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| Sam Hinkie checking the job postings on craigslist |
FIRST off, a correction. In the past, during my many writings about the plight of the Philadelphia 76ers, I have made mention of the fact that Sam Hinkie, Philadelphia’s GM and President of Basketball Operations, came to the Sixers from the San Antonio Spurs. In fact, he came over to Philadelphia from the Houston Rockets. The Lose regrets the error, and curses our crack staff of editors and fact checkers here at In Play Lose World HQ for being so lax.
And now we need another correction, because the previous statement is incorrect. Sam Hinkie is now the former GM and President of Basketball Operations for the Philadelphia 76ers. The Lose regrets that error as well. (Well, not really.) And now that we’ve done our duty and attempted to maintain our journalistic integrity, it’s time to trash his ass.
Sam Hinkie resigned on Wednesday, and now The Lose is wondering just what in the hell I’m going to write about now. Now that baseball season is upon us, there will be no shortage of lose, of course, particularly in the National League, where there are about six teams which look like they’re going to be absolutely dreadful, none more so than the San Diego Padres, who hosted the L.A. Dodgers for three games as Pet Food Park to open the season, lost all three, and got outscored 25-0 in the process. With this atrocious and truly hopeless opening salvo to the season, Padres GM A.J. Preller, who undertook the worst MLB offseason spending spree ever last year, has immediately leapt to the top spot in The Lose’s unofficial list I keep in my head called, “Guys Who You Wonder How They Have a Job in Pro Sports.” It’s an unofficial list with no set number of members. A good number of the list’s occupants have found themselves being laid off in the past year or so – Ruben Amaro, Jack Zduriencik, Billy King – and it’s not looking so good for some others – I’m looking at you, Byron Scott – but Preller has rapidly ascended the list, having charged to the top with such brazen managerial incompetence that it has most likely left the Padres doomed to suck for the next 5 years, if not longer. (And this is already the franchise with the worst overall winning percentage in MLB, so the bar for success here is set pretty low.) I know it’s early in the baseball season, but the Padres look hopeless and Preller has already shot into the #1 spot.
In part because the previous occupant of the #1 spot, Sam Hinkie, just resigned on Wednesday.
And to be clear here, I wish no ill will on any of these people. Folks losing their jobs suck. This is not some act of schadenfreude on my part. I have no ill will towards any of the terrible Pro Sports execs who I mentioned above. As I said before, what the hell am I going to write about now? Incompetence is good for The Lose business. It’s essential. Hinkie participated in a podcast with ESPN’s Zac Lowe this past Tuesday, which is worth a listen. He’s somewhat evasive and not particularly forthright in the interview, but given that he was obviously under some pressure (witness the fact that he resigned the very next day), you can certainly understand why. He seemed very bright and engaging and interesting, and I wish him nothing but the best from hereon out.
But having said all of that, you have to look at his body of work and wonder just how in the hell the ownership group in Philadelphia were dumb enough to a) hire this guy; and b) stick with him through three seasons so bad that Roget hasn’t found a synonym for ‘bad’ to describe just how bad it was. During Hinkie’s tenure, the 76ers’ record was 47-195. That’s a .194 winning percentage. The 76ers won on Tuesday night 107:93 over the corpse of the New Orleans Pelicans, a team whose five top scorers are injured and out for the season, thus raising their record to 10-68 and avoiding matching their club and NBA record for futility – the 1972-1973 76ers team that finished 9-73. After seeing their team lose 22 of its previous 23 games, the Sixers fans at Enormous Banking Conglomerate Center in Philadelphia were so giddy about this win that they chanted, “M-V-P! M-V-P!” in the direction of the game’s top scorer, serviceable journeyman forward and all-around good sport Carl Landry. (More on him in a moment.) When you start the season 1-30, and then go 1-22 later in the season, making it to the 10 win plateau counts as something of an accomplishment, I suppose.
