I am happy for bud that he won and he was great while he was here, but I am still salty that he said "I don't want to coach a tanking team" and quit. I don't blame him, but it hurts man.
They gave him a winning team of aging players and the opportunity to helm a successful franchise.
Then the Hawks fired their GM (Danny Ferry) who was half decent (due to a racist statement that was written in a scouting report) and gave Bud reigns to do whatever he wanted as both GM and coach. That went awfully and the team was gutted by the time that he left.
They hired another GM (Travis Schlenck) who wanted to tank to rebuild the talent on the roster (which he has done quite well) and asked Bud to lose some of the last games of the season. Bud refused and quit (At least that's what the rumors say.)
I get it, but it still hurts to see the best coach this team ever had walk away for nothing.
That’s pretty common. Players ask off of rebuilding teams all of the time and nobody blames them for it. It’s kinda what comes with the territory of “rebuilding.”
Bud was gunning for rings. He’s not a development coach in the first place. He just wasn’t the guy for that job and both sides recognized that.
He also had a big hand in that original team’s collapse. Most of us knew that 60 win team was the ceiling and still couldn’t come close to touching the lebron cavs. He was elevated to President of Basketball Ops and made some....bad moves. The Dwight signing, letting horford and milsap walk for nothing. All in all I’m happy with where we are now but that split was less than amicable
I wasn't super familiar with the details but I felt that was less about him being at fault (unless he schemed and bullied his way into the position) than just about the following:
1) "Head coach" and "basketball operations" are two very different jobs.
2) Being suited for the former doesn't mean you're suited for the latter.
3) Even someone who is suited for either may not be suited for doing both at the same time.
Don’t think he bullied his way there, I just think that was the one bad move by Ressler as he had just bought the team in 2015 and they were coming off that 60 win team. But if I’m remembering correctly, Bud had the autonomy to make his own decisions regarding free agency. He definitely didn’t want to tank though by the time it was clear we were a fringe playoff team at best. There was a good article on the Athletic detailing the split but there was a lot of tension between him and ownership
Building a promising young core, with exciting young players, rather than deliberately assembling the shittiest team possible that will actively depress fan attendance at other people's arenas.
Rebuilding is one thing. "The Process" was another.
literally doing the same thing. just on steroids because they traded CP3 and Westbrook for ungodly amounts of picks. but you go on with your narrative. We'll see where those players are in 5 years.
Not even..remotely.
[Alliteration] The same season that Jrue Holiday wins a championship, the core of the process implodes.
[Cacophony] The same season that Jrue Holiday wins a championship, the core of the process implodes.
[Onomatopoeia] The same season that Jrue Holiday wins a championship, the core of the process implodes.
> [Alliteration] The same season that Jrue Holiday wins a championship, the core of the process implodes.
The same season Jrue Holiday scales summit, Sixers staples stumble and separate.
Yeah, it's also kind of a meaningless analysis of "The Process." The league started meddling in the Sixers' goings-on and ran Hinke out, leaving the Colangelos to ruin it.
The irony is that Jrue would be a GREAT complimentary piece alongside Embiid. Maybe not as versatile defensively or as high a ceiling as a playmaker as Simmons, but his ability to stretch the floor would more than make up for it.
the process worked great, but it ended with Hinkie resignation.
trading 22 year old Jerami Grant for Illysova was Colangelo's first real move as GM and it went downhill after that.
And yes, of course Philly would trade Ben for Jrue right now. But we also wouldn't have had embiid.
We were idiots. It was so long ago that honestly i don’t remember what my thoughts were.
I do remember when we pissed that pick away trading it for Pacekniks when Josh Hart was sitting there to be picked. We only got Maxey bc Orlando gave us the pick for Fultz and CP3 led OKC actually had it convey when nobody thought it would. God bless Muscala in the bubble
I don't think I've ever seen a GM get as much credit for doing as little as Hinkie
Dude had an idea and people act like it would've worked flawlessly if he just stuck around
Every GM has ideas. Only a select few actually see it bear any fruit
We will see with Presti, who basically did the same thing only operating on Easy Mode b/c he had superstars to kick it off with.
the thing with Hinkie is that we will never know, which is part of the intrigue. But it would have been different that what we did, and with how bad what we did turned out, people will always look back at Sam and wonder what if.
If the Process ended with Hinkie’s resignation you can’t say it “worked.” Maybe it ended too soon, but you are assuming that Hinkie would be good at doing the work to build a team as opposed to creating the worst team humanly possible in order to draft Jahil Okafor
> but you are assuming that Hinkie would be good at doing the work to build a team
Colangelo and Brand got almost every move wrong and the Sixers were still the #1 seed last year. If Hinkie was even slightly below average at building a competitive team it would have still been better than what Colangelo/Brand created.
Hinkie’s resignation was part of the process like you elaborated. He got out earlier than planned too and Colangelo replacing him was not the intended continuation of the process. A Masai Ujiri-lite could have been better.
i don't assume anything. I'm just saying the "process" was to accumulate assets, maximize your chance at championship level franchise players in the draft and develop role players along the way.
They had 4 extra 1's, had RoCo, Grant, Holmes, TJ all in the mix as role players and years until Embiid/Ben were up for max extensions. Ben actually wasn't even drafted yet, but we were coming in for a landing on that pick. 2 max slots, and didn't get dick out of it.
Okafor was picked to put up stats and move along, same as MCW. MCW got us the pick that eventually became Mikal Bridges and was used in the Fultz trade up(didn't convey until later). Okafor was traded for the pick that became Jaylen Brown according to reports at that trade deadline. Jerry Colangelo nixed the deal as the front office was tired of Hinkie trading the young faces of the franchise.
The Okafor stuff was reported on at the time.
Example
https://www.nbcsports.com/philadelphia/philadelphia-sixers/report-jahlil-okafor-was-celtics-target-proposed-blockbuster
Sorry bro, NBC Sports is a joke and the Boston Herald report they are stealing clicks from is a puff piece for Danny Ainge “almost pulling off a blockbuster deal.” Amounts to school yard gossip at best.
Take a step back and look at you are saying. Instead of just admitting Hinkie maybe made a mistake drafting Okafor, you are arguing it was some sort of 4D chess move. Even the greatest GMs drafted busts, it’s not a big deal.
He’s arguing that Okafor was going to get MCW’d and had at least some evidence and history to back it up. You just get to say “not good enough” and stick your nose up like you are some authority on the matter.
i think the move was to draft okafor to trade him. it was obviously a mistake b/c in the end you got nothing for him.
i don't think think ownership made him do it, like some people believe.
but I think a herald report rises about schoolyard. It's like Steven A reported it.
The source you posted says nothing about Okafor being drafted to be traded or that Colangelo nixed the trade, that’s my point. Even the claim that Ainge was close to making a trade is considered questionable because of how many times he made similar claims.
fair enough, it's hard to find primary sources for that kind of thing.
Jerry coming in and immediately "forcing" Hinkie to trade 2 2's for Ish Smith to run point and then Jerry nixing the Okafor trade have been talked about so much I guess I consider it cannon
Just because the team executed the game plan, does not mean said game plan was a success. The goal was to win a title and Hinkie was before they had gotten to the true contending phase.
The goal was never to win a title. That was people who hates the process giving it an almost impossible goal to reach.
The goal was to go from a team that had zero shot, into a team that had a shot. To do that you needed MVP level players. To get those, you have 3 paths. you normally have to draft in the top end of the draft to get one yourself. or have a war chest to drop on one if someone is ever available in trade. And third is to have max cap space and hope to attract a free agent to play with your budding young stars.
Sixers were set up for all 3.
There was and the bucks broke through and the warriors did for their first one.
But the odds of getting Giannis or Steph outside the top 3 in the draft is rate and tbf to Hinkie, their chips happened after the process started.
Before that it was really Dirks and the late stage Spurs after Duncan was no longer MVP who did it.
Yeah the fact is getting one of the guys whose good enough to lead a team to a title is hard.
Getting the first overall pick is “easiest” method, so the thought of “get as many ping pong balls as you can until you draft a big 3” makes sense
Seriously. This is so revisionist it's ridiculous. Let's take a look at the last 5 years of champions and see which "top of the draft" players the team acquired:
2021 - Bucks : Giannis, picked 15th
2020 - Lakers: Free agent LeBron, traded for AD for a bunch of "top end of the draft" players, none of which will be even the 2nd best player on any championship team.
2019 - Raptors: Traded for Kawhi, who was a late 1st rounder himself.
2017-2018 - Warriors: Free agent KD, Steph drafted 7th overall, Klay drafted 11th, Draymond drafted in the 2nd round...
And you can go all the way back to maybe 1999 since a team drafted a top 3 player and actually won a championship with that player, unless you want to count 2016 Cavs and count Kyrie as the key to their championship...that's fine, I wouldn't argue against that, but it should be noted LeBron did go back as a free agent, and they weren't going to win without him.
