End of the Process
By Max Borowitz
During Sam Hinkie’s relatively brief tenure as the lead decision maker for the Philadelphia 76ers, there was probably no front office executive in the NBA (or any other sport for the matter) who generated an equivalent amount of scorn and controversy. The logic of Hinkie’s team-building strategy has been repeatedly criticized and misinterpreted by a huge cohort of NBA writers and pundits. His philosophy was not, as many claimed, to get as bad as possible in order accumulate high draft picks. Had that been Hinkie’s strategy, the 76ers would have pursued notoriously terrible players like Andrea Bargnani and played them 30 minutes a game. Instead, Hinkie stripped the roster of competent NBA players unlikely to improve, but still possessing some value. In the process he built an utterly uncompetitive team that played incredibly hard, but lacked any good offensive creators. By being terrible while attempting to develop young players, Philadelphia accumulated a number of high draft picks and promising young players.
This strategy yielded some trades that appear to be unambiguous successes. Hinkie flipped Jrue Holiday for draft picks that became Nerlens Noel and Dario Saric, both of whom hope to be parts of the next great 76ers team. Hinkie also flipped rookie of the year Michael Carter-Williams for a future Lakers draft pick. This pick has not yet conveyed, but it is very likely to yield a prospect who is much more likely to be a star than Carter-Williams. Most impressively, Hinkie took on salary from the Sacramento Kings for Nik Stauskas and future unprotected picks and pick swaps. Given this remarkably history of winning trades, one might expect Hinkie to have been one of the most lauded and praised front office leaders in the NBA. Instead, Hinkie became the target of an almost concentrated series of attacks from the media, agents, and other NBA personnel. As the volume of these attacks became more and more deafening and the 76ers continued to produce a putrid on-court product, the pressure on Hinkie became too much and he resigned.
Hinkie’s resignation letter is one of the more peculiar manifestos of one person’s professional vision, made all the more absurdly melodramatic by the fact that it is the magnum opus of someone who ran a sports team. On one hand, I cannot help but sympathize with Hinkie’s central defense of his tenure as head decision maker of the 76ers. He legitimately developed an innovative and new approach to running a basketball team that very few people in the media understood. The common claim that Hinkie was essentially running a scam on the fans of the 76ers was obviously not true. Hinkie had a real plan for success, and was serious about implementing a long-term oriented plan. Yet for all of Hinkie’s purple prose about long-term team development, his letter omits many of the actual legitimate problems with his management of the 76ers. Sam Hinkie probably did not deserve to be pushed out of his job with the 76ers. Yet at the same time, for all of his self-serious quoting of public figures from Abraham Lincoln to Elon Musk, Hinkie fails to grasp that many parts of his “process” were deeply flawed.
It is fairly easy for Hinkie and his supporters to cavalierly dismiss the claims of those who criticize him. This is mostly because an unfortunately percentage of Hinkie opponents actually do not understand what he is doing at all. An article from 2015 criticizing “the process” for trading Carter-Williams in his second season began with this worryingly obtuse sentence:
“The little boy with a Michael Carter-Williams jersey will never understand why his favorite player is not a Sixer anymore. How are we supposed to explain to a child what ‘optionality’ is?”
It’s really unfortunate that nonsensical “hot takes” like this formed the significant majority of critical arguments against Hinkie’s regime. Perhaps the author of this type of criticism is unaware that the ability to explain to a child what “optionality” is does not actually have any relationship to building a winning basketball team. Hinkie’s logic that the 76ers had essentially no long-term core when he arrived, and therefore had to be reconstructed from the ground up was correct. His willingness to unsentimentally dump players who were holding back the development of younger players, even at the expense of short-term basketball quality was admirable. His willingness to commit to a remarkably long-term thought process is even more remarkable. It’s a shame that he won’t get the chance to see through his strategy of accumulating 2nd round picks, future lottery picks, and young prospects for the future.
