Philadelphia 76ers From Slow Cooker To Microwave

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The Philadelphia 76ers going from Sam Hinkie to Bryan Colangelo similar to falling from a Slow Cooker into the Microwave.

When’s Dinner?

You know the smell of a kitchen just before the Thanksgiving day feast is served up. If your memories are as vivid as my own, you can smell the succulent basting turkey roasting in the oven, the smell of pumpkin pie cooling on the window sill. You can almost taste the cranberry sauce, and the mashed potatoes and stuffing rising up in peaks that are covered with freshly poured gravy. Perhaps you enjoyed the green bean casserole, the oyster stuffing, the carrots au gratin. Whatever your family memories, the mere mention of the meal will make your mouth salivate in anticipation.

So the patience shown by the Philadelphia 76ers fans these past three years is commendable, if not downright historically significant. The promise of a rebuild of the team has had the anticipation of a Thanksgiving feast. We’ve been waiting around for it, and certainly no fan base can be any hungrier than the Sixers fans. But we’ve been made to wait. Sometimes it seemed as though the team was content to mark time and wait for many years going forward.

But in the 2015-2016 season, the tone of the team changed. In events that may have been triggered by the team’s dismal opening to the new season, or by the youthful antics of their star rookie center Jahlil Okafor, the ownership decided that the team needed to expand their decision making diversity, and brought Jerry Colangelo on-board to serve as Chairman of Basketball Operations. While the team continued to navigate a season with only a glimmer of success – eventually ending at just ten wins – the machinery was already in place to bring in Colangelo’s son Bryan Colangelo as President of Basketball Operations and relegate former president Sam Hinkie into a well-paid but meaningless position out of sight and out of mind.

Sam Hinkie resigned instead.

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But the resignation was simply window dressing. By all accounts, the power had already been shifted by Chairman of Basketball Operations Jerry Colangelo from the President and General Manager of the Philadelphia 76ers to an unfilled new role. It was not until after Hinkie’s resignation that we had learned the true timeline of events. NBA executives pressured the Philadelphia 76ers ownership to change course. The ownership reached out to NBA commissioner Adam Silver. Silver placed the Sixers brass in touch with Jerry Colangelo.

"“His getting directly involved with the 76ers was in part due to my reaching out to Jerry,” Silver said. “Not because it was necessarily my idea that the 76ers needed an adviser. But once Josh Harris, the principal governor of the 76ers, said he would like to have a sounding board, someone with league experience, I was the one who connected him with Jerry Colangelo. I would say I feel a little bit of an obligation to defend Jerry here, because he was not looking for that opportunity.” – Adam Silver interviewed by Philly.com’s Keith Pompey"

The Sixers approached Jerry Colangelo, who tried to divert the team to his son Bryan Colangelo multiple times. Eventually, the team wore down Colangelo, but immediately began discussions with son Bryan about the new role. Jerry’s role, in the meantime, was to assess the team’s strengths and weaknesses and lay the groundwork for the new President. While the number of candidates remains a mystery to this day, the team had negotiated virtually everything but the starting date when Sam Hinkie caught on to the shift.

When the story broke, many events had already taken place out of sight. And so, the team had already shifted it’s direction long before there was a change of personnel.

Next: Sixers Grew Teamwork