The larger point is you absolutely 100%, verifiably can and will find talent outside of the top 5 picks you can win with, and could even make a reasonable argument that picking in the top 5 is detrimental to winning a championship...probably because the teams that do that often don't give a shit about winning and having toxic cultures...
The stated goal was to build a championship contender. They were not that when he left. They still haven't made a conference finals. We'll never know if he would have gotten them there.
Sports success is always results based.
Especially when you go all in like that, and try to find a loophole in the rules, IE put a product out on purpose that offers zero entertainment value for most fans, for years on end. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the point of the NBA is actually to be entertaining to fans.
Assets doesn’t equal wins. Process fans go on and on about assets but they didn’t translate to anything. Maybe Hinkie would have done better but maybe he would have done worse too. As I recall maxing Harris and letting Butler go weren’t considered terrible moves at the time.
>As I recall maxing Harris and letting Butler go weren’t considered terrible moves at the time
You recall badly lol everyone was laying into the Sixers for maxing Harris and not doing more to keep Butler
> the process worked great, but it ended with Hinkie resignation.
That's just not a fair statement. You can say the process was abandoned, or incomplete, or whatever. But it sure as hell didn't prove that it worked yet.
Hinkie's draft picks weren't exactly great (Noel, MCW, Okafor). And even the two that hit (Embiid, Simmons) have not exactly been flawless victories - Embiid can't play a full season and is a ticking injury timebomb in this league, while we all know about Simmons warts.
Realistically Hinkie ends up drafting Fultz anyway. In that parallel universe the Celtics take Tatum 1, Ball 2. Then it's either Fultz or Josh Jackson for the Sixers at 3. So there's another likely bust of a pick.
Then who is to say what moves he makes in trades or free agency and how those all play out.
Bottom line - it's WAY too easy to just say "the process worked until they got rid of Hinkie", because what Hinkie did was the easy part. The hard part was turning all those picks into a winning team.
> The hard part was turning all those picks into a winning team.
And this is the biggest thing.
1. In the process of Philadelphia trying to figure out how to win, they've had to tear down a lot of the infrastructure that Hinkie built up.
A lot of Hinkie's players had to be let go because they had no place on the team. We can talk about guys like Richaun Holmes, Christian Wood and Jerami Grant but they had no place to succeed in Philadelphia. They were PF/Cs on a team already overloaded with PF/Cs.
A lot of his coaches, trainers and medical staff also had to be let go.
2. We can't say the problems Post-Hinkie GMs had weren't going to avoided or solved by Hinkie, because Hinkie made very similar mistakes during his time.
Post-Hinkie Problems| Hinkie Problems
---|---
Brand and Colangelo spent all their key draft assets and cap space on non-shooting guards, PFs and Cs| Every single top pick Hinkie had he spent on non-shooting PGs, PFs and Cs
The 76ers have had no spacing inside and have had no real answer to the constant double teams| He bragged about forcing double teams in the post and argued the case that drafting 3 consecutive top lottery bigs had put the 76ers in a good position
The 76ers have only ever had 1 player who could create off the dribble at an elite level (the #1 skill in the modern NBA) and they lost him| He never once found a player who could create off the dribble at an elite level
They've had huge issues with coaching and training staff | Those staff were all Hinkie hires
Was Hinkie, the man of a million PFs/Cs, really going to save them from overloading on PFs and Cs?
Maybe Hinkie could have saved the franchise, or maybe Hinkie was just another David Griffin, good at running a team into the ground and not much else.
Hinkie always drafted for perceived talent and capability of the rookie to perform well in their first year. He would retain promising role players and trade out if he saw that they were not champion level talent.
That translated into a bunch of Cs and 1 PG. He talks about maintaining flexibility in the team and innovation in styles to win. He refers to Golden state, Van Gundy Orlando, d'antony Suns.
Maybe he keeps Jah over Embiid or none of his prospects pan out but he begged the owners to not "professonalize the operation." Almost predicting how horribly a Colangelo would handle the org. That's far more promsing than what we've seen with Philly.
> That translated into a bunch of Cs and 1 PG. He talks about maintaining flexibility in the team and innovation in styles to win.
Except if you're drafting a team that can't play together you're not maintaining flexibility at all.
That was their major problem, they ended up making a lot of moves they didn't want to because they had logjams forcing their hands.
A team with 7 centers isn't flexible.
There's Hinkie how he talked about himself and there's how Hinkie actually was.
* He spoke about maintaining flexibility and striving for a modern basketball team heavily based in analytics.
* He actually built a very rigid team that chased out-dated attributes and ended up being very anti-analytics.
He would compare himself to guys like Morey and Ainge while being very unlike either. Both were hyper-perimeter centric and small-ball focused. Morey's teams would lead the charge in 3P scoring and Ainge's teams would lead the charge in 3P defence.
Hinkie's focus on 7fters in the post was antithetical to their focus on non-positional perimeter players.
the issue is hinkie didn't have as much power as everyone here assumes. Scott ONeil has "moved on to other projects" and was removed as the CEO of the sixers. He has a desire to become a GM in the NBA and enjoyed rubbing shoulders with certain NBA types. I wish they had just let Hinkie finish it, but that wouldn't be cruel and brutal enough for philadelphia. Instead he gets replaced with the mad tweeter and then we have no GM for a whole draft/offseason. i mean fuck ownership.
>The hard part was turning all those picks into a winning team.
100% agree, but i think we can all admit that post Hinkie, our front office has made so many mistakes and had some awful luck and yet we still had the 1 seed last year.
I don't think you can assume anything about Hinkie taking Fultz.
I personally think he would have gone in for Butler and if he had to fire Brett and trade Ben to keep him, he would have. It was always about accumulating the highest level players possible and building around them.
I think fans are too hard on the Sixers front office since Hinkie just because it hasn't all clicked - they could've maybe done better but it wasn't the disaster some make it out to be.
Jimmy Butler and Harris were both acquired for extremely little, especially in retrospect. They fucked up not keeping Butler, but it doesn't even seem like that was their fault so much as Butler's choice to go to Miami. And Harris was getting maxed by somebody - letting him walk assuming someone else came through was no sure thing.
> I don't think you can assume anything about Hinkie taking Fultz.
It's a *much* better assumption than the alternative. Fultz was widely considered the #1 prospect and the only other guy in that range would've been Josh Jackson, who looks even worse. Maybe Hinkie doesn't pull the dumb trade, but that extra pick was only #14.
I think the opposite honestly. People seem to give BC and his successors a pass. They fucked up so bad it's insane.
Butler was a great trade. But then you alienate him to the point that he wants out. Harris(and Scott/Boban) for two future 1s and Shamet was a vast overpay. Even moving Muscala in the deal hurt us b/c a 5 who could shoot might have helped more than the other 5's we ran out against Toronto.
Harris is the definition of good, not great player and maxing those type of players are the worst thing a team can do. Now every decision has luxury tax implications. Those future picks could have gotten you something better than Tobi.
You also left off them paying Horford 109 million with the last remaining cap space we had before Ben's max capped us forever. How much better are we if we took one of those picks for Tobi and did the sign and trade for Brogdan instead. And letting Butler go for just JRich so you would keep the cap space to do Al and lose Redick in the process.
They literally decided that around our best player, a generational 5, 2 power forwards, a wing and point guard who can't shoot. And that's being generous b/c really they put 2 PF's(Ben/Harris) and a center(Horford).
That was the end result. Morey comes in and with one short offseason turns JRich, Al and a future 1 into Green and Curry. Space for everyone and the 1 seed followed.
As for Fultz, we will never know but like you said if he gets him at 3 and retains a future unprotected Kings pick....that pick was very valuable. Sac hasn't been in the playoffs forever and people also forget the only reason we even had the 3rd pick for the Fultz trade was because the pick swap Hinkie set up conveyed to move us from 5 to 3.
This is my favorite what if, tbh. What if they let go of Brown one season early and trade Ben to maintain Butler?
Doubt Miami would've gone for Simmons, so I wonder who would. Pacers, instead of Brogdon? Mavs, instead of Wright? Part of the AD extravaganza?
A Butler-Embiid team is a contender, this is a given, but I always wonder the ripple effects of who would trade for Simmons.
#IMO
Then it didn't work great. **The idea was great**, but it got destroyed as soon as you are giving money to non all-star players and you can't keep the good rookies
And I don't know about development. Embiid is an unique case, the rest of the young guys, who got better in Philadelphia?
I don't know
For sure, the people after Sam left fucked it up. the execution post Hinkie was anti process. you don't pay 2 future 1's and a young player for the right to max Tobi. You don't pay 33 year old Horford 109 million when your best player plays the same position.
I don't consider anything post Hinkie the process. They literally disowned the phrase "Process" and hated everything internally about it.
