Often when the national media goes long about the Sixers, it’s an article ripping the team apart for their supposed “tanking.” There have been little to no articles written about the Sixers development or the progress of the team, besides the occasional Zach Lowe piece. Until today, that is.
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Pablo Torre of ESPN wrote a 5,000 word article on the Sixers and their plan for development, including some very interesting quotes from Brett Brown and some of the players. The mastermind behind the article is a two-hour lunch sit down with the Sixers mastermind, Sam Hinkie.
The article in it’s entirety can be read HERE, but I’m going to share some of my favorite parts from the piece.
On why Hinkie doesn’t talk to the media often:
"“Sam views everything said in public as information given away for free,” one ex-colleague of his later explains. Or as Rockets GM Daryl Morey, Hinkie’s previous boss, tells me, “In terms of personality, we’re extremely different — for better and for worse.”"
Why the Sixers value second-round picks so much:
"Throughout league history, the second-rounder has been the penny stock of hoops, the spiritual brother of baseball’s player to be named later. But they’re not valued that way by these Sixers, who collect the things like bingeing hoarders, amassing them via salary dumps and throw-ins on other deals. In last year’s draft, Hinkie acquired or traded five second-round picks, not including his own; this June he’ll have the rights to four more from other teams. Hell, he’s acquired one for 2016, two for 2018, two for 2019 and one for 2020 already. Nobody else in the NBA has an extra 2020 pick — very possibly because said pick might presently be 12 years old. But to Philly, any second-rounder is both an embryonic trade chip and a lottery ticket that jumps in value come draft day, when some team will inevitably take a shining to a specific prospect without having the picks to draft him. When that happens, the Bank of Hinkie will be there — ready to flip the second-rounder for cash (and profit); or to package it for another asset (and profit); or to keep it himself, hoping to sign the next Chandler Parsons, the eventual $46 million forward whom the Rockets drafted 38th overall in 2011 (and profit)."
Brett Brown on the interview process to become the Sixers coach:
"When I asked Brett Brown, who was hired in August 2013, about Hinkie’s diligence in hiring, he told me that his own interview experience often felt like “the gauntlet on one of those game shows where you have to run over a bridge and then something flies out and hits you, and the pole is slippery, and then another thing swings out and hits you.” Spread wide over that summer, there was a phone call after Collins resigned, a meeting with Hinkie in Houston and another summit in New York, weeks after the draft, with four Sixers owners present. When Hinkie finally called with an offer, shortly after the New York meeting, Brown was in a Chevy Suburban headed to LaGuardia Airport, on his way back to San Antonio. Hinkie asked the Spurs assistant — the man whom Gregg Popovich had made his first director of player development in 2002 — to turn the car around.By then, Brown had only one condition for employment. “I wouldn’t have accepted the job if it wasn’t for four years,” he says. “I always get upset when people talk about trying to ‘build a culture.’ It takes time.”"
The insane practice repertoire:
"Hinkie, as part of his drive to measure everything, tracks each shot his players take, not just in games but also shootarounds and practices. “You can’t hide,” Richardson says. Some of the tallying is by hand; some of it is noted off video. Brown uses the data to see which players “are investing time into development,” he says, and doles out playing time and in-game privileges accordingly. “It’s crazy,” Noel says. “They’ll tell me what my free throw percentage is in practice. And I’m like, ‘What?!'”"
The only quote Hinkie gave in the piece:
"Instead, the quote concerns Robert Caro, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of painstaking, mountainous biographies of Robert Moses and President Lyndon B. Johnson, the latter of whom the 79-year-old writer is in the midst of chronicling in five volumes. When Caro first set out to write all 1,296 pages of The Power Broker, the Moses tome, he’d famously promised his wife that he’d be done with a manuscript in nine months. It took him 522 interviews and seven years. At one desperate point in the process, the story goes, Caro ran out of money, and when he returned home from a research trip, his wife told him that she’d been forced to sell the house they were sitting in.It was Caro’s very first book. He kept working.“Robert Caro,” Sam Hinkie tells me, grinning, “is my favorite writer.”"
Big shoutout to Pablo Torre for writing this brilliant piece. Make sure to go read the entire thing a couple times to soak all of it in.