Colangelo Honored By Philadelphia 76ers Role

When Jerry Colangelo was contacted by the Philadelphia 76ers to fill role as Chairman of Basketball, he didn’t view it in terms of personal gain. He was confident that he could make a positive contribution

A coin flip. At the time, the coin toss was for the top pick in the NBA draft, a pick that had ended in a tie between the Milwaukee Bucks and the Phoenix Suns. Jerry Colangelo was the 29 year old general manager of the Phoenix Suns on that fateful night of March 19, 1969. The choice fell to the Suns general manager, who recognized the occasion as a game-changing event for the franchise. For whatever reason, the Suns believed they were going to win the flip, Colangelo says. They called heads, he notes without regret, because that’s what a majority of fans who had voted in a newspaper poll told them they should do.

"“I wanted our fans to share in the win or the loss,” Colangelo says. “It was such a monumental, once-in-a-lifetime flip of a coin, why not let your fans be a part of that?”"

They called heads. Far in the distance in New York, then-NBA Commissioner J. Walter Kennedy tossed a 1964 Kennedy half-dollar into the air with his right hand, caught it in the same hand and turned it onto the back of his left.

It came up tails.

And so, the career of Phoenix Suns general manager Jerry Colangelo was born, born from the guy who didn’t score on the opportunity to draft an NBA hall of fame athlete. Broken spirited,from a disappointment that cut so deep, Jerry Colangelo remembers, that he left his office, jumped into his car and drove aimlessly around Phoenix for five hours. What might have been at the time seemed like a setback to the Phoenix Suns. But the team would win that year. In fact, Jerry Colangelo himself would become the coach of the team in the second half of that season, after a disappointing record of 15-23 forced the team to take action. The team would go on to finish with 39-43 record, far improved over the previous year’s 16-66 season. The Suns even took a commanding three win one loss advantage over their playoff opponents of the Los Angeles Lakers – a team with Wilt Chamberlain, Jerry West, and Elgin Baylor, before falling in the seven game series.

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What might have happened if the Phoenix Suns had won that coin toss has been the stuff of countless debates for nearly 50 years. But surely what would not have happened is the switch to Colangelo as head coach of the Phoenix Suns. Change that moment in time, and Jerry Colangelo may never have bought the Phoenix Suns franchise, might never have earned a prestigious role in the shaping of USA basketball, and therefore might never have gotten the call earlier this year to join the Philadelphia 76ers.

"What appealed to me (when the Sixers called) at the time when I got the call. is that when you are my age, when people make that call they still feel that you may have some juice left in you. It’s a situation where I feel that I can make a contribution. I believe that I can find satisfaction in that. The places where I think we need help, or I think we can find people who can be of help, that’s part of my job. I think it’s too early to say exactly what the game plan is. For now I think we move forward on all fronts, and we pull the trigger when the time is appropriate."

With the season all by over for the Philadelphia 76ers, the time for pulling a trigger may be rapidly approaching. For the lay person, and even for many who have followed professional basketball, the 76ers reconstruction has essentially been a disjointed shopping list whose long term goals have become obscured by the confederation of dissimilar parts, or in the case of the front court, by concentrating the team’s top talent in too few NBA positions. At some point in time, this team will achieve critical mass, the point where the team must spread the wealth away from the NBA center position and into other roles on the roster in order to grow more competitively as a team.

When that point arrives is anybody’s guess. Some have determined that point occurs this off-season, before Joel Embiid and Dario Saric arrive to create an even more center-centric roster. Some have argued it falls at the end of next season, after the team has witnessed and recorded every possible permuatation of big men combination in the lineup. Some have argued that its at the trade deadline in the 2016-2017 season, where the team can convert players into draft picks of the much stronger 2017 NBA draft class. Here is a conversation with Colangelo as the team approached this years trade deadline.

In my eyes, the team really doesn’t know when that event will occur. The Sixers are flush with assets of all kinds – young NBA talent with various degrees of upside, numerous NBA draft picks, and plenty of discretionary salary cash . But the master odds-maker, Sam Hinkie, does not act until the odds are in his favor. With so many unknown variables staring across the table at him, Hinkie is content to sit, and wait.

In the same manner, Jerry Colangelo has been a wiley veteran of the NBA. He knows the rule of measuring twice and cutting once. Once a draft pick or player is traded, there is no turning back. That requires a high degree of confidence in the value of the exchange. That certainty has not yet peaked, and while the off-season is clearly incredibly important for the Sixers, they are by no means at the “do or die” point of hitting on each of their potential draft picks.

But that does not mean that the Philadelphia 76ers, particularly Jerry Colangelo, has vacation time until something happens. Now is the time for relationship building, for talking to players, agents, and family members to develop positive relationships. Now is the time for the team to project which players on the roster will play for the team next season, and for that matter what the likes of a Jahlil Okafor in his second NBA season can bring to the team.

There is no hurry for the team at this point. The Philadelphia 76ers have plenty of raw talent, and each day refines that talent a little bit more. Yes, this is a team filled with building materials, and it has the blueprints drawn up by president and general manager Sam Hinkie. The contractor? Jerry Colangelo. For a man who has been in the trenches all the way to the penthouse, it’s clear that his greatest passion and talents lie in face to face meetings. So when the call was placed to Colangelo to chair the face to face affairs of this NBA team, he did more than ask what was in it for him. You see, he really does NOT work that way.

He was honored that a professional team still needed him. And on his honor, he will give his all to building the Philadelphia 76ers into a legacy he will be proud to be associated with.