The Process is dead and was a massive disaster

[Johnny Bball]

The Process ended when Sam Hinkie was kicked out by the league for doing the quiet part out loud.

Yep, but...

The fact that Hinkie couldn't take the hint, that the league tried to deliver enough times about their too obvious tanking, there is nobody but Hinkie to blame. The guy dug his own grave and its time to stop pretending he was the victim. Besides, all Hinkie really did was draft pretty poorly and dismantle the team. The is zero proof he could build a title team, but everyone always thinks the **** mystery box is a boat.

And good riddance to their process. Sixers hired (and were) poor managers, built incomplete teams and drove players out of town and its their own fault.

[Wolveswin]

If James didn’t bail out Cleveland, Cavs say hello too…

2011: #1 Kyrie Irving and 4th Tristan Thompson
2012: 4th Waiters and 17th Tyler Zeller
2013: #1 Bennett
2014: #1 Wiggins

Without James, we probably don’t know Tristan’s name, Wiggins struggles would be in Cleveland, and Bennett out of the league on Cavs watch.

[Capn'O]

The Process ended when Sam Hinkie was kicked out by the league for doing the quiet part out loud.

Yep, but...

The fact that Hinkie couldn't take the hint, that the league tried to deliver enough times about their too obvious tanking, there is nobody but Hinkie to blame. The guy dug his own grave and its time to stop pretending he was the victim. Besides, all Hinkie really did was draft pretty poorly and dismantle the team. The is zero proof he could build a title team, but everyone always thinks the **** mystery box is a boat.

And good riddance to their process. Sixers hired and were poor managers, built incomplete teams and drove players out of town and its their own fault.

Everyone either thinks the mystery box is a boat or two terrible tickets. The fact is, it's still a mystery box. Or, in South Park terms, he collected a lot of underpants but never got to Step 2.

Hinkie did get one MVP level player and a bunch of other decent players (see round 2 picks) but never got to the point of evening out the roster. Nor did he actually get to pick on those two #1s they ended up with. We just don't know what he would have done. You can only evaluate to April 2016 - arguably before that if you take into account earlier transition moves in their front office. Maybe he would have fancied Tatum. Or maybe Josh Jackson. Who knows?

I'd call it as he put the Sixers in pretty good position but pissed off a bunch of people in the process, so to speak. That's really all we know.

[SomeBunghole]

It's crazy to read some of the takes on Hinkie here. Like he was some visionary genius whose removal by the NBA prevented the Sixers from being a dynasty. It's not that hard to lose games. Blowing up a team and trading away competent players for cents on the dollar is the easy part.

People say he only had 3 years. Yeah, he only had three years and drafted poorly. His biggest success is a guy who has played in just over half of the games he could've played so far and couldn't win more than one playoff series any given year. I would say we're talking about this era's Bill Walton except that Bill Walton actually dragged a middling team to the title by the time he was 25 and his body broke down.

Finally, much as people wanna believe in conspiracy theories and blackballing, Hinkie has not come close to another NBA job since. Doesn't anyone find that just a little bit strange? That no one wants to hire this rebuilding maven? Funny how no one speaks of Troy Weaver in the same glowing terms for doing nearly the exact same thing.

[Wolveswin]

And finally, my Wolves say hello…

2008: 5th Kevin Love (drafted #3 Mayo then trade)
2009: 5th Rubio and 6th Flynn (7th was Curry)
2010: 4th Wesley Johnson
2011: 2nd Derrick Williams

And for good measure…

2013: 14th Shabazz picked right before Giannis at 15th
2014: 40th GR3 picked right before Jokic at 41st

[jazzfan1971]

I wish my Jazz ever had a chance to screw up a #1 pick. Let alone 3.

[Billl]

Phili wasn't the first team to tank for draft picks, they were just the most blatant. But losing games is the easy part. It's actually pretty common to draft pretty mediocre players in the top 5. Any draft with 5 sure fire allstars is going to be viewed as the draft of the century. All the other years are going to have top 5 picks that wash out entirely or just aren't very good.

[tribulations]

Trading for Fultz and trading away Bridges (head scratcher even in the moment) in back to back seasons was where this broke imo

[levon]

It's crazy to read some of the takes on Hinkie here. Like he was some visionary genius whose removal by the NBA prevented the Sixers from being a dynasty. It's not that hard to lose games. Blowing up a team and trading away competent players for cents on the dollar is the easy part.