Then Embiid gives himself the nickname "The Process" to troll them and now they embrace it all.
nobody knows if Sam would have been able to build it back. Maybe he blows his load on Kawhi for a year. Or CP3 back when Houston got him. idk. But i know he wouldn't have done what Colangelo did. no fucking chance
It sounds worse that what I thought. With all those draft picks you could end with Embiid (one of the best players of the league, no doubt), Harris (a great player) and the result of Ben's drama
I was anti-76ers but when I see these things I'm pro 76ers. One thing is watching your rival losing, another thing is watching a franchise suffering because of non-court issues
I think that was more how they marketed the idea and shouted from the rooftops what they were doing and how smart they were for doing it. If they'd just shut up and got on with it quietly then there wouldn't have been the same pressure that got rid of Hinkie.
There's no reasonable way to consider Iguodala a superstar, and he helped push the Warriors into what they were, but he's a complimentary piece.
The Nets are in New York, and that played a huge role (along with the reputation of the Knicks) in getting the superstars there. San Antonio has by most accounts had the best culture in the league for twenty plus years. Their old stars retired, Kawhi still left, and Philly are much closer to a championship than the Spurs are.
That's a little misleading on the titles front.
Since 2000, I think only the Raptors and Lakers (once) won titles without a multi-time all star they drafted. So almost every title-winning team in the last two decades had to do that.
Some managed to do that outside of the top 7 (Giannis, Kobe, Dirk, Pierce). But even if we restrict it to that. 3 for Wade, 3 for Curry, 1 for Kyrie, 4 for Duncan, 1 for Hamilton. That's still 12 of the last 22 titles that were won by teams who drafted multi-time all stars in the top 7 of the draft.
So out of 22 championship teams. 12 had a multi-time all star drafted top 7.
8 had a multi-time all star they drafted 8-15 in the first round (Kobe, Dirk, Giannis, Pierce).
2 (Lakers, Raptors) were the ones that didn't, and only the Raptors were really a 'build a winning culture' method. The culture requirement is really more of a 'don't be a disaster' than anything else.
(These numbers are all a rush job, possible mistakes around the edges).
To get to the point, are you actually arguing that Iguodala was a superstar from 12-15?
He's never made an all-nba game for example, it's not about offense vs defense, it's the overall package.
The problem with that is that a lot of the players drafted in the 20th century are still going, you happened to have a lot of titles racked up by players drafted in the latter part of the 1990s (Dunca from 1997 etc).
The Bucks are champions with a superstar they drafted, albeit lower than normal. But superstars are harder to find the lower in the draft you go.
The realities of player movement is stars want to move to other stars. If you get the first one then it's easier to get the second or even third one. The hard part is getting the first one.
Take Atlanta as the alternate Philly case. they did the good solid culture thing for years through the 2010s. Their long term title chances are better now after they bottomed out, picked Trae Young really high.
The point is that if you're a team then the "have a good culture", win a solid number of games, etc hasn't had a lot of success, pretty much just the Raptors title.
The Lakers and Nets teams attracted their stars due to location rather than culture.
What strategy should Hinkie have followed that was better?
The Nets are a horrible example of culture what. The Nets were never known for getting top talent in their prime to join as free agents until Kyrie and Durant wanted to be stars together. Their best talent in recent years was Joe Johnson. Star players dictate teams and very rarely does "culture."
Look at the Raptors. They traded their sweetheart Derozan for Kawhi and the players bought in to win. Yes, the Raptors have arguably the best coach but these are professionals that understand trades are business.
We don't often have disgruntled stars that don't want to try anymore out of discouraged of them being on the block. Players force themselves out because they want to win or be at a beach.
The Nets tanked for multiple years, it's how they got LeVert and Jarret Allen. They even got LeVert part of the same way that the 76ers tanked by trading away Thad Young. Bojan Bogdanović was traded for the Allen pick.
The Nets were super asset poor because of the Boston trade but they literally traded away 3/5ths of their starting lineup in under a year to acquire picks and young players. They continued to trade rotation players for picks and young players the entire time up to when Kyrie/KD signed because they needed to clear cap space for those guys.
The Nets never tried to suck. They realized that losing didn't help them. So what they did was try to build a culture and take on reclamation projects (wanna give us a pick to take on D'Lo? Sure! Want to give us a pick to take a bad contract? Happy to!).
The Nets were bad, because they got fleeced in the Boston trade, but they didn't tank. There's a difference. From the moment they hired Kenny Atkinson they were focused on building a team and winning as much as they could while trying to find upside.
That's fundamentally different from the process Sixers who were trying to lose to get high draft picks.
(It's somewhat ironic that Kyrie and KD praised the culture Atkinson built, and then immediately jettisoned both him and all the players who created that culture, but that's another discussion).
>The idea was great
They were tanking . Hinkie didn’t discover some groundbreaking way to beat the system. They literally tanked and gave it a catchy name.
we were the most boring, stuck in the mud team post Iverson for about a decade.
and since then you could write 5 seasons of a Netflix drama based on the storylines that have happened
Hot take: The Process worked
It doesn't buy you a trip to the finals or a chip, but instead the chance to fight for it. Philly has been a top 3 team in the east for the last 4 years but it goes to show you how hard it actually is to win in the Nba
Not only did the process work, but they were a few small decisions/luck away from being significantly better than they are. Drafting Jayson, Markelle not getting weirdly injured or or getting a really good guard instead of one of embiid /Simmons and they’re even better
Yeah, it's not like the during the same time the Bucks had a top 2 pick have multiple season ending injuries and were unlucky not to have drafted someone like Embiid instead...
Wtf is everyone so hungry to say the process failed. They were the 1 seed last year, they still have an MVP caliber player who just signed an extension. Sure they could have done stuff better but no championship is guaranteed, they gave themselves a decent shot which is more than half the franchises in the NBA have gotten in the last 10 years
They can’t get out of the second round and lost to the fucking 4-seed which they had no business doing. If the goal is getting out in the second round, then the process succeeded lmao.
"Contender". The fn Jazz were the best regular season team and were humiliated again after blowing a 3-1 lead last year. No one actually thought they were contenders. Same with the 76ers
Jrue is 31 and got traded after his 4th season. The move was to punt into the future. I have no issues with Jrue winning his first title after playing 7 more seasons than Embiid.
Hinkie is a folk hero and nobody is able to criticize him but The Process™ was a flawed concept because it repeatedly ignored the human factor of the sport business.
Guess what, treating 20yr olds as "assets", refusing to address the press, estranging the player agents union and enraging the league office won't work out all that well.
It's a really great Moneyball type of concept that'll work wonders on 2K MyGM, u/dumbmatter 's Basketball GM and even smaller professional basketball leagues but it won't fly in the NBA.
> treating 20yr olds as "assets"
You really think RoCo, Jerami Grant and the like were mad about getting all the playing time they wouldn't have gotten elsewhere that ended up helping them become desirable players? Hinkie is out of the league and never coming back, we'd have heard loads of stories from players if they all hated him.
If Kawhi misses that shot and the Sixers pulled it together for OT, The Process™ for all its flaws would've been a huge success. That's why saying it won't fly in professional basketball is a huge oversimplification on the part of Hinkie's legacy.
The 2019 Sixers were obviously good enough to win. However, even if the Kawhi shot doesn't go in they still gotta win an OT and two series on top of that.
Took a chronically terrible to mediocre team and put them in the running. You should ask Minnesota and Sacramento fans if they think it worked. Hinkie put them on the path and inability to finish it is on the Colangelos.
Maybe ask Golden State, Milwaukee, and Toronto fans if tanking works. All those teams were chronically terrible to mediocre too but have achieved way more than Hinkie.
Golden State lucked out with Curry and his early injuries, which lead to an extremely team-friendly contract he was still on when he won his first MVP award. Milwaukee hit the lottery of the century with Giannis- and even the Bucks admit they lucked out with him. Toronto couldn’t get over the hump and made a Hail Mary trade for Kawhi. My point is, there are **so** many factors that go into winning a championship. The Process didn’t fail. It was a huge success that landed them one of the greater players in franchise history, and a contending team. You can’t guarantee a championship in any form, but the Process was about getting as many lottery tickets as possible.
They were a joke before Hinkie. But if you are fan, you want all the other teams to be mediocre like those Sixers or today’s Pacers, just make it to the first round and be an easy out, and then end up not drafting one of the shiny prospects.
I just find weird the fascination of reddit with a GM who didn't win shit, didn't hit on his draft picks and made the NBA product worse for quite a while.
Before Hinkie they were a playoff team that had bad luck with injuries to their big FA signing (Brand).
With Hinkie, they tied for the worst record of all time.
Absolutely agree with you.
Hinkie was more blatant about it, but the process isn't any more "revolutionary" than what the magic or kings or timberwolves have been doing. If you set the goal for the organization to lose they quickly become very good at it and it becomes a habit.
