The 76ers stopped trusting The Process, and they'll pay for it with mediocrity
It's really hard to be really good in the NBA.
It's even harder if you're in a market that isn't going to attract top-flight free agents.
It was always going to be tough for the Philadelphia 76ers to compete for NBA titles, but it got much tougher Wednesday night when general manager Sam Hinkie left the team.
Mediocrity doesn't pay in the NBA, because it's a league that, more than any other professional league in the world, is driven by stars. If you have two All-Star players, you're going to the playoffs every year. If you have three, you're contending for championships.
The Lakers and Knicks can recruit and sign those All-Stars. The 76ers aren't in Los Angeles or New York, so they needed to draft them.
That's because a mediocre team in a less-than-elite market has almost no chance of becoming a good team through anything other than the draft. That's the reality. Those teams are stuck in basketball purgatory unless they get really lucky — 1-in-100 lucky
The 76ers didn't want to wait on supreme luck — they wanted a plan. Hinkie had one.
The Process, as it was dubbed, wasn't sexy, and it was going to be painful, but when you're trying to exploit market inefficiencies, the market usually bites back.
The 76ers signed up to lose, because in the NBA, losing, no matter how you look at it, is the best way to win if you're a team that can't buy its way out of jams.
What were the Cavaliers before they landed LeBron James with the No. 1 overall pick? What were they after he left for Miami? What are they now that he's back?
It takes only one transcendent talent to turn a laughingstock franchise into a perennial title contender, and Hinkie made it clear that they were going to do what was necessary to get that player, even if it meant taking a lot of heat.
The problem is that The Process, no matter how logical, needed some luck too, and the 76ers were unlucky under Hinkie.
The 76ers only needed the ping-pong balls to bounce right just once, but they didn't. The Sixers began their tanking efforts in earnest in 2013-14 and ended up with the second-best chance to draft No. 1 overall. They ended up with the third pick, and with Andrew Wiggins and Jabari Parker off the board, they selected Joel Embiid, who is yet to play a game because of injury.
Last year, the Sixers had the third-best odds at the No. 1 pick. They drafted No. 3 again, missing out on Karl-Anthony Towns and D'Angelo Russell (but passing over Kristaps Porzingis) to select Jahlil Okafor.
The Process would have worked — it was only a matter of how much patience the team's ownership had. Going into this season, it seemed as if they would see it through. It only takes one amazing player to change the trajectory of a team, so what's another year of poor play if it gives your team its best chance to land that player and be competitive for 10?
But at some point this season, the Sixers brass stopped trusting The Process, and they're now looking for a less painful way to earn respectability.
That won't happen, because winning is tough, and looking for shortcuts only makes it tougher.
The 76ers ownership started sabotaging The Process when they hired former Phoenix Suns owner and GM Jerry Colangelo to advise the team. He quickly siezed power and made a move for point guard Ish Smith, trading two second-round picks for the journeyman guard.
Hinkie believes that second-round picks are the most undervalued asset in the NBA, so trading two of them for a player who could have been picked up off the street in the summer was a clear sign that the era of The Process was over.
Smith made the Sixers watchable and helped the team avoid the NBA record for losses in a season. There's no doubt that the tiny acquisition reaped benefits, but it was a short-term decision that jeopardized the 76ers' longterm plan.
It also created the illusion that the Sixers didn't need to lose to win — if they were smart enough, they could beat a system that was rigged against them.
That's the kind of thinking that put the 76ers in the hole that Hinkie was trying to dig them out of. It's that kind of antiquated management that will have the 76ers max out as an eight seed in the Eastern Conference — chum for a superstar-laden team in its their path to a title.
(Would it surprise you that the architect of this regression is keen to hire his son as Hinkie's replacement?)
It would be cosmically unfair if this is the year luck went the 76ers way and they end up with the prodigy they've been seeking. Boasting an unparalleled arsenal of tradable assets (for Hinkie, every player was tradable — even Nerlens Noel and Okafor — and the Sixers own a comical amount of draft picks moving forward), Hinkie could have created one tremendous squad around that franchise-saving superstar. We could have seen the true fruits of The Process. Now, we never will.
Many are angry at Hinkie and are happy to see him leave. They say that tanking is shameful and dishonorable and that he deserved to lose his job. Their anger is misplaced, and Hinkie was the man who was showing them where it should be directed — a flawed and rigged collective bargaining agreement.
It's a shame it ended like this. The Process stood out as bold and daring in a sports world chalk full of conformity. Amid a sea of get-rich-quick schemes that never seemed to work, The Process was a substantial long-term investment plan.
When Hinkie took over, the 76ers were a bad team that was going nowhere anytime soon. Hinkie, plan in hand, told the Sixers brass it would have to get a lot worse before it would get better. They bought in. Despite knowing exactly what they were getting into, three years later, they — not Hinkie — quit.
If luck wasn't a factor, the 76ers would be the Houston Astros, who turned four years of losing into what could be a decade of title contention. But with The Process, luck was just as much a factor as impatience. The latter showed up first, and the 76ers brass will come to regret that it did.
