The NBA franchises are closely monitoring the current tables as the Franchises of the NBA are fighting it out to gain a playoff place and to clutch onto their prospect of acquiring the title. As the clubs play it out on the floor a lot of the Franchises have a fight off it, with the active financial structure as it is, and the players contract demands ever increasing some of the Franchises are finding it tough to endure in the existing sporting market place. In this column we will look into the Philadelphia 76ers, a club with a notable history and a massive followers basis. Plenty of the existing Franchises are fashioned from massive investment when the Franchise For Sale option were available to possible shareholders. This is growing to be more important in the existing sporting market as Franchise For Sale options are extremely tough to find, particularly in the basketball area. Stacks of presidents are holding onto their investments in this downturn and are eager for a turn around in the market. Throughout this point presidents will be controlling their Franchises as a Home Based Franchise, which means that they are slashing their expenditure and only paying out the pure minimum. A Home Based Franchise tributes itself on not having much expenses and consequently using the Franchises ability to make a turnover. The existing basketball Franchises are taking this method, as they don’t want a Franchise For Sale sign shown outside their ground. Throughout a lot of the Franchises history there has been important variations in presidents and finances as the Philadelphia 76ers column will state.

The original Philadelphia 76ers were neither in Philadelphia nor called the 76ers. But the team did start in a north-eastern city and did have a patriotic identity, the Syracuse Nationals. The Nats had been in the NBA since the league’s 1st year of existence and came to the City of Brotherly Love in 1963, just subesequent to the Warriors had abandoned Philadelphia for San Francisco. Thus began the Philadelphia 76ers, a business that has featured one of the best NBA teams ever to strut onto the court (68-13 in 1966-67) and one of the worst to be blown off it (9-73 in 1972-73).

Six Franchises from the NBL, including Syracuse, were taken into the BAA for the 1949-50 season, and the new league became the National Basketball Association. (Philadelphia’s tradition in the new league is worth documenting: the Philadelphia Warriors were one of 11 charter members of the BAA and were in the initial NBA.)

In the spring of 1963, Irv Kosloff and Ike Richman joined up to purchase the Syracuse Nationals and moved the team to Philadelphia as the 76ers. Even with the changes, the new Philadelphia 76ers didn’t look all that different on the ground. In 1967 the 76ers overwhelmed the San Francisco Warriors in six games to take the championship. That 76ers team has since been recognised as one of the greatest ever. As part of the NBA’s 35th-anniversary celebration in 1980, the 1966-67 76ers were voted the best team in NBA history.

Fitz Eugene Dixon purchased the franchise in May 1976 and soon gave Philadelphia a reputation as a club built on dollars. Dixon opened the vault instantly, paying $6 million for Julius “Dr. J” Erving ($3 million to the ABA New Jersey Nets and $3 million to Erving’s personal bank) earlier to the 1976-77 season.

Philadelphia, one of the country’s celebrated basketball cities, and its 76ers are an essential part of the league’s history and of its future.

We are all so concerned with just trying to make ends meet that we seem to be running in place and cannot stand back and take in the bigger picture to tell us what is actually happening. Why are we so grossly inefficient at the way that we run our lives? This must be a consequence of many years of relatively good times, when we didn’t need to worry about the sheer amount of petrol that our cars used, or the fact that we have become completely reliant on our cars just to exist these days. It’s been so long since we had a recession, we can’t remember what it is all about and some of us are too young anyway, being forced to read about these downturns in reference books! Perhaps it was time for a wake-up call, but time or not we have certainly received one.

We can clearly see that we can no longer rely on mechanical energy to help us to do absolutely everything. Energy inefficiency has led to huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, causing damage to the environment and forcing us to consider major changes, right now. We talk a good story about the benefits of renewable energy, but we are not helping the environment by diverting funds away from the research and development needed to actually make these options work for us.

“The Great Recession,” as it has become known, has now shown us how vulnerable we are to a downturn and how we all have little to fall back on in hard times. As such, we must be efficient in everything we do and this definitely includes energy use. We all have to learn to turn appliances off, to think of what we could do as an alternative and not just opt for the easy way. It’s just not good enough to clog our roads with vehicles carrying just one occupant as we go back and forth to our work, and we should review our transportation activities carefully.

If you happen to be the decision-maker either at home or in the office, come up with ways to save electricity and then put an action plan in place. Insist that your family turns off all the lights, turn up the thermostats by a notch – don’t allow them to be altered, and make sure that all family members wash clothes at the same time and not individually, and generally be a better keeper of the space that you occupy.

As we know, we cannot rely on our politicians to work quickly enough. Few seem to doubt the validity of those environmental claims, but political agendas are still getting in the way of making any headway. The so-called “summit” attended by our leaders in Copenhagen failed to produce any realistic action, once again.

We don’t have to wait around for politicians to try and force big business to solve these issues. If we all do our own bit, we can save ourselves money by steadily reducing our energy use and our own carbon footprints every day, and although we can’t get this all done by ourselves, we can achieve real results if we all work together. ‘People Power’ really can achieve this quite easily, after all, there are billions of us, so let’s just do it – start right now!

A large proportion of women now work right through their child’s early childhood, sometimes due to need and sometime by choice. However there are still those who take time away from employment to raise their children on a full time basis, choosing to return to work perhaps when the children reach high school or even college. If this is the case then evidently a significant amount of time has gone by since they were last in a work environment.

Trying to return to work in the current climate is not straightforward whatever your situation. We are still in the folds of a downturn, with the jobless figures very high and this means that employers who are wanting to take on new staff have the capacity to be quite choosey. It may sound impossible at the moment for those women wishing to return to work following a long break but there are preparations that you can carry out that will raise your chances.

Clearly pre-existing skills from previous employment are important but these will need brining up to date. However, before you set off and update any of your training, make sure that it is still relevant in the current job market.

The majority of roles these days have at least a basic need for computer skills, so if you are out of practice then this is without doubt an area to take training in. A lot of business owners have taken the opportunity to set up an Internet Business to run next to their existing organisation, or sometimes to replace it if the recession has taken it’s toll. These sorts of business will definitely require a decent standard of IT skill. They can also be very flexible jobs too permitting employees to Work From Home and this can mean that they are ideal for women returning to work as there is still the ability to deal with other responsibilities alongside the Online Jobs.

If you can display that you have the ability to Work From Home quite easily, by for example having broadband in place; being able to say that you have an area within the home that can be classed as an office and by having some of the required equipment such as a printer you will add to your attractiveness to an employer.

Keeping costs low is vital for businesses throughout the recession and beyond. If a organisation is to continue to survive it must look at as many ways as possible to cut expenditure and maximize sales and growth. A lot of this can be done through office space reductions. We currently see the BBC in the middle of a move from London, where office space, workers and other associated costs soar, to the Northwest of England where all of these costs are much less. This is only possible now with the development in IT. And this sort of decision is occurring within many other companies right down the chain.

If women wishing to return to work can show their ability to be flexible together with their newly enhanced IT skills they will appeal to companies both large and small who see the cost benefits of running an Work From Home and put themselves in the best situation for a quick return to work.