treated short‑term failure as the price of future contention. Over time a slogan emerged among fans: “Trust the Process.”
Sometimes the phrase was sincere, almost religious in tone. The losses were interpreted as necessary steps toward a guaranteed future reward. If the plan worked perfectly, the suffering would be justified.
Camus would be skeptical of that kind of confidence.
One of his central warnings is against what he called philosophical suicidePhilosophical suicide is Camus’s term for the act of escaping the discomfort of uncertainty by adopting a belief system that promises guaranteed meaning, thereby avoiding the honest confrontation with absurdity. —the temptation to escape uncertainty by inventing a system that promises eventual meaning. The danger of “Trust the Process” was that it could become exactly that: a reassuring story that made every defeat part of a tidy narrative of progress.
Yet many fans used the phrase differently. They said it with irony, half‑smiling at the absurdity of watching another blowout loss while still showing up the next night.
In those moments the slogan stopped functioning as prophecy and started functioning as ritual.
And ritual is closer to Camus’s idea of revolt than prophecy is.
When Success Disappears Completely
The Charlotte Bobcats season mentioned earlier shows the structure in its most stripped‑down form.
A team winning seven games out of sixty‑six offers very little conventional reward. There is almost no prestige attached to the experience. The games themselves are often difficult to watch. Even optimism becomes difficult to sustain.
At that point fandom loses most of the incentives that usually explain it.
If someone remains attached anyway—still watching, still following the roster, still caring about the next season—then the attachment cannot really be explained by the expectation of victory. Something else is operating.
Camus believed that when illusions disappear, human commitments become clearer. Without the comforting belief that the world is secretly arranged in our favor, the question becomes simpler: will we continue or not?
A fan sitting in an arena during a seven‑win season is quietly answering that question.
The Long Losing Streak
The Detroit Pistons offered a compressed version of this experience in 2023–24.
Over two months the team lost twenty‑eight consecutive games, setting the NBA record for a single‑season losing streak. Each night the pattern repeated itself: a competitive start, a collapse somewhere in the second half, another loss added to the column.
Eventually the streak ended with a 129–127 win over Toronto, a game in which Cade Cunningham scored thirty points and delivered twelve assists.
But what defined the streak was repetition.
Every game carried the possibility that the cycle would finally break, and every game ended by renewing the same emotional structure. Camus’s Sisyphus lives in that repetition—the awareness that tomorrow’s effort may simply reproduce yesterday’s result.
For fans, the real choice during a streak like that is not whether to celebrate the eventual victory. It is whether to keep watching game twenty‑four, game twenty‑five, game twenty‑six, when the outcome has started to feel predetermined.
Some stop. Others continue.
Camus would call the second group rebels.
”I Revolt, Therefore We Are”
In a later book, The Rebel, Camus expands his idea of revolt beyond the individual.
When a person refuses to accept certain conditions—refuses, for example, to live entirely by the logic of success and failure—that refusal often becomes shared. It creates a small community of people who recognize themselves in the same act of commitment.
Sports fandom works exactly this way.
A losing team rarely holds its supporters together through glory. What binds them instead are the rituals of following the season, the shared memory of past disappointments, and the strange pride that develops around enduring them together.
Winning can create a celebration.
Losing for long enough can create a community.
Seeing Losing Differently
From a purely instrumental point of view, loving a losing team makes little sense. The emotional return on investment is poor. The odds of reward are uncertain. There are easier ways to spend a winter evening than watching a franchise stumble through another rebuilding year.
But Camus suggests that meaning does not always come from success.
Sometimes it comes from the decision to continue caring in situations where success is not guaranteed—and may never arrive. The fan who returns after another losing season is not necessarily predicting redemption. Often they are simply refusing to treat attention and loyalty as things that must be earned only by winners.
The Kings eventually climbed the mountain. The Timberwolves finally broke through. The Pistons ended their streak.
Those moments are memorable, but they are not the real philosophical center of the story.
The center lies in the quieter decision that comes before them—the decision to show up again while the stone is still rolling back down the hill.
Footnotes / Philosophy Terms
1. Absurd ↩
The absurd is Camus’s term for the tension between humanity’s desire for meaning and a universe that remains indifferent to that desire.
2. Revolt ↩
Revolt, for Camus, is not violent uprising but the persistent refusal to surrender one’s values and commitments despite knowing the world offers no guarantee of reward.
3. Philosophical suicide ↩
Philosophical suicide is Camus’s term for the act of escaping the discomfort of uncertainty by adopting a belief system that promises guaranteed meaning, thereby avoiding the honest confrontation with absurdity.