At the same time, there are serious criticisms of Hinkie’s approach that have been muffled over the screams of his most absurd critics. At the core of “the process” are some huge problems. One of the core pieces of Hinkie’s logic is that players should essentially be treated like the assets of a private equity firm. On paper, this is exactly the correct way to view players. Under this logic, a player like Michael Carter-Williams is no more a person than a future draft pick. In fact, whether they admit it or not, I would imagine that most franchises essentially treat their players like this. The critical flaw in how Philadelphia executed this asset-driven strategy is that when payers and agents understand that they are merely assets to Philadelphia, it will become increasingly hard to conduct business with the rest of the league. Hinkie’s failure to meet the salary floor, combined with a clear disregard for players who are already in house created a culture in which unnamed agents began to undermine Hinkie to the media. It’s not that Hinkie was wrong, it’s that he made no effort to be subtle in his approach. Everyone knew that he treated players as assets to be moved and nothing more, and as soon as players understand that they are not valued as individuals, it will always be hard to build a culture of loyalty and continuity.
Hinkie also proudly describes in his letter how his team would rarely attempt to explain the details of his process, apparently to avoid creating emulators. In the business world, this strategy makes sense. If Hinkie were running a private equity firm, it would be an obvious loss of competitive advantage for him to allow journalists or competitors to understand anything about his decision making. Indeed, the publicity generated by success and innovation would serve only those behind the innovation curve. Yet in a business like basketball that is run in public, media service actually matters. Hinkie’s basic refusal to explain his most controversial moves guaranteed that the majority voice, particularly in the notoriously hostile Philadelphia sports media market, would be unambiguously hostile.
Yet perhaps most damagingly, it has become increasingly unclear that Sam Hinkie actually knows how to build a roster. If one looks back at the history of his draft picks, they have been only ambiguously successful. His selection of Nerlens Noel was a good pick; Noel is an excellent athlete and promising defending who can really move both on defense and in transition. He’s the sort of player that anyone hoping to build a fast-paced roster would need to anchor a defense. Yet for all of his good qualities, Noel is only a quality role player. He will never be close to a first or even second option on offense. Joel Embiid has yet to play an NBA game, but Hinkie’s willingness to select him is still defensible. Embiid was probably the best player in his draft class, but injury concerns have sidelined him indefinitely. Even though Embiid and Noel are not ideal fits (neither can really shoot at all), it is at least conceivable that they could play together. At minimum, they were both talented enough to warrant a selection.
Where Hinkie really deserves blame is his selection of Jahlil Okafor over Kristaps Porzingis. This is not simply a hindsight opinion, as I was stunned at the time when Hinkie took Okafor over Porzingis. Okafor is the type of player being driven to extinction by the type of forward thinking and analytically driven decision making that Hinkie often associates with. Yet Okafor is a deeply problematic player who is almost impossible to build around. Okafor does not really shoot, run, or defend, and anyone who watched last year’s playoffs would see clearly that being able to shoot, run, and defend are the basics of modern winning basketball. Okafor, even in the best case scenario, would probably never be able to coexist with Noel or Embiid, considering their respective abilities. Meanwhile, with Porzingis’s much more modern skill-set, Hinkie could have set up the 76ers with a franchise player who could impact the game on both ends. Hinkie didn’t just get pushed out of Philadelphia because people did not understand “the process.” He left because while he did an excellent job finding future picks and young role players, he did not appear to bring Philadelphia anywhere close to finding a superstar.
Sam Hinkie has undoubtedly brought Philadelphia closer to competing to a championship. But he did this at the tremendous cost of building one of the worst teams in basketball in history. For that cost, one would have expected active fan outreach or an especially promising core of young players. Yet clearly, neither existed. Hinkie expected that he would be able to execute a cold and calculating strategy in an industry predicated on interpersonal and inter-organizational relationships. The fact that the knives came out for him when the team failed to improve on the court should not be surprising. He did not deserve to be fired, but nobody should be surprised that he was. For someone to have the job security to tank three seasons, it should be assumed that the team would show more signs of obvious improvement. Philadelphia never did, so for many with the 76ers, Hinkie had to go.
