The Inevitable Martyrdom Of Sam Hinkie

Any Progress Of Sixers Will Only Add To Mystique Of Contrarian Sam Hinkie

Martyrdom.

It’s the death or termination of a person or ideal to quell its popularity, but which has an opposite effect of creating even more sympathy and admiration.

The powers that be will take neither the credit nor the blame for the ousting of Sam Hinkie from the Philadelphia 76ers, but they had the hand in it nonetheless.  But the timing, oh the timing, of the move was absolute insanity.   At the cusp of three years of torturous struggles on the basketball court switching to a true rebuild, the owners simply stood in the doorway of next year, placed the team across the threshold, and then pushed Sam Hinkie back out into the cold and locked the door behind them.

There, now any improvements from the nightmarish torture of the past three years will never be credited to Hinkie and his long term process was their agreement with NBA executives who did not approve of Hinkies style. Instead, they’ve martyr’d him as a result.

The NBA is a marketable product of entertainment.  As a result, there will be doubts and politics involved in it’s operations – as there is not scientific method nor recipe of how.  When the Philadelphia 76ers concluded that the team’s best hope of future success lay in the hands of one basketball analytics guru and strategist Sam Hinkie, they comitted to a seven year program.

"Well when they [Joshua Harris and Sixers’ ownership group] acquired the team in 2012 (actually occurred on October 2011), maybe, I think the talk was about seven years. Seven years,”“So I think it’s still on that same timeline. No. To be good. To be good. To be formidable. To be a contender. That’s probably 18-19, right? – Julius Erving as interviewed on SiriusXM radio"

Next: Buried Alive