The process is dead, long live the process.

LondonSox

Robert the Deuce
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Jul 15, 2005
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New thread for discussion of Hinkie and or the process.
If mods want to move in other posts that's cool otherwise we can just continue here

I also would like to be very clear that the reason I adore Hinkie is he thinks how I think in terms of how to make decisions. All I want in a GM is someone who had thought about and considered his reason for his decisions and revists them to learn.
 

Manzivino

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Jul 31, 2006
7,139
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Hinkie’s biggest problem was that his strategy was right. The worst thing you can be in the NBA is mediocre. The threat to the league wasn’t the Sixers’ acceptance of intentionally bottoming out; it was the Process potentially working and multiple teams deciding to copy it at once. Fans are understanding that long term success requires short term suckage but they’re not willing to buy tickets and support it financially, and MLB may well be showing us this year what a league looks like when multiple teams commit to being terrible rather than striving for mediocrity no matter how right they are to do so. For a league whose regular season is already seen as borderline meaningless, the NBA can afford even less to have multiple teams racing for the bottom.
 
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OurF'ingCity

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Apr 22, 2016
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The only way to prevent tanking is to eliminate the draft and let teams bid for rookies like any other free agents. This will never happen, of course, because the NBAPA doesn't want rookies taking money away from established vets and the owners like being able to have good, young players on relatively cheap deals.

So yes, Hinkie's strategy is perfectly rational given the circumstances. We can debate, I suppose, whether Hinkie could have pulled off a more Ainge-style approach of accumulating assets while staying competitive, but Ainge's success in that regard was largely based on the Brooklyn trade, which required a pretty unique combination of events and players that no other team had.
 

americantrotter

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Aug 1, 2005
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The only way to prevent tanking is to eliminate the draft and let teams bid for rookies like any other free agents. This will never happen, of course, because the NBAPA doesn't want rookies taking money away from established vets and the owners like being able to have good, young players on relatively cheap deals.
Also because US sports fans are oddly socialist when it comes to drafting/competitive balance.

In Econ we studied about bubbles and what happened to fund managers who got out early. They were marginalized or fired. No one said they weren’t right, just that they didn’t maximize the potential. When you go against the flow people eventually revert to wanting the now they see others having. Long term tanking requires more patience than our society has.
 

Eddie Jurak

canderson-lite
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Dec 12, 2002
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I think there were legit positives and legit nagatives to the process.

On the plus side, they put themselves in position to obtain a load of high draft picks. Mostly due to tanking, but aided by some stellar deals that they were able to pull off. The Sacramento and Laker picks don't add all the way up to the bounty of the Pierce/Garnett trade, but Hinkie started out without a Pierce/Garnett. Relative to the price he paid, Hinkie arguably got a better return than Ainge.

I think the problem was that Hinkie didn't fully account for the collateral consequences of perrenial losing. (Maybe tanking is a drug and Hinkie got hooked?) At some point he's just waiting to hit on a few big picks and not doing much in the way of team building and player development along the way. And the return on those picks has been spotty. Okafor was a bust, Noel didn't give them much, Embiid didn't play for 2 years and played under 30 games in his 3rd year. I'm curious how a draft analyst would rate his actual value compared to expected value. While the Celtics were building their team and putting and exciting team on the court, Philly was tanking, badly enough that Hinkie eventually lost his job to a twitter troll.

Of course the Celtics had something Hinkie didn't - the Brooklyn trade - but the significnce of that gets overstated. At the end of the day the Celtics had virtually no talent (the roster Stevens had as a rookie coach was atrocious), and it wasn't until this year, Stevens' 5th, that the Brooklyn trade paid any real dividends.

I think Hinke should have pulled out of the nosedive sooner (which might have saved his job) and drafted better.

The supposed interpersonal stuff is sort of a side issue. We've seen that before, in reference to Dan Duquette (who had to wait a LONG time for his next shot) and of course BB (Cleveland edition).
 

leetinsley38

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Aug 24, 2005
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The Sixers might be the second most interesting team in sports over the last five years or so to follow and argue on the internet about...after the Patriots.
 

Soxfan in Fla

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Jul 30, 2001
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TripleOT

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Jul 4, 2007
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Yeah as if I couldn't hate him any more lol
How about when Smith wrote a column saying Paul Pierce was gutless, the day of the deciding Game 5 between the Sixers and Celtics, which the Cs won by 33, with PP putting up 46?