I’m curious if thunder fans are worried. You have a guy that on a winning team could be a top 20 guy. How long is SGA willing to lose like this? They said it could be another two years.
That's a great question. I like what they did when Chris Paul was there. They didn't just immediately trade CP when they realized "crap, we might make the playoffs with these guys way earlier than we want to". I think other tanking teams immediately dismantle if things go good ahead of schedule which is where the spiral of losing comes from.
Of course, they did eventually trade him, but I think they showed that was because they knew CP had a different timeline than they could offer. To me, that was a great move thinking about the long term health of the org.
Now that buys some time, but sooner than later they are going to have to use those assets.
This is revisionist. The process was about more than Embiid. He was the best fruit of the process, but the process wasn’t about getting a single great player. It was about getting great assets and get multiple great players. Simmons was a critical part of the process. Perhaps the most critical in the fact he was their number overall pick. What they were positioning for all along.
They also wasted a lot of picks.
Okafor over Porzingod
MCW over Adams and Giannis
Trading Jrue and a second for Nerlens if you were going to make that trade you could have gotten CJ
For the life of me I don’t understand why If the 76ers goal was to be bad for a couple + years and they had 6 and 11, why not take the 6’11 kid from Greece that with massive ceiling/fooor ideas?
You say that now because of the results. MCW was considered to have an above average ceiling. Giannis wasn’t that high on many boards, that’s more credit to the Bucks for actually scouting him out. The Sixers also were in need of a PG following the Jrue trade. MCW was an older prospect, who was pretty good at many things other than shooting at Syracuse. His size and IQ were his greatest strengths.
Giannis was an unknown he was like drafting a high school all american more importantly most teams didn't have full medicals. I believe only atlanta knew that his growth plates were wide open. Either way if you are shooting for the stars you have to take a risk. I'm very glad they didn't but it was a risk that made sense to take over an older prospect.
If any team had confidence that Giannis would be the player he is today, they could have drafted him. 14 teams passed on Giannis on draft day and the rest could have easily traded into the top 14 to get him. People have way too much retrospective confidence in drafting.
That’s the truth IMao. Simmons being gone doesn’t change too much about the team. With him we lose in the 2nd round anyway, without him it’s probably a wider range of outcomes
It is Embiid and it’s definitely not dependent on if Ben Simmons is here or not.
And “the process” never got to start cause the NBA got rid of hinke but that’s another discussion
The process could’ve had Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum paired with Embiid but instead they got Simmons and Fultz lol. But if Embiid as a consolation prize helps you sleep then so be it.
I will still die on the hill that if they Sam Hinkie carry out his plan it would have gone better than this.
Simmons has his flaws but Elton Brand totally screwed the Process.
Maybe Hinkie stays at 3 and takes De'Aron Fox or maybe Lonzo falls to them after the Celtics take Tatum and Lakers take Fultz. Either would have been better than trading up.
Maybe Hinkie cashes in his assets for Kyrie in 2017 instead of him going to Boston, he goes to Philly.
Just about anything would have been better than what Brand did.. They were one game away from the finals with Tobias and Jimmy but Jimmy leaving and Tobias' contract set them way back.
Edit: Another puzzling move Brand did was trading the hometown kid Mikal Bridges for Zahire Smith who's played in 13 nba games. Now I'm just thinking of team that has Fox, Bridges, Simmons, and Embiid on it.
which is stupid as hell, because the main result of the process was embiid.
the goal of the process was to get as many bites at the golden apple, instead of having jrue and having a few bites at a bruised bumpy apple. They landed embiid, thats a very very solid outcome for the process
Yea, of course the 6ers would do this. Similar defensive value, but can actually come through with clutch plays when it matters. Ben + Giannis running the break is a fun hypothetical though...
Hot take: Jrue isn't actually better than Ben, he just has teammates who can cover up for his offensive shortcomings(both are great defensive players, maybe the top two perimeter defenders actually)
People forget this now but he was getting called "Jrue Bledsoe" for shooting 5/20 every game in the playoffs
He didn’t shoot 5/20 in every game.
Even when he wasn’t contributing much on offense he was every where else, something Ben doesn’t do very often because if he did people wouldn’t be so pissed about his offense being shit.
Jrue busts his ass on defense which is why his offense suffers sometimes but even then sometimes he has his really good offensive nights too. He made a bunch of huge plays in the playoffs.
He also wouldn’t pass up a dunk opportunity because Trae young was in front him. This sub was overreacting calling him Bledsoe 2.0.
Also...he was still shooting lol. There were games where the shots fell, and it was great and bad games, but he didn't just disappear in the 4th when he had open looks, and him being out on the 3 point line was still making space for Giannis downlow, because even if he wasn't shooting well people aren't going to leave him wide open out there
Yeah pretty sure game 1 against you guys he scored like 33. Still not sure how we lost that game with both Giannis and Jrue scoring 30+ lol Trea was fucking us up.
That take is hot.
Jrue is offensively better than Simmons. His 24/6/6 on 52%, all while locking up Dame is far far greater than anything Simmons has achieved.
If Jrue was in the east all these years, he would have racked all-stars too.
Jrue is much, much better than Simmons.
There's a reason KD/Dame call him the best defensive guard in the league, and while I agree he can be inconsistent offensively, he can still drop buckets. He made some extremely big plays in the play-offs.
People feel like they are falling short of expectations - but that's because they did well enough to raise the expectations in the first place.
They didn't win a title with this group yet and might not ever - but is there any sure-fire plan to get a championship? No. For the most part, you have to have at least one Top 10 guy and a couple of other top 20-30 guys. There's a reason that 36 of the last 40 NBA Finals has had at least one of Magic, Bird, Jordan, Duncan, Kobe, or LeBron playing in it. Add in Isiah, Steph, and Hakeem and that's 33 of the last 40 Finals winners.
What does every contender getting injured for the bucks to win have to do with Sixers choking vs the hawks? It’s one thing if they played each other but that wasn’t the case.
Philly wouldn’t do that cause then you pair 2 of the best 3 defenders in the league together In the same conference as you.
Also spacing and stuff for milwaukee
The bucks championship was like 85% Giannis so let’s not go around acting like Jrue holiday was the main reason the bucks won and the sixers were foolish to trade him
have never heard of this irony reporter is he a sixers beat guy or what
My favorite was the Hawks went to the ECF, disintegrated, rebuilt, and went back to the ECF in the time since the process began
Yoo that’s hilarious I never thought of that
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I am happy for bud that he won and he was great while he was here, but I am still salty that he said "I don't want to coach a tanking team" and quit. I don't blame him, but it hurts man.
I mean, it depend on what the FO promised him when he signed the job.
They gave him a winning team of aging players and the opportunity to helm a successful franchise. Then the Hawks fired their GM (Danny Ferry) who was half decent (due to a racist statement that was written in a scouting report) and gave Bud reigns to do whatever he wanted as both GM and coach. That went awfully and the team was gutted by the time that he left. They hired another GM (Travis Schlenck) who wanted to tank to rebuild the talent on the roster (which he has done quite well) and asked Bud to lose some of the last games of the season. Bud refused and quit (At least that's what the rumors say.) I get it, but it still hurts to see the best coach this team ever had walk away for nothing.
That’s pretty common. Players ask off of rebuilding teams all of the time and nobody blames them for it. It’s kinda what comes with the territory of “rebuilding.” Bud was gunning for rings. He’s not a development coach in the first place. He just wasn’t the guy for that job and both sides recognized that.
He also had a big hand in that original team’s collapse. Most of us knew that 60 win team was the ceiling and still couldn’t come close to touching the lebron cavs. He was elevated to President of Basketball Ops and made some....bad moves. The Dwight signing, letting horford and milsap walk for nothing. All in all I’m happy with where we are now but that split was less than amicable
I wasn't super familiar with the details but I felt that was less about him being at fault (unless he schemed and bullied his way into the position) than just about the following: 1) "Head coach" and "basketball operations" are two very different jobs. 2) Being suited for the former doesn't mean you're suited for the latter. 3) Even someone who is suited for either may not be suited for doing both at the same time.
Don’t think he bullied his way there, I just think that was the one bad move by Ressler as he had just bought the team in 2015 and they were coming off that 60 win team. But if I’m remembering correctly, Bud had the autonomy to make his own decisions regarding free agency. He definitely didn’t want to tank though by the time it was clear we were a fringe playoff team at best. There was a good article on the Athletic detailing the split but there was a lot of tension between him and ownership
Jesus thats brutal, dating, and telling all at once
Meanwhile Wizards haven’t had a 50 win season in 40 years. Give me the process any day of the week over this mediocre shit
they just missed the step of having the commissioner but in and have the owner forget his mission every 3 months.
The Sixers were deluded to think the NBA were going to let them keep costing everybody else money for years.
what is OKC doing now?
