I Hate The Process
With Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons both healthy, this season has been the coming out party for the Philadelphia 76ers. After six seasons of rebuilding in the most drastic and dramatic fashion imaginable, the Sixers have emerged with two soon-to-be franchise players in Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid, and a host of talented young role players like Robert Covington and Richaun Holmes. Even after the nasty end to former GM Sam Hinkie’s tenure, everything has come up roses for the entire organization. But no matter how happy the fans are, how fun the team is, how bright the future looks, there is one nagging thought I just can’t shake:
I hate The Process.
Don’t take this the wrong way. “Joel Embiid If Healthy” and Simmons have the makings of a great foundation for a team that can rule the 2020s, and the the surest way to get those two was through Hinkie’s paradigm shifting brain child “The Process”. But for the sake of argument, let’s not limit the scope of analysis to Hinkie’s tenure as general manager. Let’s look at the entire rebuild from the basement of the Eastern Conference to the bright future the Sixers have now.
The 76ers lost on purpose for four solid seasons and were gifted with two of the most skilled young players in the game. The thought of rewarding the worst team with the best player runs counterintuitive to everything we hold dear about sports: Winning is good, losing is bad. That is the pure dichotomy that makes sports so special.
But the Sixers defiled the relationship between fan and team with a 75–253 record in an effort to land a franchise cornerstone. The Process is worth studying because it stands as the one and likely only attempt at such an aggressive rebuild. Sixers ownership relieved Hinkie of command before he could complete the rebuild, and the league went so far as to change the lottery process. Even with all the harm it might have done to Hinkie’s reputation (he may never work in the league again), he followed what he believed was the best path for the franchise.
The only way to win in the NBA is to get a superstar, and to get one through the draft you usually want to pick as early as possible. Every championship winning team (besides the 2004 Pistons) had a top tier player on the roster. But was the only way for the Sixers to acquire their man (or men) to take a nosedive into the dregs of the lottery? Let’s take a look at the timeline that brought us the modern iteration of this team to find out:
History
Sam Hinkie, the 36-year-old Stanford wunderkind, was appointed general manager in Philadelphia following the 2012–13 season after the 34–48 squad failed to qualify for the playoffs for the first time in three seasons. The roster Hinkie inherited from former GM Tony DiLeo was built around the core of Jrue Holiday, Thaddeus Young, and Evan Turner. The new brain trust in Philly made the decision that the quickest path to the top would be sinking to the bottom. And thus, The Process was born.
The Sixers shipped out Holiday in a trade that landed them the draft rights to the number six pick in the draft, Nerlens Noel, who was coming off an ACL tear in February of 2013. Young was swapped for two expiring contracts and a late first-rounder from Cleveland. Turning players into future draft picks would become a major theme of the next few seasons, as Philadelphia acquired a war chest of picks (including seven first rounders and TWELVE second round choices). By selecting Noel, who would not step foot on the court all season, the team had signified one thing to fans: wait and trust. Getting the players necessary to turn Philly into a legit contender would take time and, apparently, a lot of losing.
Therein lies great unknown about tanking: the draft is an uncertain method of talent acquisition. Even if you lose the most games, you might not get the best pick. Even if you get the number one selection, the player might not be any good. Even if the player is good, he might not fit your system, and so on.
Hinkie’s central school of thought was that the surest way to acquire quality assets, or in this case good basketball players, was through the draft. The draft has always been a notoriously difficult undertaking; the horror stories of “Sam Bowie over Michael Jordan” and “Hasheem Thabeet over James Harden” hang over front offices for years. Haunting them even after the GMs who made the decisions are long gone. By selecting early and often, the Sixers were playing the odds and betting on the long game; get more bites at the apple and you are bound to hit on a franchise player. Noel’s injury-plagued rookie season would just be the beginning.
In an effort to top his previous selection in terms of games missed, Hinkie would select Joel Embiid the following season. Embiid, who had been an electrifying player for the Kansas Jayhawks, had a litany of injuries (a fractured back, a broken foot) that would keep him out for TWO seasons.
In 2015, the Sixers apparently made a mistake in their scouting by drafting Jahlil Okafor: a healthy player. Okafor would lead the team in scoring with 17.5 points per game, but the campaign for futility continued as the Sixers mustered a pathetic 10–72 record. Bringing the total record to 47–199 during Hinkie’s tenure.
