Life is complicated — if you read Sam Hinkie’s 13-page letter of resignation from the Philadelphia 76ers, this truth will be reaffirmed on many levels.
In reading that letter, observers will arrive at different conclusions.
Try these three:
https://twitter.com/AndyGlockner/status/717898913647190016
https://twitter.com/netw3rk/status/717923993043476480
Just read all 13 pages of Hinkie's letter. It's fraught with inconsistencies, excuses, and baseless conjecture.
— Brian Geltzeiler (@BGeltzNBA) April 7, 2016
Reasonable people can and will disagree about Hinkie’s methods, their effectiveness, and how coherent a plan Hinkie actually formulated on the job with the Philadelphia 76ers. We’re not here to say whether Hinkie was right or wrong, partly because we evaluated the process in an end-of-season piece earlier this week.
What’s more at issue in the wake of Hinkie’s resignation as general manager — forced not necessarily by owner Josh Harris, but certainly by circumstances Harris created — is a basic dynamic found in all too many sports organizations, in the NBA and beyond.
It happened earlier this year, in January with the Brooklyn Nets, and now it’s happened again with the 76ers: An organization plainly hired people to engage in a long-term rebuild, only to then fire them or push them out before the project ever had a reasonable chance of running its course.
Yes, Josh Harris didn’t “fire” Sam Hinkie, but by giving Jerry Colangelo — always a deft power broker in any room he occupies — an appreciable amount of authority within the 76er organization, Harris might as well have handed Hinkie a pink slip. One could even say that Adam Silver and league owners bear some responsibility for all this, but in the end, Harris could have stood his ground and exhibited the requisite degree of patience needed to see this plan through.
He did not.
Once again, team employees — it was Lionel Hollins in Brooklyn as head coach of a rebuilding team — were put in position to oversee a long-term effort. Once again, the owner didn’t have the stomach to give that employee a reasonable chance of succeeding.
You don’t have to agree with Sam Hinkie’s choices or the philosophy which informed them in order to think he was wronged here. This is the complexity of life. The Sixers were about to enter a draft with multiple first-round picks and a chance to develop their roster to an appreciable extent. Even the most vociferous Hinkie critics will acknowledge that with better ping-pong-ball luck, the Sixers could have been in a much better place today. Before the 2016 draft, Hinkie had multiple chances to put his imprint on the Sixers, for better or worse.
Harris should have welcomed such a scenario, because this is exactly what he hired Hinkie to do. Harris wanted an elite team, and in terms of a conceptual architecture, Hinkie provided the path. Hinkie’s specific draft-night decisions and aspects of his managerial style were his deficiencies, but the concepts Hinkie prized did indeed represent the right way to build a team from a nobody into a championship contender.
Sure, maybe Hinkie’s 2016 draft decisions weren’t going to hit the mark. The draft is and always will be an inexact science. Yet, Harris owed it to Sixer fans and the organization at large to give Hinkie this draft without competing factions in the picture. Jerry Colangelo wasn’t merely a special adviser; people like him never are. Bryan Colangelo is set to become the new general manager in Philadelphia, the completion of a very different kind of process his father wanted all along.
Josh Harris allowed this to happen, even though Hinkie spent the past few years doing exactly what Harris wanted him to do.
If you are familiar with the acclaimed television series Mad Men, you will instantly recognize who Josh Harris is in this clip:
The creatives gave the client exactly what the client wanted.
The client rejected the ad.
Josh Harris is the Patio cola executive, the person who makes his desires explicitly known and then bails when presented with actions that meet those desires to the letter.
You can disagree with Sam Hinkie’s decisions and still think he deserved to make a few more calls this June and July.
What are we left with in Philadelphia? More than anything, we’re left with the sense that the past three years have been a waste of everyone’s time and effort.
Once again, a professional sports organization in the United States has prematurely ended a process before it could fully run its course.
No one wins in that scenario, but for men such as Josh Harris, that thought doesn’t attain the primacy it ought to possess.