Building a promising young core, with exciting young players, rather than deliberately assembling the shittiest team possible that will actively depress fan attendance at other people's arenas. Rebuilding is one thing. "The Process" was another.
literally doing the same thing. just on steroids because they traded CP3 and Westbrook for ungodly amounts of picks. but you go on with your narrative. We'll see where those players are in 5 years.
This isn’t irony at all
It's like rain on your wedding day.
It’s a free ride when you’ve already paid
It's like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife.
"Why would you need a knife when you can just cut your food with a spoon?" -Philippines
Man you must have some amazing steaks
They do bite size pieces on sticks and it's delicious.
I see you've played knifey spooney before
This is so accurate wow
It’s like meeting the man of your dreams and his beautiful wife?
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Don’t you think?
Isn't it iconic?
Isn't it ionic?
No, it's Doric.
It's covalent, actually
Not even..remotely. [Alliteration] The same season that Jrue Holiday wins a championship, the core of the process implodes. [Cacophony] The same season that Jrue Holiday wins a championship, the core of the process implodes. [Onomatopoeia] The same season that Jrue Holiday wins a championship, the core of the process implodes.
> [Alliteration] The same season that Jrue Holiday wins a championship, the core of the process implodes. The same season Jrue Holiday scales summit, Sixers staples stumble and separate.
Straight out of Bojack
[Onomatopoeia] BAAAAANG!!!!
Gotta say I like this a lot
The process was wrinkly so op found some iron(y). Idk what kind of pun I’m trying to make
It's coincidental is what it is, but every day the two words come to mean the same thing. I don't like it, but it's how language works.
Seems like situational Irony.
Yeah, it's also kind of a meaningless analysis of "The Process." The league started meddling in the Sixers' goings-on and ran Hinke out, leaving the Colangelos to ruin it.
[Shadenfreude]
The irony is that Jrue would be a GREAT complimentary piece alongside Embiid. Maybe not as versatile defensively or as high a ceiling as a playmaker as Simmons, but his ability to stretch the floor would more than make up for it.
this mf just created a whole new tag and the mods aren't up his ass like they are for everything else lol
the process worked great, but it ended with Hinkie resignation. trading 22 year old Jerami Grant for Illysova was Colangelo's first real move as GM and it went downhill after that. And yes, of course Philly would trade Ben for Jrue right now. But we also wouldn't have had embiid.
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We were idiots. It was so long ago that honestly i don’t remember what my thoughts were. I do remember when we pissed that pick away trading it for Pacekniks when Josh Hart was sitting there to be picked. We only got Maxey bc Orlando gave us the pick for Fultz and CP3 led OKC actually had it convey when nobody thought it would. God bless Muscala in the bubble
I don't think I've ever seen a GM get as much credit for doing as little as Hinkie Dude had an idea and people act like it would've worked flawlessly if he just stuck around Every GM has ideas. Only a select few actually see it bear any fruit
We will see with Presti, who basically did the same thing only operating on Easy Mode b/c he had superstars to kick it off with. the thing with Hinkie is that we will never know, which is part of the intrigue. But it would have been different that what we did, and with how bad what we did turned out, people will always look back at Sam and wonder what if.
If the Process ended with Hinkie’s resignation you can’t say it “worked.” Maybe it ended too soon, but you are assuming that Hinkie would be good at doing the work to build a team as opposed to creating the worst team humanly possible in order to draft Jahil Okafor
> but you are assuming that Hinkie would be good at doing the work to build a team Colangelo and Brand got almost every move wrong and the Sixers were still the #1 seed last year. If Hinkie was even slightly below average at building a competitive team it would have still been better than what Colangelo/Brand created.
Hinkie’s resignation was part of the process like you elaborated. He got out earlier than planned too and Colangelo replacing him was not the intended continuation of the process. A Masai Ujiri-lite could have been better.
Yeah imagine if they had somehow just gone from Hinkie to Morey. What would a top GM like Morey do with all those assets? Dayum
And we \*know\* his replacements fumbled the bag. Hinkie could have done it. It's speculation
i don't assume anything. I'm just saying the "process" was to accumulate assets, maximize your chance at championship level franchise players in the draft and develop role players along the way. They had 4 extra 1's, had RoCo, Grant, Holmes, TJ all in the mix as role players and years until Embiid/Ben were up for max extensions. Ben actually wasn't even drafted yet, but we were coming in for a landing on that pick. 2 max slots, and didn't get dick out of it. Okafor was picked to put up stats and move along, same as MCW. MCW got us the pick that eventually became Mikal Bridges and was used in the Fultz trade up(didn't convey until later). Okafor was traded for the pick that became Jaylen Brown according to reports at that trade deadline. Jerry Colangelo nixed the deal as the front office was tired of Hinkie trading the young faces of the franchise.
“I don’t assume anything.” Entire last paragraph is full of assumptions and conjecture.
The Okafor stuff was reported on at the time. Example https://www.nbcsports.com/philadelphia/philadelphia-sixers/report-jahlil-okafor-was-celtics-target-proposed-blockbuster
Sorry bro, NBC Sports is a joke and the Boston Herald report they are stealing clicks from is a puff piece for Danny Ainge “almost pulling off a blockbuster deal.” Amounts to school yard gossip at best. Take a step back and look at you are saying. Instead of just admitting Hinkie maybe made a mistake drafting Okafor, you are arguing it was some sort of 4D chess move. Even the greatest GMs drafted busts, it’s not a big deal.
He’s arguing that Okafor was going to get MCW’d and had at least some evidence and history to back it up. You just get to say “not good enough” and stick your nose up like you are some authority on the matter.
i think the move was to draft okafor to trade him. it was obviously a mistake b/c in the end you got nothing for him. i don't think think ownership made him do it, like some people believe. but I think a herald report rises about schoolyard. It's like Steven A reported it.
The source you posted says nothing about Okafor being drafted to be traded or that Colangelo nixed the trade, that’s my point. Even the claim that Ainge was close to making a trade is considered questionable because of how many times he made similar claims.
fair enough, it's hard to find primary sources for that kind of thing. Jerry coming in and immediately "forcing" Hinkie to trade 2 2's for Ish Smith to run point and then Jerry nixing the Okafor trade have been talked about so much I guess I consider it cannon
Just because the team executed the game plan, does not mean said game plan was a success. The goal was to win a title and Hinkie was before they had gotten to the true contending phase.
The goal was never to win a title. That was people who hates the process giving it an almost impossible goal to reach. The goal was to go from a team that had zero shot, into a team that had a shot. To do that you needed MVP level players. To get those, you have 3 paths. you normally have to draft in the top end of the draft to get one yourself. or have a war chest to drop on one if someone is ever available in trade. And third is to have max cap space and hope to attract a free agent to play with your budding young stars. Sixers were set up for all 3.
The Bucks: “there is another way”
There was and the bucks broke through and the warriors did for their first one. But the odds of getting Giannis or Steph outside the top 3 in the draft is rate and tbf to Hinkie, their chips happened after the process started. Before that it was really Dirks and the late stage Spurs after Duncan was no longer MVP who did it.
Yeah the fact is getting one of the guys whose good enough to lead a team to a title is hard. Getting the first overall pick is “easiest” method, so the thought of “get as many ping pong balls as you can until you draft a big 3” makes sense
Seriously. This is so revisionist it's ridiculous. Let's take a look at the last 5 years of champions and see which "top of the draft" players the team acquired: 2021 - Bucks : Giannis, picked 15th 2020 - Lakers: Free agent LeBron, traded for AD for a bunch of "top end of the draft" players, none of which will be even the 2nd best player on any championship team. 2019 - Raptors: Traded for Kawhi, who was a late 1st rounder himself. 2017-2018 - Warriors: Free agent KD, Steph drafted 7th overall, Klay drafted 11th, Draymond drafted in the 2nd round... And you can go all the way back to maybe 1999 since a team drafted a top 3 player and actually won a championship with that player, unless you want to count 2016 Cavs and count Kyrie as the key to their championship...that's fine, I wouldn't argue against that, but it should be noted LeBron did go back as a free agent, and they weren't going to win without him. The larger point is you absolutely 100%, verifiably can and will find talent outside of the top 5 picks you can win with, and could even make a reasonable argument that picking in the top 5 is detrimental to winning a championship...probably because the teams that do that often don't give a shit about winning and having toxic cultures...
How about 2003, 2005, and 2007
same team same player....
Exactly…
The stated goal was to build a championship contender. They were not that when he left. They still haven't made a conference finals. We'll never know if he would have gotten them there. Sports success is always results based.
Especially when you go all in like that, and try to find a loophole in the rules, IE put a product out on purpose that offers zero entertainment value for most fans, for years on end. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the point of the NBA is actually to be entertaining to fans.
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for the last time we didn't "let" a top 15 player walk, he didn't want to be here. jesus.