People say he only had 3 years. Yeah, he only had three years and drafted poorly. His biggest success is a guy who has played in just over half of the games he could've played so far and couldn't win more than one playoff series any given year. I would say we're talking about this era's Bill Walton except that Bill Walton actually dragged a middling team to the title by the time he was 25 and his body broke down.

Finally, much as people wanna believe in conspiracy theories and blackballing, Hinkie has not come close to another NBA job since. Doesn't anyone find that just a little bit strange? That no one wants to hire this rebuilding maven? Funny how no one speaks of Troy Weaver in the same glowing terms for doing nearly the exact same thing.

Also, the Process wouldn't really work today. Yes it's more important to have cost-controlled homegrown talent, but the league is skewing towards parity at all costs. They'd flatten the **** out of the odds if someone defiantly tanked the way Hinkie did. The Spurs really tried their best (Sochan at point guard? lol) and still didn't get #1.

[HotelVitale]

The strategy behind the Process was not necessarily a bad one: Tank for several seasons, aided in part through injury redshirting top picks to get those top picks repeatedly. The execution of it was disastrous. Four top 3 picks and only one worked out, and he's injury prone and shrinks in the playoffs. Poor trading and signing decisions. Questionable coaching appointments. It's been a failure of the execution of The Process, not the idea of it.

Some might argue that by tanking several years in a row, the team built a losing culture, and that's why The Process failed. That could be part of it, but I'd argue it's a smaller part than the other factors. Imagine if instead of Embiid, Okafor, Simmons and Fultz, the Sixers drafted Embiid, Porzingis/Booker, Brown, and Tatum? For the sake of argument, let's say Tatum was only available for the Sixers because the Celtics knew they didn't want him. They still could have stayed at #3 and picked Fox or Mitchell. I mean, damn!

I totally agree on luck, if the Sixers landed the 4th pick in the Okafor draft they probably end up with Porzingis, if they stayed at #5 the Fultz year (and didn't have the Kings picks to trade) they might end up with Fox, #2 in Simmons draft and they absolutely get Ingram, etc. A little bit of bad luck at the right time would've boosted them quite a bit, in addition to the more well-known mistakes of taking Fultz etc.

I'd also add that the Process wasn't just 'suck and get top picks' but also to use every tool at your disposal as a tanking team to acquire more assets. In addition to the top-5 picks the Sixers got from their own tanking they got:
-an unprotected top pick + a swap that they used to move up to #3, all for renting cap space to the Kings
-an unprotected top pick from a bad LAL team for MCW--few teams would've had cajones to do that right after MCW won ROY
-another extra top-ten pick (became Saric eventually)
-Jerami Grant, TJ McConnell, Robert Covington, Richaun Holmes etc all on extremely cheap 4-year deals
-I think they had 5 other extra first rounders in those years too--two became Korkmaz and TLC, two were traded for T Harris, one became Maxey (indirectly), plus all their own picks as the team got better
All of this was part of the war chest that should've brought in a great haul or some other great young prospects, and all of it was definitely part of the Process strategy. They also had max-ish cap space a couple years after they already had the Embiid-Simmons core in place (plus all this other stuff), though it's too painful to go into what they did with it.

[HotelVitale]

The process itself was not a massive disaster.

When Hinkie was sacked, they had the following assets: the #1 pick (Simmons)
Joel Embiid
Jerami Grant
Robert Covington
TJ McConnell
Lakers first
Sac pick swap (eventually became #1 in 2017)
War chest of their future firsts

Colangelo bungled it so hard. Taking Fultz was one thing, but they then inexplicably passed on Mikal Brdiges for Zhaire Smith who nearly died, then they panicked and sold their assets for Jimmy and Tobias Harris, came as close as it gets to beating Toronto in 2019, and then picked Tobias and Horford over Butler…

Just an inexplicable bungling of assets.

When Hinkie resigned, what the front office did from that point on is a 10th percentile outcome for the picks and assets they had.

I'm always here for the Colangelo disrespect but the Zhaire over Bridges call was just awful, maybe the worst pick I've ever seen in that you got a guy whose mom works for the franchise, he's pleading to go there, AND he's a perfect basketball fit for the team. So of course they flip him for a shorter, green guy. I hated that pick.

Agreed on that, but as one of our resident anti-hindsight guys two points to add:
1) the trade was #10 for #16 plus an unprotected future 1st from MIA (who was super mid at that time); not bad value in the abstract, it's just what they did with those picks that sucked so bad
2) I watched as much Mikal Bridges as anyone pre draft, and he absolutely became the best version of himself and no one could've reasonably predicted that. He was a good shooter in college but most good college shooters don't become totally elite shooters in the NBA, and he was trash as a dribbler-driver in college and somehow developed a really nice game with that. He was also a nice 3D defensive prospect but no one thought he was surefire all-time great 3D-level guy, that plus the shooting just translated as well as anyone could've hoped for.

