And When the Sixers Get Good, Give Sammy His Statue...

Young talent. Top of the board picks. The most cap room in the NBA. A ten win team. That is what Sam Hinkie left the Sixers when he left as general manager in early April. Obviously the first three of those things were all good, and the Sixers are better off for it. To hear it be told, it was the last piece that made change at the top of the basketball operation. We don't believe the company line though.

Sam Hinkie got run out by the NBA, guilty of exposing their terrible collective bargaining agreement for what it is. He understood that from the fifth seed to the worst team in the conference wasn't much different, except that the worst team had a shot of getting a super talent in the draft that would make them good. While the Nets and Pacers of the world try to compete and put a second-tier playoff team on the court, Hinkie understands that his team needs to be absolutely terrible- to insure that top three kind of pick that can change the franchise, and free up the cash to go out and actually sign a star that gives them a chance to compete. Hinkie understands that the step before contending for a championship, or at least being in the second round, is to be really bad. He played that system perfectly. The other GM's and owners hated that. They need interest in their second tier teams to be real. Hinkie exposed to the world that there is no reason to be interested in them.

The league hates Sam Hinkie for doing his job right. They hate him for gaming the system they created. They hate him for understanding basketball better than the "basketball guys" do. You need stars to win, and you only get them through lots of salary cap room to sign them, and from drafting them. No one in the league did a better job at lining up those two things. All he did was put a completely unqualified, incapable of winning team on the court. This infuriated the league. I guess they prefer a mess that stays in purgatory, like the Knicks.

Things are about to change for the Sixers. They have not one, not two, but possibly three Rookie-of-the-Year contenders in 2016-2017. They have a ton of money, and as of today can start spending it on free agents. They have a very real shot of going from ten win this past season to a playoff contender no later than next season. From there, they will only grow. As we all enjoy this product, let's not forget how we got it, even if the league is going to try and credit others.

Stop Stopping "The Process," NBA

I have one fear about the Philadelphia 76ers, and one fear alone- in five years we'll be watching a seventh seeded Sixers team lose in the first round of the playoffs for the third straight year. That might sound ridiculous for someone who's team is 1-27, but it's the most rational reaction to how bad this team is. I have sat through a several season tank now, one that I have listened to the reasoning behind, and understood, and all I ask is that it ends where we want it- a real contender.

Being a decent NBA team is the NBA's version of hell. The owners and commissioner's office created that, they wanted that, and the Sixers took them at their word. You are either a championship contender or you want to be as bad as possible, most of the time. If you are a fifth to eight seed in the NBA for more than a year or two, you are basically wasting everyone's time. They created a league where two and three stars are supposed to team up on contending teams and try to win championships. They created a league where the draft lottery is the place to find your superstar and build a contender. They created a salary cap driven league, where who your teammates are and where you are located matter more to free agents than raw dollars (because they are mostly the same). They even changed the rules and the refereeing to benefit superstars (MJ, Kobe, LeBron), to make sure they would have this kind of a league. In other words, four years ago this was a team that was one game from the conference finals, a team that had made the playoffs as a lower-half seed pretty regularly for a few years, but hadn't had a true "superstar" since Allen Iverson, and had no shot to defeat LeBron's Heat even if they had won that game in Boston, so the Sixers realized they were a fraud contender, and blew the thing apart, and they were right to do that. My main point is this- the Sixers are bad, and should be bad, because the NBA created an incentive system to make them bad.

None of this is to say that any of what is happening at the Wells Fargo Center is good. As 538 recently wrote, the Sixers would be a bad expansion team at this point, which is embarrassing for a historically good franchise. The fact that they got worse this season should be alarming, and what alarms me more is the lack of pieces I consider to be a part of a future championship run that are currently on this team. I think Sam Hinkie is running out of time, and at least my patience, in his "process." I'm frankly not willing to wait until LeBron James' career is over to see a competitive team on the court. They need to start showing progress.

With that said, the NBA should not be stepping in the way they clearly are. Yeah, I know, Adam Silver denies that he is. I don't believe him at all. Jerry Colangelo showing up in Philadelphia along with Mike D'Antoni wasn't an accident. It didn't just happen this way. The NBA owners were not happy with how bad the Sixers situation was, and so they forced the Commissioner to step in. He pushed the Sixers to hire Colangelo, and Colangelo gave us D'Antoni. Maybe in the long run this is a good thing. Maybe it's not. The main point is that the NBA shouldn't be meddling in a situation they created. The Sixers are gaming the system- the system they created.

Should this be going on? Probably not. If the NBA doesn't like this though, they should change their system. They could create a need-based spending system, or eliminate their salary cap system they have. They could change the CBA altogether. They could eliminate the draft lottery and simply hand out picks based on records, giving the worst teams the leg up in getting the next great stars. They could change a lot of different things. Stopping teams from playing their own flawed system is not the way to fix this though.