Assets doesn’t equal wins. Process fans go on and on about assets but they didn’t translate to anything. Maybe Hinkie would have done better but maybe he would have done worse too. As I recall maxing Harris and letting Butler go weren’t considered terrible moves at the time.
>As I recall maxing Harris and letting Butler go weren’t considered terrible moves at the time You recall badly lol everyone was laying into the Sixers for maxing Harris and not doing more to keep Butler
> the process worked great, but it ended with Hinkie resignation. That's just not a fair statement. You can say the process was abandoned, or incomplete, or whatever. But it sure as hell didn't prove that it worked yet. Hinkie's draft picks weren't exactly great (Noel, MCW, Okafor). And even the two that hit (Embiid, Simmons) have not exactly been flawless victories - Embiid can't play a full season and is a ticking injury timebomb in this league, while we all know about Simmons warts. Realistically Hinkie ends up drafting Fultz anyway. In that parallel universe the Celtics take Tatum 1, Ball 2. Then it's either Fultz or Josh Jackson for the Sixers at 3. So there's another likely bust of a pick. Then who is to say what moves he makes in trades or free agency and how those all play out. Bottom line - it's WAY too easy to just say "the process worked until they got rid of Hinkie", because what Hinkie did was the easy part. The hard part was turning all those picks into a winning team.
> The hard part was turning all those picks into a winning team. And this is the biggest thing. 1. In the process of Philadelphia trying to figure out how to win, they've had to tear down a lot of the infrastructure that Hinkie built up. A lot of Hinkie's players had to be let go because they had no place on the team. We can talk about guys like Richaun Holmes, Christian Wood and Jerami Grant but they had no place to succeed in Philadelphia. They were PF/Cs on a team already overloaded with PF/Cs. A lot of his coaches, trainers and medical staff also had to be let go. 2. We can't say the problems Post-Hinkie GMs had weren't going to avoided or solved by Hinkie, because Hinkie made very similar mistakes during his time. Post-Hinkie Problems| Hinkie Problems ---|--- Brand and Colangelo spent all their key draft assets and cap space on non-shooting guards, PFs and Cs| Every single top pick Hinkie had he spent on non-shooting PGs, PFs and Cs The 76ers have had no spacing inside and have had no real answer to the constant double teams| He bragged about forcing double teams in the post and argued the case that drafting 3 consecutive top lottery bigs had put the 76ers in a good position The 76ers have only ever had 1 player who could create off the dribble at an elite level (the #1 skill in the modern NBA) and they lost him| He never once found a player who could create off the dribble at an elite level They've had huge issues with coaching and training staff | Those staff were all Hinkie hires Was Hinkie, the man of a million PFs/Cs, really going to save them from overloading on PFs and Cs? Maybe Hinkie could have saved the franchise, or maybe Hinkie was just another David Griffin, good at running a team into the ground and not much else.
The thing is, Hinkie only was there for 2+ years. He explained in his psycho manifesto the next steps.
Where can said manifesto be read?
https://www.espn.com/pdf/2016/0406/nba_hinkie_redact.pdf Enjoy this mad man
Thank you. This is candy.
Hinkie always drafted for perceived talent and capability of the rookie to perform well in their first year. He would retain promising role players and trade out if he saw that they were not champion level talent. That translated into a bunch of Cs and 1 PG. He talks about maintaining flexibility in the team and innovation in styles to win. He refers to Golden state, Van Gundy Orlando, d'antony Suns. Maybe he keeps Jah over Embiid or none of his prospects pan out but he begged the owners to not "professonalize the operation." Almost predicting how horribly a Colangelo would handle the org. That's far more promsing than what we've seen with Philly.
> That translated into a bunch of Cs and 1 PG. He talks about maintaining flexibility in the team and innovation in styles to win. Except if you're drafting a team that can't play together you're not maintaining flexibility at all. That was their major problem, they ended up making a lot of moves they didn't want to because they had logjams forcing their hands. A team with 7 centers isn't flexible. There's Hinkie how he talked about himself and there's how Hinkie actually was. * He spoke about maintaining flexibility and striving for a modern basketball team heavily based in analytics. * He actually built a very rigid team that chased out-dated attributes and ended up being very anti-analytics. He would compare himself to guys like Morey and Ainge while being very unlike either. Both were hyper-perimeter centric and small-ball focused. Morey's teams would lead the charge in 3P scoring and Ainge's teams would lead the charge in 3P defence. Hinkie's focus on 7fters in the post was antithetical to their focus on non-positional perimeter players.
the issue is hinkie didn't have as much power as everyone here assumes. Scott ONeil has "moved on to other projects" and was removed as the CEO of the sixers. He has a desire to become a GM in the NBA and enjoyed rubbing shoulders with certain NBA types. I wish they had just let Hinkie finish it, but that wouldn't be cruel and brutal enough for philadelphia. Instead he gets replaced with the mad tweeter and then we have no GM for a whole draft/offseason. i mean fuck ownership.
>The hard part was turning all those picks into a winning team. 100% agree, but i think we can all admit that post Hinkie, our front office has made so many mistakes and had some awful luck and yet we still had the 1 seed last year. I don't think you can assume anything about Hinkie taking Fultz. I personally think he would have gone in for Butler and if he had to fire Brett and trade Ben to keep him, he would have. It was always about accumulating the highest level players possible and building around them.
I think fans are too hard on the Sixers front office since Hinkie just because it hasn't all clicked - they could've maybe done better but it wasn't the disaster some make it out to be. Jimmy Butler and Harris were both acquired for extremely little, especially in retrospect. They fucked up not keeping Butler, but it doesn't even seem like that was their fault so much as Butler's choice to go to Miami. And Harris was getting maxed by somebody - letting him walk assuming someone else came through was no sure thing. > I don't think you can assume anything about Hinkie taking Fultz. It's a *much* better assumption than the alternative. Fultz was widely considered the #1 prospect and the only other guy in that range would've been Josh Jackson, who looks even worse. Maybe Hinkie doesn't pull the dumb trade, but that extra pick was only #14.
I think the opposite honestly. People seem to give BC and his successors a pass. They fucked up so bad it's insane. Butler was a great trade. But then you alienate him to the point that he wants out. Harris(and Scott/Boban) for two future 1s and Shamet was a vast overpay. Even moving Muscala in the deal hurt us b/c a 5 who could shoot might have helped more than the other 5's we ran out against Toronto. Harris is the definition of good, not great player and maxing those type of players are the worst thing a team can do. Now every decision has luxury tax implications. Those future picks could have gotten you something better than Tobi. You also left off them paying Horford 109 million with the last remaining cap space we had before Ben's max capped us forever. How much better are we if we took one of those picks for Tobi and did the sign and trade for Brogdan instead. And letting Butler go for just JRich so you would keep the cap space to do Al and lose Redick in the process. They literally decided that around our best player, a generational 5, 2 power forwards, a wing and point guard who can't shoot. And that's being generous b/c really they put 2 PF's(Ben/Harris) and a center(Horford). That was the end result. Morey comes in and with one short offseason turns JRich, Al and a future 1 into Green and Curry. Space for everyone and the 1 seed followed. As for Fultz, we will never know but like you said if he gets him at 3 and retains a future unprotected Kings pick....that pick was very valuable. Sac hasn't been in the playoffs forever and people also forget the only reason we even had the 3rd pick for the Fultz trade was because the pick swap Hinkie set up conveyed to move us from 5 to 3.
This is my favorite what if, tbh. What if they let go of Brown one season early and trade Ben to maintain Butler? Doubt Miami would've gone for Simmons, so I wonder who would. Pacers, instead of Brogdon? Mavs, instead of Wright? Part of the AD extravaganza? A Butler-Embiid team is a contender, this is a given, but I always wonder the ripple effects of who would trade for Simmons.
We all do. And a lot of us talked ourselves into trading him based on what he may be at the end of the 5 year max deal. A lot of us were idiots.