I didn't like the trade at the time and that was one of the moments were a lot of Sixers fan were like 'oh Brown's maybe not super sharp huh' but Bridges should get credit for being the best version of himself, rather than the Sixers getting slammed for not seeing that he was obviously going to be the best 3D guy ever who could also be a credible 2nd-3rd cerator on a very good team. If he just became a decent version of himself--solid 3D guy and good but limited 5th-6th man--that woudl've been nice for the Sixers but not a home run or anything. What really stings there is that Zhaire was literally my least favorite of all the top-20 prospects in my write up that year, just didn't see it with him. (I also wanted Lonny Walker or Aaron Holiday at 16 though so what do I know.)

[Roger Murdock]

The problem with the process is it they actually branded losing as the team culture and never got a single leader or winner in the building until Butler, and by that point it was so far gone that Butler clashed with team culture and left.

Hinkie - GOAT loser
Simmons - loser who never cared
Embiid - loser who cares but has no leadership skills and gets visibile frustrated and melts down the second theres adversity
Okafor - loser who wasnt good
Fultz - loser who gave up once he got hurt
Tobias - checked out cashing checks
Morey - whiner and cry baby
Doc - blames everyone else
Colangelo - loser who attacked his team anonymously

The goal of sports is to win and they made their entire identity losing and never made an effort to fix it.

[Shock Defeat]

And the NBA was right to banish him. The NBA is a copycat league, if the NBA didn't banish him there would be 4-5 teams every year trying Hinkie style teardowns.



100% correct. The NBA was right to kill "The process." The purpose of the process was to redistribute talent to the sixers by forfeiting games via signing bad players. No sports league wants that. The majority of NBA revenue comes from the RS. And extreme tanks make it very hard to sell RS games to fans. And if you had 4-5 teams adopt that strategy it would be a nightmare. There would routinely be nights with no competitive games going in.

Feel like Hinkie would have gotten away with it if he was just less explicit with what he was doing. There have been multi-season stretches of a team being absolutely awful that haven't drawn nearly as much ire as the Process did

You’re allowed to be garbage as long as it’s incompetence and not part of the “plan” apparently.

Sixers total wins over the process: 47

Pistons total wins over the past 3 years: 54

Haven’t really heard anything about the league stepping in to force DET to change their front office.

Hinkie set a couple of league-wide standards for tanking teams: if you’re going to do it, acquire excess picks for multiple bites at the apple and don’t be overt about it.

While the results of the process Sixers and the current Pistons are the same, the way they went about it was vastly different. Pistons tried to compete they just are incompetent at it, there is nothing you can really do about that. Sixers on the other hand intentionally played some of the worst lineups they can field. Guys were resting for random reasons, and I'm not even talking about older players. I am pretty sure they sat out some of their best players, whom were in their 20s, for random reasons just to play guys that should not have been in the league at all.

Furthermore, I would argue that those 47 wins that the Sixers got over the "process", majority of them didnt' come because the Sixers were good, it was because other teams didn't even try. Put the 2024 Pistons against the 2016 Sixers, the 2016 Sixers would get blown out. There was a huge gulf in quality between the teams, and it was blatant that the Sixers tried to field the worst product on the floor, on purpose.

[Slimjimzv]

Hinkie was never going to make it as a GM. He openly treated the players like objects instead of humans. He's logistically brilliant, but socially inept.

[JShuttlesworth]

I thought they had a really good team in 2019, they were on the right track

But then they started to make a lot of bad decisions, starting with letting Jimmy Butler go

[John Murdoch]

Lol no dude.. this is like pulling meyers after 1 yr at gsw and saying it failed..hinkie didnt even get to 60% of the full plan before silver banned him . If anything Morey is the one who has shown his process hasnt worked

[ConSarnit]

Feel like Hinkie would have gotten away with it if he was just less explicit with what he was doing. There have been multi-season stretches of a team being absolutely awful that haven't drawn nearly as much ire as the Process did

You’re allowed to be garbage as long as it’s incompetence and not part of the “plan” apparently.

Sixers total wins over the process: 47

Pistons total wins over the past 3 years: 54

Haven’t really heard anything about the league stepping in to force DET to change their front office.

Hinkie set a couple of league-wide standards for tanking teams: if you’re going to do it, acquire excess picks for multiple bites at the apple and don’t be overt about it.

