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
Buried Alive
After a year of the conventional NBA methods, the team had dug a hole for itself, jumped in, and then pulled the earth in on top of itself. You see, the team had committed to a four team trade in the hopes of bringing one of the NBA elite centers to the Philadelphia 76ers in Andrew Bynum, and in the process surrendered arguably the best defensive wing player in the NBA in Andre Iguodala, and their first round pick this year in Moe Harkless and last year’s in Nikola Vucevic. The team hoped that by moving Iguodala, it would give Evan Turner and Jrue Holiday the chance to grow . The Sixers also surrendered their first round pick – a lottery protected for two years, top 11 protected in year three, top 8 protected in year four, eventually converting to two second round picks in 2016.
The team also traded a first and second round draft pick to the Miami Heat for Arnette Moultrie. Moultrie and Bynum were to pair up and run the post game for the Sixers.
Bynum never suited up. Moultrie didn’t deliver when he did. In the process, the team spent a lot of draft picks and hard currency to have one of the most accomplished benches in the NBA. In 2013, the NBA salary cap space was set at $58 Million, but the team committed to $65 Million.
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No salary space. No draft picks. No young players. Lots of veteran players, some who simply could not deliver, while others were good enough to carry the team for a couple dozen wins, just enough to embed the team in the middle of the NBA draft. The team was stuck in one of the worst places in the NBA – hopelessness.
But, the team was “politically correct”. The team had severe limits to the draft options going forward. The team had no salary cap space to deal any free agents. And the team had some good players, who were just good enough to keep the team in that 20-40 win range, but never good enough to threaten for a playoff appearance. The fan-base understood the situation, and for a lucid moment in time, the ownership consortium seemed to have a good grasp of the situation as well. The team had to make tough choices. The system of the NBA is set up to give a little, and take a little.
You fail to win games? You get a lottery pick with odds ranging based on the depths of your season’s futility. You win some games? Great. But now your players will demand more money and your lottery chances decline. Once an NBA team spirals down, there is little more to do than fight to remain semi-bad. Pay good players, keep drafting to hope to replace good players.
Next: Lazarus
Lazarus
But Sam Hinkie arrived and changed everything. He immediately “bit the bullet” and worked to immediately distance the team from the disastrous Moultrie and Bynum trades. And he did.
Sam Hinkie acknowledged that the team had nothing coming through the pipeline in terms of young talent to develop. Now the Philadelphia 76ers sit on three to four first round draft picks and rights to swap draft picks. The team could have lottery picks for the next several years going forward as well. But most of all, the team has one of the biggest NBA salary cap room to deal for free agents.
From buried and gone to young and vibrant – in just three years. So what’s the problem?
The problem falls back to the politics. In the reign of Sam Hinkie, the Philadelphia 76ers only managed to win 19, 18 and 10 games respectively. That left the team, and the league, open to criticism. What people failed to consider is that success on the basketball court is dependent upon the personnel decisions of several years prior. Unless you are the Cleveland Cavaliers and get three of four of the first picks in the NBA draft, and then have an NBA elite player by the name of LeBron James elect to sign with your team in free agency, you truly are not changing the course of your team much in an NBA draft to the following year.
So the team that Hinkie inherited was never in play for a playoff appearance anytime soon, despite the rantings of virtually every hot take videos out there. What the question became what was the goal of the rebuild? Painful losing was inevitable. The GM could sink for two years and bob back to the .500 surface, only to submerge once more, or stay down longer and set the team up for a long duration deep runs into the NBA playoffs. Hinkie saw the long term goal as the priority, and began to restructure the entire team to meet that goal.
Next: Future is ... almost now
Future Is… ALMOST Now
The complexity of the rebuild of the Sixers franchise is just too much to absorb simultaneously. So let’s break it down into it’s major components. With a goal of becoming the champions of the National Basketball Association, the organization had to evaluate all aspects of the team and supporting functions to ensure that all components were driving to the same goal.