It had gotten so bad in Philadelphia that earlier this year the organization hired former Suns and USA Basketball mastermind Jerry Colangelo as a ‘consultant.’ It has been suggested repeatedly that this was done at the behest of the league offices, because the NBA was embarrassed about the sorry state of the franchise – and, more to the point, the other 29 owners were outraged about the state of the 76ers, because what should be a marquee and lucrative franchise wasn’t generating the sorts of revenues it should be producing given that it had become such a laughingstock. And even though no one involved in the league could come right out and say it, what was going on in Philadelphia was clearly a case of an organization that was systematically tanking, trying to be as bad as possible in the hopes of gaming the system and improving its odds of winning the NBA draft lottery, hoping to somehow land a bona fide superstar. As I’ve said before, I hate the draft lottery and wish the league(s) would do away with it entirely, because it fundamentally provides a perverse incentive not to be successful – and when teams who have only a 1% of winning the lottery strike it rich, like the Chicago Bulls and the Cleveland Cavaliers have done, it only further legitimizes the strategy, because the 1% chance of winning the lottery that you get when you barely miss the playoffs is still better than the 0% chance you have if you’re the 8th seed and you’re playing the Dubs or the Cavs. For a league that has spent much of the past 30 years being hounded by accusations that games aren’t on the up-and-up – how did Mark Cuban put it? Oh, right, “Fuck you! Fuck you! Your game is rigged!” – the idea that one of your franchises is engaging in deliberately and systematically trying to fail doesn’t sit well in the corporate offices.
But it was pretty clear when Colangelo came on board that he wasn’t just a ‘consultant.’ In the 76ers pecking order, he was suddenly slotted above Hinkie, and reports indicate that Hinkie was going to be pushed even further down the totem pole in favor of Bryan Colangelo, the former GM of the Suns and the Raptors who happens to be Jerry’s son. He’s been named NBA Executive of the Year on two occasions, Bryan has, but his body of work as a whole as an NBA exec has been somewhat mixed. Quite bluntly, he wouldn’t be getting this job in Philly if his last name wasn’t Colangelo. Hinkie’s response to this impeding demotion was to pen a 13-page letter of resignation which is baffling and absolutely bizarre. (And for all disciples of In Play Lose, this is now officially required reading.) It reads like the opening of someone’s dissertation, rife with quotations and philosophical bents but lacking anything of substance.
And the substance is what’s at issue here. The substance is that the 76ers have won .194 of their games and so embarrassed the league that it’s looking into trying to rejig the lottery so as to somehow dissuade this kind of nonsense from ever happening again. They’ve attempted to game the system and its rules, running payrolls well below the salary floor and propping them up with zombie cap figures from contracts of players long since waived, running through endless numbers of players on endless numbers of 10-day contracts, and making trades for the express purpose of trying to make the team, as a whole, even worse than it was before. It’s at the end of that ludicrous letter that Hinkie tries to use his clearly superior mathematical skills to prove his point:
“In the upcoming May draft lottery, we have what will likely be the best ever odds to get the #1 overall pick (nearly 30%), a roughly 50/50 chance at a top-2 pick (the highest ever), and a roughly 50/50 chance at two top-5 picks, which would be the best lottery night haul ever. That same bounce of a ping pong ball (almost a flip of a coin) will determine if we have three first round picks this year (unusual) or four (unprecedented). That's this year.”
To Hinkie, all of the wheeling and dealing and horse trading has been, in essence, a math problem. That the 76ers could possibly wind up with four first round draft picks – their own plus three others (read here to try and make sense of it) – sounds really great, except for the fact that a large reason why the 76ers are 10-68 and still going through all of this mess is that, under Hinkie, they’ve drafted terribly. At some point you have to actually show that you’re capable of judging NBA talent.
We mentioned Carl Landry before, and he’s part of a “great” trade the 76ers made in the off-season. Knowing that the nitwit Sacramento Kings were desperate to free up cap space to try and sign some mediocre free agents, the 76ers agreed to take on Landry, Jason Thompson, and Nik Stauskas from the Kings. In exchange, the Kings agreed to give the 76ers rights to swap places in the draft with the Kings in 2017 and 2018. Everyone agrees in NBA circles that, for the Kings, this was a stupid trade. An absolutely stupid trade. You don’t give up swap rights to your picks when there is no guarantee you’re going to be any good. But the Kings, of course, have no idea what they’re doing and are run by a bunch of delusional weirdos, a good number of whom actually believed they’d contend for a playoff spot this year when all indications are that they’re likely to be dreadful for the foreseeable future. This wasn’t a good thing to give up, and so the early line on this was that the Sixers won the deal.
