Bryan Colangelo Surfing Sixers Off-Season

Bryan Colangelo arrived in time to catch the wave of Hinkie’s work. Now all he needs to do is hang ten

Surf’s Up!

In Philadelphia, particularly for the 76ers, it might as well be. After three years of austerity in salary cap management and in hording draft picks for the future, the Philadelphia 76ers will benefit from a wave of potential prosperity in this year’s NBA draft. All the team needs is for new President of Basketball Operations Bryan Colangelo to grab his NBA draft board and hang ten.

Or rather four.

You see, the narrative is forming now, a narrative of needing NBA experience and veteran leadership on the Philadelphia 76ers roster. But for each year of inexperience this team completes, it grows that one year of experience across the board. Do nothing, and in three years you will have all the NBA veteran leadership you need on this roster. So that can’t truly be it. That narrative is beginning to frighten me, much like the political narratives of freedoms, liberty, rich versus old, and taxation and subsidies scare me.

Words that have more emotional components, are cliche’s, are words used by those who haven’t a true nuts and bolts plan in place. Bryan Colangelo is 18 years into this NBA and he has likely forgotten far more than I will ever know about the intricacies of the business. So why fall upon cliches and “veteran leadership” talk now, when we all know that the team needs far greater details to repair the team. Could it be he truly doesn’t know what’s broken yet? Or is it simply a matter of not having a path in place to obtain the right fixes.

I suspect that the message is more of the latter. Right now, Colangelo is a conduit of absorbing the information from the coaches, analysts, and scouts, distilling that information, and then packaging the conclusion into a coherent summary for ownership. We are somewhere in the midst of that consensus building and board approving phase which makes it unlikely that we’ll get details of the fixes too quickly.

More from Draft

I won’t lie. When I hear that the team is focusing on basketball minds in the front office, I made some incorrect assumptions. I automatically presumed that interviews would include details of what the team sought: something like “we need to bolster our perimeter defense to give a young man like Jahlil Okafor a chance at the post” or something akin to “we need to get our perimeter shooting going, and the best way to do that would be to look for (insert statistic here) in free agency or a trade”.

So far, we are getting a consistent message of “we’re young, and we need veteran leadership”. Hey, girl scouts need leaders too, but that says nothing from a basketball expertise perspective. It may simply be that the message I’m looking for is not ready yet because there is not a consensus – or if there is a consensus, it has not been blessed by the powers that be. The team has plenty of basketball capital to bring in pieces that may not be present on the team, or to fix pieces that aren’t quite working yet. But I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn by suggesting that Sixers fans are a very astute group, and know what is not working for this team.

The real work for Bryan Colangelo, despite the new title to the team, happens after the NBA draft. Until that time, much of the work is done automatically by the NBA Lottery on May 17th. On that night, we learn if the Philadelphia 76ers win the coin toss and pick at either one or two in the NBA draft (versus a disappointing showing at either three or four) and whether we win another coin toss to determine if we get the Los Angeles Lakers pick at four or five. That is in place.

Next: Philadelphia 76ers Draft Strategy Per Bryan Colangelo

Then, regardless of the picks we eventually end up with, most of the scouting work has been done. By this point in time, the Philadelphia 76ers NBA draft board is in place, or soon will be. A wave of three or up to four draft picks are coming our way, and nobody needs to do a thing. Perhaps that’s why we are getting such a stock cliche’ message right now…. perhaps it’s just easier to grab the draft board and surf the wave coming our way.

Surfs Up Sixers Fans!