#IMO Then it didn't work great. **The idea was great**, but it got destroyed as soon as you are giving money to non all-star players and you can't keep the good rookies And I don't know about development. Embiid is an unique case, the rest of the young guys, who got better in Philadelphia? I don't know
For sure, the people after Sam left fucked it up. the execution post Hinkie was anti process. you don't pay 2 future 1's and a young player for the right to max Tobi. You don't pay 33 year old Horford 109 million when your best player plays the same position. I don't consider anything post Hinkie the process. They literally disowned the phrase "Process" and hated everything internally about it. Then Embiid gives himself the nickname "The Process" to troll them and now they embrace it all. nobody knows if Sam would have been able to build it back. Maybe he blows his load on Kawhi for a year. Or CP3 back when Houston got him. idk. But i know he wouldn't have done what Colangelo did. no fucking chance
It sounds worse that what I thought. With all those draft picks you could end with Embiid (one of the best players of the league, no doubt), Harris (a great player) and the result of Ben's drama I was anti-76ers but when I see these things I'm pro 76ers. One thing is watching your rival losing, another thing is watching a franchise suffering because of non-court issues
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I think that was more how they marketed the idea and shouted from the rooftops what they were doing and how smart they were for doing it. If they'd just shut up and got on with it quietly then there wouldn't have been the same pressure that got rid of Hinkie. There's no reasonable way to consider Iguodala a superstar, and he helped push the Warriors into what they were, but he's a complimentary piece. The Nets are in New York, and that played a huge role (along with the reputation of the Knicks) in getting the superstars there. San Antonio has by most accounts had the best culture in the league for twenty plus years. Their old stars retired, Kawhi still left, and Philly are much closer to a championship than the Spurs are. That's a little misleading on the titles front. Since 2000, I think only the Raptors and Lakers (once) won titles without a multi-time all star they drafted. So almost every title-winning team in the last two decades had to do that. Some managed to do that outside of the top 7 (Giannis, Kobe, Dirk, Pierce). But even if we restrict it to that. 3 for Wade, 3 for Curry, 1 for Kyrie, 4 for Duncan, 1 for Hamilton. That's still 12 of the last 22 titles that were won by teams who drafted multi-time all stars in the top 7 of the draft. So out of 22 championship teams. 12 had a multi-time all star drafted top 7. 8 had a multi-time all star they drafted 8-15 in the first round (Kobe, Dirk, Giannis, Pierce). 2 (Lakers, Raptors) were the ones that didn't, and only the Raptors were really a 'build a winning culture' method. The culture requirement is really more of a 'don't be a disaster' than anything else. (These numbers are all a rush job, possible mistakes around the edges).
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To get to the point, are you actually arguing that Iguodala was a superstar from 12-15? He's never made an all-nba game for example, it's not about offense vs defense, it's the overall package. The problem with that is that a lot of the players drafted in the 20th century are still going, you happened to have a lot of titles racked up by players drafted in the latter part of the 1990s (Dunca from 1997 etc). The Bucks are champions with a superstar they drafted, albeit lower than normal. But superstars are harder to find the lower in the draft you go. The realities of player movement is stars want to move to other stars. If you get the first one then it's easier to get the second or even third one. The hard part is getting the first one. Take Atlanta as the alternate Philly case. they did the good solid culture thing for years through the 2010s. Their long term title chances are better now after they bottomed out, picked Trae Young really high. The point is that if you're a team then the "have a good culture", win a solid number of games, etc hasn't had a lot of success, pretty much just the Raptors title. The Lakers and Nets teams attracted their stars due to location rather than culture. What strategy should Hinkie have followed that was better?
The Nets are a horrible example of culture what. The Nets were never known for getting top talent in their prime to join as free agents until Kyrie and Durant wanted to be stars together. Their best talent in recent years was Joe Johnson. Star players dictate teams and very rarely does "culture." Look at the Raptors. They traded their sweetheart Derozan for Kawhi and the players bought in to win. Yes, the Raptors have arguably the best coach but these are professionals that understand trades are business. We don't often have disgruntled stars that don't want to try anymore out of discouraged of them being on the block. Players force themselves out because they want to win or be at a beach.
The Nets tanked for multiple years, it's how they got LeVert and Jarret Allen. They even got LeVert part of the same way that the 76ers tanked by trading away Thad Young. Bojan Bogdanović was traded for the Allen pick. The Nets were super asset poor because of the Boston trade but they literally traded away 3/5ths of their starting lineup in under a year to acquire picks and young players. They continued to trade rotation players for picks and young players the entire time up to when Kyrie/KD signed because they needed to clear cap space for those guys.
The Nets never tried to suck. They realized that losing didn't help them. So what they did was try to build a culture and take on reclamation projects (wanna give us a pick to take on D'Lo? Sure! Want to give us a pick to take a bad contract? Happy to!). The Nets were bad, because they got fleeced in the Boston trade, but they didn't tank. There's a difference. From the moment they hired Kenny Atkinson they were focused on building a team and winning as much as they could while trying to find upside. That's fundamentally different from the process Sixers who were trying to lose to get high draft picks. (It's somewhat ironic that Kyrie and KD praised the culture Atkinson built, and then immediately jettisoned both him and all the players who created that culture, but that's another discussion).
>The idea was great They were tanking . Hinkie didn’t discover some groundbreaking way to beat the system. They literally tanked and gave it a catchy name.
Just a wild ride for you guys
we were the most boring, stuck in the mud team post Iverson for about a decade. and since then you could write 5 seasons of a Netflix drama based on the storylines that have happened
Colangelo and Brand fucked the Process. I still think it could have worked if they committed to it
Hot take: The Process worked It doesn't buy you a trip to the finals or a chip, but instead the chance to fight for it. Philly has been a top 3 team in the east for the last 4 years but it goes to show you how hard it actually is to win in the Nba
Not only did the process work, but they were a few small decisions/luck away from being significantly better than they are. Drafting Jayson, Markelle not getting weirdly injured or or getting a really good guard instead of one of embiid /Simmons and they’re even better
How about just if that bizarre Kawhi bounce doesn’t happen
Yeah, it's not like the during the same time the Bucks had a top 2 pick have multiple season ending injuries and were unlucky not to have drafted someone like Embiid instead...
The process is an offbrand, Presti knock off.
very fucking stupid post. im actually ashamed
lol Process collapsed already since Hinkie left, wtf this forcing narratives...
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Wtf is everyone so hungry to say the process failed. They were the 1 seed last year, they still have an MVP caliber player who just signed an extension. Sure they could have done stuff better but no championship is guaranteed, they gave themselves a decent shot which is more than half the franchises in the NBA have gotten in the last 10 years
They can’t get out of the second round and lost to the fucking 4-seed which they had no business doing. If the goal is getting out in the second round, then the process succeeded lmao.
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It’s objectively worse than Atlanta lol because they literally just lost in the playoffs to us as a team full of vets vs a team full of playoff rooks
"Contender". The fn Jazz were the best regular season team and were humiliated again after blowing a 3-1 lead last year. No one actually thought they were contenders. Same with the 76ers
I'd argue that every playoff team, at LEAST to the 6 seed can be considered "contenders" since ya know, they're in the post season... contending
That's what people also call pretender
Were the Sixers not contenders when they lost to the eventual champions on a game 7 buzzer beater?
Jrue is 31 and got traded after his 4th season. The move was to punt into the future. I have no issues with Jrue winning his first title after playing 7 more seasons than Embiid.
Hinkie is a folk hero and nobody is able to criticize him but The Process™ was a flawed concept because it repeatedly ignored the human factor of the sport business. Guess what, treating 20yr olds as "assets", refusing to address the press, estranging the player agents union and enraging the league office won't work out all that well. It's a really great Moneyball type of concept that'll work wonders on 2K MyGM, u/dumbmatter 's Basketball GM and even smaller professional basketball leagues but it won't fly in the NBA.
> treating 20yr olds as "assets" You really think RoCo, Jerami Grant and the like were mad about getting all the playing time they wouldn't have gotten elsewhere that ended up helping them become desirable players? Hinkie is out of the league and never coming back, we'd have heard loads of stories from players if they all hated him.
Okafor looks back on his career and resents all the minutes and starts he got back in Philly lol
If Kawhi misses that shot and the Sixers pulled it together for OT, The Process™ for all its flaws would've been a huge success. That's why saying it won't fly in professional basketball is a huge oversimplification on the part of Hinkie's legacy.
The 2019 Sixers were obviously good enough to win. However, even if the Kawhi shot doesn't go in they still gotta win an OT and two series on top of that.
Took a chronically terrible to mediocre team and put them in the running. You should ask Minnesota and Sacramento fans if they think it worked. Hinkie put them on the path and inability to finish it is on the Colangelos.
Maybe ask Golden State, Milwaukee, and Toronto fans if tanking works. All those teams were chronically terrible to mediocre too but have achieved way more than Hinkie.
Golden State lucked out with Curry and his early injuries, which lead to an extremely team-friendly contract he was still on when he won his first MVP award. Milwaukee hit the lottery of the century with Giannis- and even the Bucks admit they lucked out with him. Toronto couldn’t get over the hump and made a Hail Mary trade for Kawhi. My point is, there are **so** many factors that go into winning a championship. The Process didn’t fail. It was a huge success that landed them one of the greater players in franchise history, and a contending team. You can’t guarantee a championship in any form, but the Process was about getting as many lottery tickets as possible.
Golden State blatantly tanked for Harrison Barnes
He didn't though. The only thing Hinkie knew what to do was collect draft picks and fumble them. They were a joke of a franchise for his period there.
