Philadelphia ? On Wednesday, the 76ers were coming off an upset road victory over a good Milwaukee Bucks team. The Sixers came home to play the Utah Jazz, one of the NBA’s elite teams, with two young star players in guard Deron Williams and forward Carlos Boozer. For a town with a long, storied connection to pro basketball, the game should have appealed to many.

It did. To 11,006 fans.

The problem for the 76ers, and the NBA, is that that sparse crowd does not appear to be an anomaly. Several sources who regularly track attendance league-wide claim that overall attendance for the first month of the 2007-08 season is down about 4 percent compared with the first month of last season.

A caveat: Analyzing attendance numbers is an inexact science. Announced crowd figures at games and in box scores frequently refer to the number of tickets sold, not the number of people in the building. The number of no-shows, for example, is one of the attendance figures the league zealously protects.

Nor does the league disclose how many tickets have been given away or sold at a discount (a common trick teams use to pump up attendance numbers) rather than sold at face value, or the amount of money spent per patron. A team with a building full of discounted tickets, nonetheless, loses money.

Of course, the big question is: If attendance is down, then why?

Answers are not simple. It would be easy to blame the usual suspects (Tim Donaghy, etc.), but in fairness, any number of factors outside the league’s control could be at work.

With gas prices through the roof, fans may be less inclined to drive long distances. The subprime mortgage crisis has eaten into many families’ discretionary incomes. The NBA, like all leagues, continues to battle with TiVo and WiFi and PDAs and all manner of gadgets that keep people home.

And it is hard to sell a losing team with no superstars. The 76ers, with Allen Iverson, averaged 16,099 last November. Attendance average dropped dramatically from last season’s 17,317 to 13,591 this season – only 78.5 percent of capacity at Arco Arena.

The SuperSonics, whose ownership has indicated it wants to move to Oklahoma City, have seen attendance drop from last November’s 15,710 average to this November’s 14,498 (85 percent of capacity at KeyArena).