Well I will say people seem to have declared the tank a failure.
Is it?
The team was awful and had no picks no talent. Nothing.
We still don't know if embiid will be healthy ever, and if so he could be a super super star. Simmons could land with them this year.
I mean if they have embiid (healthy) and saric and Simmons and Noel and okafor and the lakers pick and the heat and thunder pick and Covington. And btw the pick swap and unprotected first with the Kings. And the most salary cap space in the league.
Why is this a failure? Is there a team with more youth and assets around? You can trade okafor or Noel (or both) or the lakers pick (or if it transfers this year the player).
Now you need to pick who to keep and who to trade and make some good moves (and I do agree that the stockpiling of assets regardless of potential for team fit may have been an error)
But this is a really scary looking team. Esp when you can add two max free agents to it as well.
Yet he failed? Seems early no? He hasn't won jack shit yet but it's not like the sixers didn't get anything out of the last three years...
It is too early to call this a failure, absolutely. It is also true that the Sixers have more valuable pieces than they did when he took over. But I want to reiterate that there is so much more to being a good NBA GM than simply "winning" trades on paper. You need to show leadership, hire the right coaching staff, build a roster with the right mix of players with complementary skillsets, recruit well in free agency, among other things. I wouldn't necessarily call him a plus in any of these categories. I would say that for any of these other points, the jury is still out, or he has shown some deficiency.
In terms of leadership, I would give him an F. The way he trots out Brett Brown every night to face a firing squad from the media, while he hides in his office and never answers for himself is embarrassing. The first 2-3 years of Danny Ainge's tenure with the Celtics looked like a miserable failure, yet he was front and center in the media all the time, answering for himself. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the way Ainge handled himself in the beginning (and I was certainly no Ainge fan in those years).
He has put together a team without a real point guard to feed his star big men the ball, and his top 3 draft choices all play the same position, and will be hard pressed to play together. Obviously the Sixers are far from a finished product, but it is pretty impossible to put "building a complementary roster" in his favor so far.
Too early to judge Brown and his coaching staff.
Also too early to judge on Hinkie's free agency recruitment, as he has never really gone after any notable free agents. I do believe what Jeff Van Gundy says about free agents just going after the money, but I also tend to think that if the money the Sixers offer is equal to some other teams, that the Sixers will probably be shut out. If the money is equal, what player will want to go to a team with the infrastructure the Sixers have? And what agent will go out of his way to want to help a GM he doesn't like? Thus they will have to pay a certain premium.
You seem to say that the idea that they "could" get Simmons this year(which the odds are not in favor of, by the way) is really a plus in the evaluation of Hinkie. I don't believe that in any way. If he gets Simmons in the draft, it will be because of luck and nothing else. All it would mean was that Hinkie had a bad NBA team, and then got lucky in a lottery. Any person on earth could manage to do that. The Lakers have a chance at Simmons, too. If they got him, I would still think their front office has done a pretty bad job. Also, when you say that the Sixers didn't have their own draft picks before Hinkie arrived, it strikes me as kind of a half truth which you are just using to help prove your point. The Sixers potentially did owe Miami and Orlando their first rounders, but have been bad the last several years, so they actually only gave up a couple second rounders. In the end, they barely lost anything.