I. New Training Facility
Well, any organization seeking to do a facelift invariably turns to the bricks and mortar. Nothing says “we are new and improved” more than a new building. But the Sixers didn’t build just to be new, but to be a front runner in the NBA. So the team is building a basketball training complex which will feature a 2800 square foot locker room, a player restaurant, cardio and weight room, a hydrotherapy room with a 40-foot lap pool and 2 NBA sized basketball courts. With the move over to South Jersey the Sixers plan on growing their relationship within the Camden community.
A video of the new facility can be found below:
This was just one of the team’s innovations.
II. Basketball Analytics
The organization made a huge investment at incorporating basketball analytics into the day to day operations at the player level, but also into the building of the NBA roster, and into the overall scheme of building an NBA championship team. With the team aiming at youth, analytics leverages the coaching staff to give immediate feedback to the player. Even when players practiced alone in the gym, Hinkie was able to discuss their accuracy. For a “non-basketball guy”, Hinkie certainly understood a great deal about basketball.
III. Sports Science and Medicine
The team wanted to infuse the latest and greatest science and medical breakthoughs into the infrastructure of the team. Having been burned by the Andrew Bynum fiasco, the team was incredibly wise to seek not only help, but perhaps the world’s premier expert in the field in the recruitment of Doctor David T. Martin. Martin immediately paid dividends to the team by personalizing the recovery of center Joel Embiid, particularly since a need for a second foot surgery was discovered.
IV. Coaching and Staffing to promote player development
When the team hired head coach Brett Brown, Hinkie was hiring more than a coach. He was hiring a professional mentor and lifestyle coach as well. Simultaneously, the team invested in a support cast of counselors, strength conditioning, dietitians, and more to fulfill the 24 hour needs of a training athlete.
V. Restoring draft picks into the organization
This was probably one of the most under-appreciated aspects of the former general manager, but perhaps one of the most valuable. You can see it in the 2016 NBA draft, where the Philadelphia 76ers have an opportunity to end up with two of the first five picks in this draft, and four of the first thirty. The rights to swap picks with the Sacramento Kings also boosts the chances to draft at the first overall pick of the draft.
The pain of the losses translates directly into the draft picks in this draft.
VI. Contract Writing for Developing Players
This is another under-appreciated area, and one that has drawn so much ire from NBA players’ agents. Sam Hinkie was a master of front loading an NBA contract. That seems counter productive, doesn’t it? Well not exactly. Hinkie overpaid a prospect in year one in order to retain a sever-ability clause in later years. If a player was offered $700,000 in year one to sign elsewhere, Hinkie would offer $1,200,000 for the same year one. But where the $700,000 contract could be a multi-year deal, there were no team options written into the contract. In Hinkie’s paper, you bet there were.
Trusting his own eye for talent, Hinkie signed any number of players to those more lucrative, but more team friendly contracts. In the occasion where a player would elect not to do so, as the case of K.J. McDaniels, Hinkie would give them a one year deal.
But in the end, all of the value Hinkie generated for the team’s future did little to help the team’s present. And the political forces of the NBA finally got the break they were looking for.
Next: He Has To Go!
He Has To Go!
We may never learn the true and total tale of what happened with the Philadelphia 76ers organization, but we do know this:
The NBA was unhappy with the prolonged losing of the Philadelphia 76ers. So unhappy because, quite frankly, it was a sore spot with the NBA commissioner that media loved to poke at.
"“Am I a fan of that strategy? Put it this way: No. But does that mean it’s not acceptable under league rules? It doesn’t.” – Adam Silver"
I don’t think it’s any great leap of faith to say that the NBA commissioner carries a great deal of weight with the owners of each team. When the 2015-2016 season began, the Philadelphia 76ers limped into the season with a series of injuries which forced the team to seek emergency relief and bring on a 16th man. With a roster already unfamiliar to one another, and too young to be expected to generate much success, the early injuries simply shunted any hope of showing up in the win column.
