Sometimes being a revolutionary means the person doing the innovative maneuvers has to face much criticism. Traditionalists questioning a new stratagem. Conventional thinkers cast doubt on any other theory yet to be proven as a law normally practiced. You get the drill: Being first is often not worth the push-back.
Tradition, despite often redefining itself and usually proven less effective over periods of time, provides its adherents with a safeguard. It is incredibly hard to lay blame on someone doing something everyone else has done before them, right?
Case in point: How many view the way professional sports organizations are “supposed” to build their teams.
Enter: Sam Hinkie and the Philadelphia 76ers.
It is well documented by now, so let’s not bore you with the semantics: Many, including other NBA general managers, dislike Hinkie’s grand design because it is vastly different from how others have gone about trying to build their own sports edifices.
Hinkie, with the presumed full backing of Philly ownership, has gone about his business in a cold manner, transparent in action and plan but not in information. He’s moved forward without any hesitation to construct his next transaction. This hasn’t sat so well with many, although to be fair, it isn’t merely because he has been tanking unescorted by guilt or hiding it through a fictitious free agency signing. Hinkie has set himself up for criticism largely because his plan’s destination doesn’t have an expiration date. Hell, it doesn’t actually have a bottled by date, either.
Therein may be the true issue folks take umbrage with. No one can complain about the Sixers or Hinkie because their plan has been to be as atrocious as possible in order to build through the luck of ping pong balls, scouting through analytics, and hoping a combination of that — as well as high-volume drafting in the second round and signing undrafted free agents — will result in them landing the NBA’s next transcendent superstar. The plan to be horrible has worked — so it is kind of hard to argue with a guy succeeding at wanting to be horrible.
Take issue with Hinkie wanting to be horrible, if you want. That’s fair, too. There’s no easy way to explain to Philly fans or NBA fans in general that a team is consistently attempting to trot out a D-League All-Star team. It is a tough pill to swallow. It is even harder to swallow given the fact that there’s no proof — at all — that Sam Hinkie and his master plan will ever come into fruition and give the theory a positive practical application.
That is where the divide in “Hinkieland” is: Either you hate his plan for whatever reasons you have, or you are invested in it because of its innovative approach to building. For full disclosure, I lean towards aligning myself with the latter group, as I believe in the idea of his plan, but also acknowledge that the execution of it (mostly through landing the right players in consecutive NBA drafts) will ultimately determine how we view the Hinkie era in the City of Brotherly Love.
A new “Sam Hinkie is horrible, Philly is doing it backwards” traditionalist procession of debate has begun because of the Sixers’ latest first-round draft pick, Jahlil Okafor. The issue is that the 76ers already have Nerlens Noel and Joel Embiid, who both play the same position already, and Okafor now makes the third such big drafted in a row. That’s three “centers,” all playing for one team, and none of them can be on the same court with the other at the same time.
That isn’t a lie. That’s factual. There are zero ways to spin that into a positive from a tangible on-court standpoint. It would be like Burger King debuting with the Whopper, then adding the “Other Whopper” to the menu, and finally topping that off by adding the “Alternative Whopper for Cool Kids” — except, you know, Burger King can’t trade their yum-yum assets with Wendy’s or Arby’s or whatever fast-food chain floats your boat… the Sixers, however, can.
Hinkie is a man who clearly cares more about assets than perception. With Karl Anthony-Towns and D’Angelo Russell no longer available on the board, the Hink-master went best player available, like he always has, despite already having similar commodities at his disposal. Then again, he knows he isn’t the CEO of Burger King. He’s not going to try to trade hamburger recipes with the other CEOs down the block; he has three of something which is in high demand — talented centers.
That’s not even mentioning the idea that Embiid might never be healthy long enough to be an impactful player, or that Okafor might be so good, a player who one day might become transcendent enough, that passing on him would have been a bigger mistake than log jamming Hinkie’s center depth chart.
Had any team passed on (caution: extreme example follows) Michael Jordan simply because it had two other solid (but not tremendous) shooting guards on its roster, what would the history books have written about those franchise’s front-office leaders?
I get it, though. Revisionist history only works after the proof is so deep in the pudding that even Bill Cosby a person without any of the five senses could sniff and see it.
The second-guessing of Sam Hinkie will continue to happen until the Sixers start showing signs of being at least semi-relevant again, notwithstanding the fact that is kind of the point to begin with. Hinkie has not attempted to build the organization into a mediocre monster or a “one-round-and-out” franchise; he’s been trying to swing for home runs with every pitch thrown in his direction.
Here is the thing: Hinkie might go down on three pitches, all outside of the strike zone, but he’ll at least go down swinging. Say what you will about his plan and his tactics, but it represents a far better approach to building franchises than following the more conventional route.
Has a plan similar to Hinkie’s ever worked? Well, certainly not one which has been as blunt in being implemented, and has been granted the chance to be horrible in order to become good. Yes, many teams do get very good by way of stringing very good drafts together after several years of being wretched, but to be fair, none have gone to this type of extreme to do such a thing. The counterpoint is that teams have masked their tanking by signing “name” players to pretend they care to win as soon as possible.
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One thing the traditionalist critics of Hinkie must concede is that, as traditional and accepted as it has become, many teams have also failed by doing things the conventional way. Year after year we see it. Team X tries to build through a few ho-hum free agent signings, hoping to get over the hump, in an effort to be the first team eliminated in the NBA playoffs. That’s not much of an achievement, to say the least.
This is what people have to ask themselves while discussing Sam Hinkie, even if we all agree there’s no way to project if the plan will actually work or not: What would you prefer your favorite NBA team to do — shoot for the top with visions of an NBA title with every draft pick, even if it means having to wallow through basketball hell for years, or aim for making the NBA playoffs every three out of seven years, but never truly being relevant on a larger scale?
Answer that honestly. If you choose to be the type of fan who prefers the former’s methods, then you should also be a fan of Sam Hinkie. If you like the latter, well, it must be really hard being a person having goals in their lives set no higher than the top of a phone book.