But you’re only going to “win” the deal if, in 2017 and 2018, your team is actually better than the Kings and you have something to swap! In the abstract, this deal may be a “win,” but it does absolutely nothing to help your team actually go about winning that deal by winning more games! Landry is basically there in Philly to be salary cap filler, Stauskas was already a bust in Sacto and the 76ers were simply taking a flyer on him, and Thompson was promptly traded to the Warriors for Gerald Green, another player the 76ers didn’t want but also one who basically can’t play any more, so they waived him and paid him $10,000,000 to go away and counted that 10 mil on their salary cap. This trade doesn’t count as a win, because nothing Sam Hinkie did here actually contributes to any improved performance on the floor.
And that’s where none of this works. All the back room procedural shit means nothing if it doesn’t result in wins. Wins! And simply promising it’s all going to get better some day doesn’t really cut it when what you have to show for 100 or so roster transactions is three good players on your team, and all you have to show from three drafts is the drafting of three centers, a point guard who can’t shoot, and a Slovenian guy with three years left on his contract in Turkey. There were some decent players in that 2014 draft. And sure, franchises whiff in the draft and miss on guys, but to come away with absolutely no useful players when you have two first round picks and you’re coming off a season in which you lost 26 games in a row is unforgivable.
This team was so young and so bereft of leadership this year that they finally had to relent and trade for Ish Smith to play the point – an unspectacular player but a safe pair of hands – and give up two of those precious draft assets to do so when they could have just signed him in the offseason in the first place. They wasted the third pick in the 2014 draft on Joel Embiid, who has missed two seasons with foot problems, and even if he comes back healthy next year, you now have all three of those centers still on your roster and nowhere on the floor to put them all, which means you’re going to have to move one of them and probably take a loss on the deal, because everyone knows you need to move one of them. Throw another four 20-year-olds out there – four 20-year-olds from what is shaping up to be not a great draft, by the way – and now the team is even younger and more raw and more inexperienced than before, and not likely to be any better, and it’s not a sure thing that they’ll ever get better, seeing as how there’s been no indication in three years that this team has any aptitude for developing players at all. But at least now, you can say that having all of these draft assets might bear some fruit, since it won’t be Hinkie doing the drafting.
But hey, we have cap space! Oh boy! Having cap space means little with the salary cap soaring in upcoming years. Everyone will have cap space then, free agents will be more able to choose than ever before, and as the Kings found out after making that dumb trade, having money to spend means nothing if your franchise is a toxic waste dump. No player worth his salt is going anywhere near Philly for years. The Colangelo family is going to have to do a lot of smoothing things over with the agents out there, a lot of whom Hinkie has pissed off, and the fact that he’s been systematically setting players up to fail for three years doesn’t make the organization look so good with the NBA rank-and-file. (Here’s a great story of how Kristaps Porzingis did basically everything possible to avoid being drafted by 76ers. He may be onto something there.)
Sam Hinkie clearly knows how to do the math, but he also clearly doesn’t have any eye or feel for NBA talent. Another thing he clearly knew how to do was spin a tall tale, since he somehow convinced the new ownership group in Philadelphia that he had some method and formula which would ultimately lead to great success. They’ve labeled this ‘the process’ in Philly, and if you read any Sixers fan message boards, it’s alarming to see just how many fans bought into this rubbish and drank the Sam Hinkie magical kool-aid, when it seemed pretty obvious from the get-go that it was a bad idea and was doomed to fail miserably. But P.T. Barnum was right. There really are suckers born every day. The 76ers have less resembled a functioning NBA team in the past three years and more resembled a combination of used car dealership and theatre of the absurd. If you actually bought into ‘the process,’ I hope that it also came with a year’s supply of snake oil. At least you only had to suffer through that for a year.