But it’s likely that the discipline issues of rookie center Jahlil Okafor off the “yeah, that’s a shame” into the “what can we do?” from the Philadelphia 76ers ownership. If Adam Silver needed the right moment to place a corrective plan into effect, that was the opening he needed. He responded to rumors that he was directly seeking a change of direction in the Sixers organization.
"Those reports are not correct,” Silver said. “Josh Harris, who’s the principal owner of the 76ers, decided on his own that he needed to change course. He and I had many conversations along the way about the utility of the strategy that he was following. And he came to the conclusion once this season began, and he saw how his team was performing on the floor, that he needed to change his strategy.”"
What resulted from that discussion is that Silver talked to Jerry Colangelo to change direction. The official story became “adding basketball voices to the room.” But the true goal was simply to remove one voice, one person, from the room: Sam Hinkie’s . After the fact, Silver was more than happy to share more details:
"“His (Jerry Colangelo’s) 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.”"
And so, begrudgingly, Adam Silver was brought into the situation, and begrudgingly persuaded Jerry Colangelo to take over the navigation for the team. But it gets better:
"“Bryan Colangelo, who of course has ultimately ended up as president of basketball operations for the 76ers, was someone at the time that Josh excluded as a possibility because it was clear that Bryan was looking for a full-time job as the head of basketball for one of our teams,” Silver said. “So in essence, the 76ers ended up with Jerry because Bryan was not an option at the time.”"
So the path is Josh Harris dragged Adam Silver in, who persuaded Jerry Colangelo to get involved, because his son Bryan Colangelo was not interested in the Philadelphia 76ers either. Have you ever found yourselves talking to your children about a misdeed, and they were all innocent and confessed that somebody else made them do it? Yeah… this evolving story seems to have a lot of similarities to that… doesn’t it?
Next: Just Don't Screw It Up!
Just Don’t Screw it Up!
In the end, the decision to impeach President Sam Hinkie happened back in December. From the moment the ownership reached out to one or both of the Colangelo’s, the deal was struck. Hinkie as truly on his way out, but accepted the “more voices” narrative at face value. However, the mechanics of reluctant saboteurs delayed “the Process” of Sam Hinkie’s removal as much as the mechanics of Hinkie’s “Process” had delayed the eventual translation into the team’s win column. To make the change, they needed time to understand the team, the strategy, and be ready to move in instantly. A particularly difficult matter to arrange when all principals were so reluctant to be involved.
As cozy of a positive situation that awaits new President Bryan Colangelo at the Philadelphia 76ers, the credit to the situation belongs entirely to Hinkie – the guy just removed. Most of the time, a bad general manager fights to improve the team in the short term to keep their job at the expense of the long term benefit of the team – much like the team’s situation when Hinkie arrived. But Hinkie played the hand dealt to him in the opposite direction. He sacrificed the short term for the long term benefit for the team.
And so, Bryan Colangelo’s role is a highly paid autopilot.
If he attempts to rework the roster into “his” roster, any negative results will be met with blood curdling outcries. If he attempts to change the head coach, the fan base will martyr Brett Brown and he will be cast into the villain role. If he tries to trade players, any mistake will be historically accounted for by his ineptness. And any success met in the NBA draft will be a direct result of Hinkie’s draft picks, while any miss will be taken as his ineptness.
Colangelo has one option – steady as she goes!
And why not? The team is sitting on a stockpile of draft picks, two former first round prospects who will likely join the team this season, and virtually everything Sam Hinkie began comes online this year. In short, Hinkie built this cruise ship but was fired before he could pilot her on the maiden voyage.
History is written from the memories, and it’s a fact that positive memories will outlast any negative ones. The folks that love to rant and hate? Eventually there will be some new head coach or NBA general manager to hate. The folks that supported Hinkie throughout the process? They will remember him fondly.
Eventually, some NBA team will be painted into the corner once more. Some ownership will eventually give Sam Hinkie the impossible task of rebuilding a franchise, only to balk at retaining him just as that ship is about to sail. But until then, his popularity will only grow now.
The NBA fixed the Sixers, and martyred Sam Hinkie in “The Process.”