Mayor Cherelle Parker called the Sixers’ decision to stay in South Philly ‘a curveball.’ Some say she just whiffed.

When Mayor Cherelle L. Parker in September unveiled the terms of the agreement she reached with the 76ers to build a new arena in Center City, she vowed to go all out to help promote the project to the public and win City Council approval for it.

”We are fighting back to back for this,” Parker told reporters.

It turns out the 76ers did not have the mayor’s back.

In December, as Parker was traversing the city to sell the arena deal, the Sixers were meeting behind closed doors with Comcast — which through a subsidiary owns the Wells Fargo Center where the Sixers are tenants — to strike a different deal entirely: one that would keep the team in South Philadelphia and scuttle plans for a facility on East Market Street.

The team’s announcement this week that it would do just that represented a blow to Parker, who expended significant political capital in her first year in office to tout the Center City project as “the best financial deal ever entered into by a Philadelphia mayor for a local sports arena.”

After publicly expressing support for the project in September, she embarked on a citywide tour to promote the agreement. She aggressively lobbied City Council to pass legislation that would enable it, and she endured months of a public pressure campaign by the arena’s outspoken opponents.

Even before she took office a year ago, the arena was part of Parker’s political calculus. It was a major campaign issue during the Democratic primary for mayor in 2023, when she was backed by the building trades unions that supported the arena for the construction jobs it would create. She separated herself from progressive opponents by saying she would not “express reflexive opposition.”

In the end, some observers said she and the lawmakers who voted for the project look as if they were used as a bargaining chip in a dispute between the Sixers ownership and Comcast leaders.

Some elected officials said as much. Councilmember Jim Harrity, the first member to publicly support the initial arena project, said Sunday that he felt like a “pawn.” Jamie Gauthier and Rue Landau, Council members who voted against the proposal, said the 76ers were “not engaging the city in good faith.”

Even the typically staid Council President Kenyatta Johnson, who shepherded legislation through Council last month and spent countless hours leading hearings about the matter, stood alongside the Sixers owners and Comcast leadership Monday and quipped: “I wish y’all would have got the deal done before we actually started the process.”

Parker defended her advocacy for the Sixers on Monday, saying that she called the initial proposal historic and that “there is nothing about that statement that is untrue right now.”

The mayor also suggested that she was not involved in discussions between the Sixers and Comcast until they had already reached an agreement. She didn’t say when she learned of the Sixers’ decision to stay in South Philadelphia but said she had been talking with Johnson about it “over the last 72 hours.”

Sixers managing partner and co-owner Josh Harris said conversations with Comcast began in early December. Council, with Parker’s lobbying, approved legislation enabling the Center City project on Dec. 19.

“Was I at the meeting before the meeting to say that this negotiation was going to take place? Absolutely not,” Parker said. “But guess what? I’m still the CEO of this city. ... I’ll let other people Monday-morning quarterback about the ‘we are pawns in the game.’”

» READ MORE: Sixers and Comcast plan a new South Philly arena and event complex

Plenty of people are. Robert Saleem Holbrook, executive director of the Abolitionist Law Center, one of the organizations affiliated with a coalition of groups that opposed the Center City arena, said city leaders look as if they were “playing checkers while the Sixers were playing chess.”

He said that unions will still see job creation and the Sixers will still get a new arena but that Parker “got played while the Sixers were keeping their options open.”

”It was a win-win deal for everyone except the Parker administration,” Holbrook said. “Chinatown wins, building trades win, Sixers won, Comcast won, Parker loses big time. [She] did all this threatening to get City Council to approve this deal and to suppress opposition. ... This is a chink in her armor.”

Several Philadelphia political consultants — who requested anonymity to criticize the administration freely — similarly said it was a bad look for the mayor and for City Council members who made the issue a cornerstone of their agenda over the last several months.

One Democratic strategist said Parker and Council oversaw a “bad process.” Another called the outcome evidence of a “pretty big whiff.”

And City Councilmember Nicolas O’Rourke, a member of the progressive Working Families Party who opposed the arena, said the ordeal makes him question “the real powers at play making decisions in our city.”

“Corporations seem to the be ones that are calling the shots,” he said.

However, some observers said it isn’t likely to become an issue that threatens anyone’s political standing long-term.

Phil Goldsmith, a former city deputy mayor and managing director, said Parker’s position from the start was that spurring growth on Market Street would create union jobs. Building a new arena in South Philadelphia is still likely to generate construction work.

“From a political point of view, she put a lot in the unions,” Goldsmith said, “and I think the unions will come out fine.”

Now, he said, her challenge shifts to charting a future for the Market East corridor. The Sixers’ announcement came just days after Macy’s said it would close its store in the iconic Wanamaker Building on Market Street.

“What are you going to do for Market Street? You just can’t rely on Comcast and the Sixers to figure that out,” Goldsmith said. “This is a public issue.”

On Monday, Parker said the city would oversee a planning process for the future of Market East, and she outlined next steps for the proposed new arena in the South Philadelphia sports complex, saying the city would “start from scratch” in another negotiation with the Sixers — this time with Comcast as their partner.

“Philly, this is a lot,” she said. “This is a curveball that none of us saw coming. But nevertheless, we are here.”

Staff writer Jake Blumgart contributed to this article.