But ownership was unhappy with the direction of the team and, in December of 2015, brought in Jerry Colangelo to “mentor” Hinkie and pull the franchise out of the self-imposed rut. By April, there were talks that Colangelo was exploring options to add yet another executive to the front office. A chasm between Hinkie and Philadelphia (about the direction the team was going, about draft selections, about personnel decisions) had formed. A rift that would never heal.
In a thirteen page resignation letter, Hinkie departed from the Philadelphia 76ers organization on April 7, 2016. But the resignation was more of a dismissal, a referendum on his unorthodox team building methodology. The now 38-year-old general manager had overseen the worst three-year span of basketball in league history, and the Sixers were frankly tired of losing. Colangelo’s hiring had been the nail in the coffin. Philadelphia no longer trusted that Hinkie had the team’s best interest at heart.
The number one selection the Sixers would win in the draft lottery the following month felt like a final gift from their departed executive. With that pick, they selected Ben Simmons. A healthy 6’10” point guard who would fracture a metatarsal in his foot, requiring him to miss his entire rookie season. Even though he was gone from the team, Hinkie’s vision of losing for profit lived on.
Following a 28-win campaign in 2016–17, including the first 31 games of Embiid’s professional playing career, the Sixers had again landed the third pick in the draft. After much deliberation, Philly’s new think tank (now including Colangelo’s son Brian) decided to mortgage some assets to move up and select Markelle Fultz number one overall.
After 253 losses the Sixers had secured their future, but at what cost? The team was 29th, 30th, 28th, and 18th in attendance during the four year span; decades of goodwill cashed in. But The Process was not over.
Bad Personnel Decisions
The NBA lottery system, a system established in 1985 to, ironically, combat losing on purpose, has never been gamed quite so aggressively. The Sixers rid themselves of talented rotation players and, for their troubles, landed the third pick in the 2014 draft (Embiid), the third pick in 2015 (Okafor), the first pick in 2016 (Simmons), and the third pick in 2017 (which they turned into Fultz). Philly’s hope was that they had landed a franchise player in one of those drafts but, even as late as the 2016–17 season, no one was sure that Philly had succeeded. Embiid didn’t play a game until his third season, Okafor looked like a dinosaur trying to score against double-teams in the low post, and Simmons was sidelined for a year — effectively kicking the can down the road on any judgement of his abilities.
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Therein lies the great unknown about tanking: the draft is an uncertain method of talent acquisition. Even if you lose the most games, you might not get the best pick. Even if you get the number one selection, the player might not be any good. Even if the player is good, he might not fit your system, and so on. The Sixers selected in the lottery seven times from 2013 to 2017, if you count the draft night trade that netted them Noel, and three of those picks are no longer with the organization.
Bad personnel decisions undermined the efficacy of this grand strategy. Despite the fact that tanking probably was the right choice for the 76ers, missing on several key selections limited how effective we will view The Process in 15 or 20 years.
Players on rookie deals have become a commodity in the modern NBA. Good rookies can serve dual purposes: filling the roster with talent while keeping the price tag low. The Golden State Warriors were constructed on this principle, allowing them the financial flexibility to sign Kevin Durant in the summer of 2016. Embiid and Simmons might be enough of a core to keep the Sixers goals affixed to the Northern California model of team building, but the team could have had so much more.
The idea to acquire as much value as possible, regardless of where the player fit into the team, a forward-thinking concept, was hampered by the selection of three players who play the NBA’s most dated position.
The 2013 Draft was historically bad, so the selections of Noel and Rookie of the Year Michael Carter-Williams are hard, but not impossible, to scrutinize. Carter-Williams was a long point guard who could switch on defense, but he couldn’t shoot and lacked the quickness to get past other guards on the perimeter. Noel was injured for the entirety of his rookie season. By the time he set foot on the floor, the Sixers had already drafted his replacement in Joel Embiid.
The idea to acquire as much value as possible, regardless of where the player fit into the team, a forward-thinking concept, was hampered by the selection of two players who play the NBA’s most dated position. The Warriors brought about a new gold standard with the “Lineup of Death”, a small-ball group that could switch on screens, shoot threes, and demolish teams who used plodding rim protectors with a deadly pick-and-roll. Drafting centers, neither of whom could stretch the floor, in consecutive drafts seemed like an odd choice in a league that was getting smaller.