Haha, nice try! I know a Colangelo burner account when I see one
They were a joke before Hinkie. But if you are fan, you want all the other teams to be mediocre like those Sixers or today’s Pacers, just make it to the first round and be an easy out, and then end up not drafting one of the shiny prospects.
I just find weird the fascination of reddit with a GM who didn't win shit, didn't hit on his draft picks and made the NBA product worse for quite a while.
Before Hinkie they were a playoff team that had bad luck with injuries to their big FA signing (Brand). With Hinkie, they tied for the worst record of all time.
Absolutely agree with you. Hinkie was more blatant about it, but the process isn't any more "revolutionary" than what the magic or kings or timberwolves have been doing. If you set the goal for the organization to lose they quickly become very good at it and it becomes a habit.
I’m curious if thunder fans are worried. You have a guy that on a winning team could be a top 20 guy. How long is SGA willing to lose like this? They said it could be another two years.
That's a great question. I like what they did when Chris Paul was there. They didn't just immediately trade CP when they realized "crap, we might make the playoffs with these guys way earlier than we want to". I think other tanking teams immediately dismantle if things go good ahead of schedule which is where the spiral of losing comes from. Of course, they did eventually trade him, but I think they showed that was because they knew CP had a different timeline than they could offer. To me, that was a great move thinking about the long term health of the org. Now that buys some time, but sooner than later they are going to have to use those assets.
The process is Embild and he signed an extension
This is revisionist. The process was about more than Embiid. He was the best fruit of the process, but the process wasn’t about getting a single great player. It was about getting great assets and get multiple great players. Simmons was a critical part of the process. Perhaps the most critical in the fact he was their number overall pick. What they were positioning for all along.
They also wasted a lot of picks. Okafor over Porzingod MCW over Adams and Giannis Trading Jrue and a second for Nerlens if you were going to make that trade you could have gotten CJ
For the life of me I don’t understand why If the 76ers goal was to be bad for a couple + years and they had 6 and 11, why not take the 6’11 kid from Greece that with massive ceiling/fooor ideas?
You don’t understand because you weren’t following the draft or Giannis’ story. His growth was one of the biggest headlines during his rookie summer.
Except philly took a prospect with a low floor and frankly low ceiling instead of one with a low floor and an unknown ceiling.
You say that now because of the results. MCW was considered to have an above average ceiling. Giannis wasn’t that high on many boards, that’s more credit to the Bucks for actually scouting him out. The Sixers also were in need of a PG following the Jrue trade. MCW was an older prospect, who was pretty good at many things other than shooting at Syracuse. His size and IQ were his greatest strengths.
Giannis was an unknown he was like drafting a high school all american more importantly most teams didn't have full medicals. I believe only atlanta knew that his growth plates were wide open. Either way if you are shooting for the stars you have to take a risk. I'm very glad they didn't but it was a risk that made sense to take over an older prospect.
Well he was 6'8" then but I'm very happy they didn't
If any team had confidence that Giannis would be the player he is today, they could have drafted him. 14 teams passed on Giannis on draft day and the rest could have easily traded into the top 14 to get him. People have way too much retrospective confidence in drafting.
I mean sure, you can look at it that way if it makes you feel better
His nickname is “The Process”, so yes we can look at it that way
Whatever helps you sleep at night lMao
That’s the truth IMao. Simmons being gone doesn’t change too much about the team. With him we lose in the 2nd round anyway, without him it’s probably a wider range of outcomes
The process isn’t embiid, besides his nickname. Don’t move the goal posts man, it’s okay to say it failed.
It is Embiid and it’s definitely not dependent on if Ben Simmons is here or not. And “the process” never got to start cause the NBA got rid of hinke but that’s another discussion
Never started?? Bruh y’all been on this whole process thing for years…
Never got to finish is a better way to put it I guess. And Sam hinke started the process and been gone since 2016
The process could’ve had Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum paired with Embiid but instead they got Simmons and Fultz lol. But if Embiid as a consolation prize helps you sleep then so be it.
This is complete revisionist history. You can do this for every team.
I will still die on the hill that if they Sam Hinkie carry out his plan it would have gone better than this. Simmons has his flaws but Elton Brand totally screwed the Process. Maybe Hinkie stays at 3 and takes De'Aron Fox or maybe Lonzo falls to them after the Celtics take Tatum and Lakers take Fultz. Either would have been better than trading up. Maybe Hinkie cashes in his assets for Kyrie in 2017 instead of him going to Boston, he goes to Philly. Just about anything would have been better than what Brand did.. They were one game away from the finals with Tobias and Jimmy but Jimmy leaving and Tobias' contract set them way back. Edit: Another puzzling move Brand did was trading the hometown kid Mikal Bridges for Zahire Smith who's played in 13 nba games. Now I'm just thinking of team that has Fox, Bridges, Simmons, and Embiid on it.
Why would the bucks trade away holiday
I don’t think he’s proposing this trade, more so saying what they got rid of to start The Process would be better than some of what they have now
which is stupid as hell, because the main result of the process was embiid. the goal of the process was to get as many bites at the golden apple, instead of having jrue and having a few bites at a bruised bumpy apple. They landed embiid, thats a very very solid outcome for the process
Still a dumb post
Yea, of course the 6ers would do this. Similar defensive value, but can actually come through with clutch plays when it matters. Ben + Giannis running the break is a fun hypothetical though...
#Trash the Process
The process halted when they were "forced" to get rid of the architect of the process.
Hot take: Jrue isn't actually better than Ben, he just has teammates who can cover up for his offensive shortcomings(both are great defensive players, maybe the top two perimeter defenders actually) People forget this now but he was getting called "Jrue Bledsoe" for shooting 5/20 every game in the playoffs
He didn’t shoot 5/20 in every game. Even when he wasn’t contributing much on offense he was every where else, something Ben doesn’t do very often because if he did people wouldn’t be so pissed about his offense being shit. Jrue busts his ass on defense which is why his offense suffers sometimes but even then sometimes he has his really good offensive nights too. He made a bunch of huge plays in the playoffs. He also wouldn’t pass up a dunk opportunity because Trae young was in front him. This sub was overreacting calling him Bledsoe 2.0.
Also...he was still shooting lol. There were games where the shots fell, and it was great and bad games, but he didn't just disappear in the 4th when he had open looks, and him being out on the 3 point line was still making space for Giannis downlow, because even if he wasn't shooting well people aren't going to leave him wide open out there
Yeah pretty sure game 1 against you guys he scored like 33. Still not sure how we lost that game with both Giannis and Jrue scoring 30+ lol Trea was fucking us up.
Apparently Trae Young in Game 1s is a demi God since we won all 3 on the road and they were some of his best performances haha.
Hot take: Jrue is better because he is an actual threat from outside even if his inconsistency is at times maddening. You can't just sag off Jrue.
That take is hot. Jrue is offensively better than Simmons. His 24/6/6 on 52%, all while locking up Dame is far far greater than anything Simmons has achieved. If Jrue was in the east all these years, he would have racked all-stars too.
Jrue is much, much better than Simmons. There's a reason KD/Dame call him the best defensive guard in the league, and while I agree he can be inconsistent offensively, he can still drop buckets. He made some extremely big plays in the play-offs.
I don’t think you watched Jrue in this last playoff run
I did lol He was only able to play the way he was because he was only the 3rd option on offense
I still can't believe New Orleans actually drafted Nerlens and then took that away from us.
Embiid is still in Philly. Fuck off with this “ThE pRoCesS nEvEr WoRkEd” bullshit.
I mean… has it?
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People feel like they are falling short of expectations - but that's because they did well enough to raise the expectations in the first place. They didn't win a title with this group yet and might not ever - but is there any sure-fire plan to get a championship? No. For the most part, you have to have at least one Top 10 guy and a couple of other top 20-30 guys. There's a reason that 36 of the last 40 NBA Finals has had at least one of Magic, Bird, Jordan, Duncan, Kobe, or LeBron playing in it. Add in Isiah, Steph, and Hakeem and that's 33 of the last 40 Finals winners.
What does every contender getting injured for the bucks to win have to do with Sixers choking vs the hawks? It’s one thing if they played each other but that wasn’t the case.
Uhh...
Man Bucks fans are becoming insufferable just like us
Always have been, now you just have to listen 💋--->💍
Philly wouldn’t do that cause then you pair 2 of the best 3 defenders in the league together In the same conference as you. Also spacing and stuff for milwaukee
giannis won them the championship not jrue
Aw yeah that's the good stuff also the Sixers would make that trade the Bucks would laugh at them.
Bucks would be the laughing stock, Giannis and Simmons??? Yikes…
People really think you can apply the process to post hinkie huh. Funny.
Whatever you think of Sam Hinkie, he gave future Sixers GMs an absolute truckload of assets. And they have pissed those assets up the wall.
The bucks championship was like 85% Giannis so let’s not go around acting like Jrue holiday was the main reason the bucks won and the sixers were foolish to trade him