h*h
发帖数: 27852 | 1 Is the Philadelphia 76ers’ lose-on-purpose approach to team-building
ingenious or morally bankrupt?
By Jack Hamilton
Photo by USA Today Sports/Reuters
Nov. 14, 2014; Philadelphia 76ers forward Nerlens Noel (4) reacts after a
play during the second quarter against the Houston Rockets at Toyota Center.
Photo by USA Today Sports/Reuters
Sometime during the last 18 months, the Philadelphia 76ers ceased being a
basketball team and became an avant-garde, vaguely basketball-ish idea. It
might have happened in June 2013, when the Sixers traded All-Star point
guard Jrue Holiday for a draft pick they used on promising but injured
center Nerlens Noel, whom they then shelved for the entire 2013-14 season.
It might have happened in February 2014, when they shipped out Evan Turner
and Spencer Hawes at the trade deadline for a motley assemblage of
journeymen, second-round draft picks, and one former All-Star (Danny Granger
), who was immediately jettisoned, lest his basket-making skills infect his
new teammates with the ability to win NBA games. Or maybe it happened this
June, when the Sixers used the third pick of the 2014 draft on Joel Embiid,
another injured center who may or may not play this year, thus ensuring that
a team that had lost an NBA-record-tying 26 consecutive games in 2013-14
somehow found a way to not improve.
Whatever else you want to say about them, you can’t accuse the 2014-15
Philadelphia 76ers of failing to meet expectations. They are on pace to be
the worst team in NBA history according to a variety of statistical
indicators, the harshest being their win-loss record: Philly currently sits
at 0-10, having lost those 10 games by an average of 16.9 points. In Monday
’s loss to the Spurs, the Sixers came out with a starting five of Tony
Wroten, Hollis Thompson, Luc Mbah a Moute, Brandon Davies, and Henry Sims.
It is not an exaggeration to say that none of them would start for any other
NBA team. (Except maybe the Lakers. Probably the Lakers.) The Sixers’ best
player is Michael Carter-Williams, a big and talented point guard who was
last season’s Rookie of the Year, which means that everyone assumes the
Sixers are trying to trade him. Their highest-paid player is Jason
Richardson, an aging guard who hasn’t appeared in an NBA game in nearly two
years. (Richardson is one of only two players on the roster who is older
than 25.) The Sixers employ a small forward who wears number 99 and a point
guard who wears number 88, perhaps in homage to seldom-used Eagles wide
receiver Jeff Maehl, although probably not.
If you do not follow the NBA, you might be surprised to learn that the man
who assembled this team has not been fired. The Max Bialystock of this
production is general manager Sam Hinkie, a 36-year-old stats maven who’s
either a genius or someone with a genius for being called a genius. Hinkie
holds an MBA from Stanford, and prior to joining the Sixers in 2013 spent
nearly a decade apprenticing under Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey, arguably
the NBA’s most prominent evangelist of statistical analysis.
Are the Hinkie haters so wrong to suggest that a basketball team should be
built so as to win basketball games?
Hinkie is about as far from an insider as one can find in the clubby
confines of professional hoops: He played no organized basketball past high
school, and before arriving in the NBA he worked for Bain Capital, in
Australia. By all accounts, he is exceptionally smart, and he’s nothing if
not forward-thinking. In a profession where job security is as precarious as
a Dwight Howard free throw, Hinkie—with the support of ownership in
Philadelphia—has taken a long-game approach to roster construction that’s
visionary, immoral, or both.
There’s a widely held belief that the worst thing an NBA team can be is
mediocre. If you’re not great, then you might as well be terrible, as a
horrible win-loss record is the ticket to the top of the draft lottery,
where you just might find the sport’s next superstar. Well-managed teams
realize this, and poorly run ones don’t (ladies and gentlemen, your 21st-
century New York Knicks!), which means that sometimes very good teams will
become very bad teams, as a stepping stone to vice versa. The best recent
practitioners of this badness-to-goodness approach are the Oklahoma City
Thunder, whose mid-2000s run of futility (partly as the Seattle Supersonics)
landed them Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, Serge Ibaka, and the departed
James Harden, and a renewed identity as a perennial contender.
But no organization has ever bottomed out quite as extravagantly as these
Sixers, a team that drafts players who literally cannot play and trades
players who can in order to draft more players who can’t. What the Sixers
lack in flesh-and-blood basketball talent they make up for in that most
alluring buzzword of the contemporary NBA: assets. The one inconvenience of
that strategy is that the 2014-2015 Philadelphia 76ers exist, albeit barely,
as an ongoing professional basketball concern. While the enlightened fan
can be heartened by assets—future draft picks, promising youngsters on team
-friendly contracts—he can’t root for them. In the meantime, the actual
humans who wear Sixers uniforms recently lost 123-70 to the Mavericks, which
wasn’t that bad a result considering they trailed 73-29 at halftime.