To make matters worse, the following season they selected YET ANOTHER center in Jahlil Okafor. It is easy to second guess selections like Noel and say things like “Kristaps Porzingis was there instead of Okafor”, but the validity of the scheme has to be analyzed with an eye towards seeing if the tactics utilized were sound: not by assuming the role of armchair gm.
Porzingis was a natural fit for the Sixers, but long term durability (ironically something Philadelphia felt they did not have with Embiid and Noel) and adaptation to the NBA game prevented the Latvian from being chosen with the no. 3 pick. The logic behind passing him up was sound, but it still wound up as the wrong decision. This stands as both a testament to the trickiness of acquiring players through the draft and as one of the ultimate failures of Hinkie’s tenure as GM.
Asset Mismanagement
Had Hinkie been allowed to see his brainchild through to fruition, maybe the end result would have been different, or maybe he was so far in on his “best player available” strategy that he saw no way to deal Noel and Okafor for equal value and maintain his credibility. Either way, by the time he resigned in April 2016, all the Sixers had to show for their trouble was three players who couldn’t share the court.
Perhaps the architect had a plan to turn those assets into more assets but, in the wake of his departure, the clarity of the grand design had never been muddier. Moving Noel and Okafor to clear space on the floor for budding superstar Joel Embiid seemed like the natural next step, but actually trading those players proved to be an arduous affair.
Noel was the first to depart in February 2017, returning Justin Anderson, Andrew Bogut, and two second round picks. Okafor followed after in December, netting only Trevor Booker. For the number six selection in 2013 and the number two selection in 2015, Philadelphia added essentially only Anderson and Booker, who are averaging combined a full point worse than Okafor in his rookie season.
But the mismanagement doesn’t end with the frontcourt logjam cleared. The Sixers also moved up in the 2017 Draft to acquire “point guard of the future” Markelle Fultz. Fultz has played in only four games this season and has plenty of time to develop into the third part of a Philadelphia triumvirate, but dealing another potential lottery pick (a pick acquired from Milwaukee in the trade that shipped out Carter-Williams) is another misallocation of assets.
All the Sixers had to show for their trouble was three players who couldn’t share the court.
The Celtics publicly professed that they drafted the same player at three (Jayson Tatum) that they would have had they selected first. If that is true (some of the declaration is surely gamesmanship from Boston GM Danny Ainge), the Sixers would have been able to select Fultz without giving up another lottery selection. Because now the question isn’t who is better: Fultz or Tatum (a race where Tatum has a clear head start)? Rather, who is better, Fultz or Tatum + lottery player from 2018 or ‘19? And that doesn’t even open the VERY valid argument that Tatum would have been a better fit for Philadelphia, who already had a starting point guard in Simmons and needed more wings who can stretch the floor.
The Verdict
The ultimate goal of the scheme was to take Philly off the first-round-playoff -exit treadmill and give them a legitimate shot at bringing home the Larry O’Brien Trophy. No proper verdict can be returned until we see if Simmons, Embiid, and Fultz have the makings of a championship team. However, the early returns are encouraging.
But how much of the rebuild was just dumb luck? If the Sixers had undertaken a similar plan from 2004–2008 and picked in the exact same spots of the draft, instead of boasting Simmons and Embiid, they would have drafted a murder’s row of Josh Childress, Andris Biedrins, Deron Williams, Yaroslav Korolev, Adam Morrison, Greg Oden, and OJ Mayo. A group that can boast three All-Star Selections and two All-NBA Teams, all belonging to Williams.
I grant you that is an absurd example for a million reasons, but it goes to show how many factors that are out of team control come into play. The courage to try a method of team building that had never been done before can’t be understated, but we are years from well and properly knowing if the Process was worth the pain.
Whether I like it or not (I don’t), the Sixers nailed enough of their high picks to create an enticing landing spot for big name free agents. And they have managed their salary cap well enough to put together a sumptuous package, able to lure names like LeBron James into taking meetings with them this summer.
Even if they don’t score a big name, the roster is loaded with homegrown talent. Embiid looks like one of the most dominant big men this decade and Simmons is the runaway favorite for Rookie of the Year. With any meaningful contribution from Fultz (who was a phenom for the Washington Huskies last season), they have a stable of thoroughbreds already in the red, white, and blue. I suppose that means The Process was a success.
I just don’t have to like it.