While the results of the process Sixers and the current Pistons are the same, the way they went about it was vastly different. Pistons tried to compete they just are incompetent at it, there is nothing you can really do about that. Sixers on the other hand intentionally played some of the worst lineups they can field. Guys were resting for random reasons, and I'm not even talking about older players. I am pretty sure they sat out some of their best players, whom were in their 20s, for random reasons just to play guys that should not have been in the league at all.

Furthermore, I would argue that those 47 wins that the Sixers got over the "process", majority of them didnt' come because the Sixers were good, it was because other teams didn't even try. Put the 2024 Pistons against the 2016 Sixers, the 2016 Sixers would get blown out. There was a huge gulf in quality between the teams, and it was blatant that the Sixers tried to field the worst product on the floor, on purpose.

Trying to lose VS being incompetent shouldn't matter if the NBA cares about quality.

Net Rating:

Pistons: -9.0

Sixers: -10.2

Losses by 15+ points

Pistons: 25

Sixers: 20

If the issue was competition, why did the league/owners force the Sixers to fire Hinkie yet they are now fine with the Pistons? If they are so concerned with selling tickets against embarrassing opponents I'd argue the Pistons are just as embarrassing as the Sixers and are even more likely to get blown out.

I'm not even trying to defend the Sixers. But if the argument is based around competitiveness shouldn't the league push back even harder on incompetent teams than a team like the process Sixers? We know the process Sixers weren't trying so there is some belief that they could become competent. Isn't it worse for the league to have incompetent teams who can't win for trying than it is to have teams that at least planned for losing? f you're going to get rid of the planning losers than you should also want to get rid of the "trying to win" losers. Both are detrimental to the league.

[OriAr]

Philly weren't the first team to tank for the rebuild, neither were they the last to do it, tanking jobs have been in place since at least Kareem came out of UCLA in 1969 and have been going on since.
However, Hinkie was the first one to:
1. Be blatant about it - He was the first one to openly say "we are tanking" and have no shame about it whatsoever, in fact he was very smug about it.
2. Pull of a tank job of unprecedented scale - There is no sugarcoating it, the Process Sixers were the most talent devoid teams in the history of the NBA by design, Hinkie traded away any player that had anything resembling talent so he could just accumulate assets instead while the on court product was simply pure garbage that makes the Pistons look good. Rebuilding teams usually take on vets on bad contracts to help with team culture, even if they win some games, Hinkie's teams had difficulty meeting the salary floor, that's how big the tank jobs were.
3. Pull off a tank job this long - What ultimately got Adam Silver to intervene and Hinkie to be ousted, was the fact that the Process had gone for several years and there were still NO signs of improvement whatsoever. Rebuilding teams usually start to get somewhat better by year 3 of the rebuild. Not the Sixers though, they started year 3 of the Process 0-18 and 1-30, finishing the season 10-72, Adding to the bleak outlook of Philly's future and strengthening Silver's belief that radical measures are necessary to salvage the situation because evidently Hinkie seemingly had no problem tanking that blatantly for that long. If the Sixers opened that season 10-21 instead, I fully believe Hinkie wouldn't have gotten ousted, but the Sixers seemingly had no intent of getting better so Adam Silver had no choice but intervene.

Overall, the Process failing feels almost like a fitting punishment from the basketball gods for the indefensible product Philly put out for 3 seasons, with Hinkie feeling no issues whatsoever regarding the poor quality of the teams he was putting together, and it's a good thing the NBA took steps that no team would ever try a tank job that blatant, that long again.
Even if Philly wins it all next season, it'll be a different team, with barely any similarity even with the 2019 team that had a good chunk of the process' draft picks on it. Embiid will likely be the only player gathered during the Process on the team next year, the rest will be players Morey got there, whose job has been to fix the mess The Process had become by then.

[shi-woo]

People seem to forget that Joel hasn't played a game under Hinkie, and essentially missed his first 3 years, and looked to be Greg Oden.

The optics were a lot worse than people are making it seem, in 2016, the 6ers had won a total of 47 games in 3 years, had no clear path, and Robert Covington, a summer league guy, was their most prized on court asset to show for it.

Joel missed the entirety of the next year essentially too only playing in 30 games, and Simmons missed the entire season as well.

You can't have a team keep punting seasons till they draft LeBron.

The Butler traded saved them, and that wasn't a Hinkie trade guys...

[Sign5]

Very ironic how their best draft pick (outside Embiid) came years after the process and ended up being a mid first round pick in Maxey