If you buy what Hinkie is selling, then that score is totally meaningless.
The team’s collection of future picks is vertigo-inducing. If the Sixers
draft wisely, if Carter-Williams continues to develop (either as a point
guard or a trade chip), if cap space can lure quality free-agent veterans,
if Noel and Embiid rise to anywhere near their speculative potential, then
the Sixers could have a dominant team for years to come in the not-so-
intimidating Eastern Conference, and maybe quicker than anyone thinks. But
that’s an awful lot of ifs, and in the meantime good luck selling luxury
boxes or even nosebleed seats to watch an unprotected 2017 first-round pick.
What’s most fascinating about the Sixers is that they’ve literalized pro
sports’ championship-or-bust mindset. This team is, essentially, an
experiment in how much abuse fans are willing to tolerate in exchange for
promises of a dynasty down the road. Philadelphians, as you’d expect, are
not flocking to see this gruesome science project—the Sixers are third from
the bottom in the NBA in attendance. It’s asking an awful lot of fans to
put money into a team that isn’t trying to win, particularly when it seems
content to stretch this period of intentional loserdom into something like a
minor era. After all, there are words for people who abuse the patience of
others, and rest assured that Sixers fans are familiar with all of them.
Philadelphia natives take their sports rather seriously, he wrote as he
ducked out of the way of a battery. As to be expected, camps have formed.
The pro-Hinkie side has taken the form of a half-ironic personality cult:
jokily messianic memes abound, #INHINKIEWETRUST is a running hashtag, and
the popular blog Liberty Ballers hosted a draft day party replete with
Hinkie T-shirts. Tongue-in-cheek as much of this is, there is optimism and
even excitement among a certain cadre of Sixers fans, a group that relishes
being part of what is, at the very least, a bold attempt to refashion a not-
so-successful franchise.
On the other end of the spectrum are old-media stalwarts like Philly
sportscaster Howard Eskin, who’s been known to rail against the “Hinkie
apologists” (including his own son). There’s also ex-Sixers coach and
wandering curmudgeon Larry Brown, who recently kvetched to the Philadelphia
Inquirer that the Sixers “don’t have a basketball person in the
organization. It makes me sick to my stomach.” (Brown led the Sixers to
their last Finals appearance in 2001 by strapping the team to the back of
Allen Iverson, an electrifying guard whose shot-happy inefficiency made him,
incidentally, the precise sort of player the analytics crowd is stereotyped
as loathing.)
It’s easy to caricature all of this as Moneyball on the hardwood, brainy
progress squaring off against brawny conservatism. But are the Hinkie haters
so wrong to suggest that a basketball team should be built so as to win
basketball games? There’s a fine line between outside-the-box creativity
and running a franchise like you’re part of some obscurantist, too-clever-
by-half fantasy league. While it’s a bit dopey to say that sports exist for
the fans, the Sixers’ disavowal of anything like basketball aesthetics
nevertheless feels like an affront.
And what if it turns out that Hinkie isn’t actually the smartest guy in the
room? By taking asset acquisition to its logical extreme, the Sixers may
well have convinced the NBA that its current method of parceling out talent
is in fact illogical. A few weeks ago, a proposal to reform the draft
lottery to disincentivize tanking fell just six votes shy of passing. If
significant changes are pushed through while the Sixers’ experiment is in
progress, what now appears to be a madcap experiment could swiftly transform
into a doomed basketball hellscape.
Top Comment
I can't express how much I hope they end up as the 6-76ers. More...
-waiting4oct
117 CommentsJoin In
The record for futility in an 82-game season already belongs to Philadelphia
, set by a ’72-’73 Sixers squad that went a brisk 9-73 (you’ll hear those
numbers a lot this season). That Sixers team was awarded the top pick
straightaway, and claimed as its prize future All-Star/coach/television
analyst/coke-rap enthusiast Doug Collins. By 1977 they were back in the NBA
Finals, after purchasing the rights to ex-ABA superstar Julius Erving.
It’s impossible to say what these Sixers will look like four years from now
. This year, at some point, the Sixers will win a game. It might happen on
Wednesday night, when they play the rebuilding Boston Celtics, or on
Saturday, when they visit the unquenchable tire fire that is the Knicks. But
it won’t be pretty, and a lone victory (or even 10) won’t stop anyone
from wondering if the Philadelphia 76ers are even dumber than they look, or
if—in the words of Homer Simpson—Sam Hinkie is stupid like a fox.
Jack Hamilton is Slate’s pop critic. He is assistant professor of American
studies and media studies at the University of Virginia. Follow him on
Twitter. |
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