Few things are more frustrating than being an NBA team that’s stuck in the middle. If you’re at the top like the Pistons and Spurs, things are obviously wonderful. At the other end, if you’re the Hawks or Bobcats, you’ve already conditioned yourself to look ahead to the joys of high lottery picks and plentiful salary cap space.

But what do you do if you’re, say, the Philadelphia 76ers? At 24-25, they’re not good enough to contend with the elite. In fact, the biggest thing they have to look forward to this spring is another fourgame, first-round pounding by Detroit.

On the other hand, they’re not exactly playing for the future, either. Allen Iverson and Chris Webber, their two best players, both are on the wrong side of 30, and the Sixers won’t be under the cap until at least 2008. But they’re not quite a bad team,either.In fact, Iverson and Webber still are good enough to keep Philly around .500 and prevent them from rebuilding quickly through the draft.

It gets worse. Thanks to some poor cap management under the rein of general manager Billy King, the Sixers have painted themselves into the proverbial corner. Webber has 2 1/2 and about $50 million left on his enormous contract, while Iverson has 3 1/2 years to go on a deal that’s nearly as generous. The two of them combine to swallow up nearly the entire salary cap.

That would be bad enough, but the Sixers have made things worse by surrounding their two mega-contracts with more overpaid players. Center Samuel Dalembert and small forward Kyle Korver were restricted free agents this past summer, meaning the Sixers could match any offer. In spite of that, they signed off on nearly $90 million in contracts to keep the two – even though neither had inked an offer sheet with another team.

Those bad deals might be tolerable if the Sixers were the Knicks and had the willingness to spend obscene sums of money to make the team competitive (or, um, keep it uncompetitive). But Philadelphia is part of the majority in the NBA – those teams whose owners are unwilling to pay luxury tax and thus must show some financial restraint.

Since the four players mentioned above are pulling in so much coin – they put the Sixers near the tax line just by themselves – the fiscal restraint shows itself in the supporting cast. Philly’s bench is an abomination, a story that hasn’t received as much attention as it should. With backup center Steven Hunter a disappointment and swingman John Salmons the lone reserve to even remotely deliver (he’s actually replaced Korver in the starting lineup of late), Philly only has six players averaging more than five points a game. I don’t think that’s what their fans had in mind when they started calling them the Sixers.

So it’s a frustrating life in purgatory for the Sixers. They can’t take on any more salary, so bringing in more players is out of the question. They can’t trade their current players, because they’re all overpaid. They can’t even take a page out of Isiah’s playbook and deal expiring contracts, because they don’t have any for the next two years.

Normally, a team in this situation might choose to blow it up and rebuild, much like the Hornets chose to do last year when their season went off the rails. The problem is that the goals of rebuilding are cap space and draft picks,and it’s hard to see who Philly could trade to bring in that kind of loot.

The key here is Webber. His contract is so radioactive that not even the Knicks will trade for it, especially since he has a bad wheel. But if they can’t trade Webber, it’s hardly worth it for the Sixers to consider any other piece of the rebuilding. Even if they found takers for Iverson (which they certainly would) and Dalembert, Webber’s deal almost assures the Sixers won’t have any cap space. And if that’s the case, what’s the point of dealing a star as marketable as the Answer, who not only pumps in 30 a night but virtually guarantees the team a solid road gate and huge merchandise sales?

By now, you’re probably wondering how a team gets to this point. In the Sixers’ case (and that of nearly other team that ends up in similar straits) it’s a testament to the power of self-delusion.Yes, they’ve had some bad luck along the way – King fleeced the Nets’ normally sage Rod Thorn in the Dikembe Mutombo trade, only to see Todd MacCulloch’s career end due to a rare nerve problem. But more than anything, it was the Sixers’ delusion about being one player away that drove them to make most of these destructive moves.

Last year’s trade for Webber was the capper – a three-for-one deal the benchdeprived the Sixers were in poor position to make. But even before then, Philadelphia’s moves smacked of desperation, especially its habit of grossly overpaying to keep its own middling players, done in the mistaken belief that it was on the cusp of contention. Eric Snow, Kenny Thomas, and Derrick Coleman all were rewarded in such a day. Those deals led directly to the capped-out circumstances that begat the Webber deal, because by then it was the only gamble the Sixers had left to make.

As a result, the Sixers’ only solution to the morass is an untraditional, though occasionally successful one – hope that their best players all get hurt at once, so that the team ends up with a high lottery pick. It worked for the Hornets, and a decade earlier it worked phenomenally for the Spurs.

But it has to be a depressing thought for Sixers fans.They’re watching one of the greatest little men ever to play the game in Iverson, and despite the nightly beating he takes, he’s remained at peak form into his 30s. Yet those same cheering fans are secretly sticking needles in their A.I. bobbleheads, hoping for a well-timed broken bone so the team can briefly become bad enough to again become good.

Mr. Hollinger is the author of the 2005-06 Pro Basketball Forecast.