Nick Piccone
When Sam Hinkie resigned from his post as Sixers general manager, I didn’t like the move. I thought he should’ve been given a chance to rebuild this team and see it through.
The Sixers ownership didn’t feel the same. They brought in Jerry Colangelo, who in turn was ready to bring in his son, Bryan, to work with Hinkie. The former Sixers GM knew exactly what that meant, so he left town.
The goal of Hinkie’s plan was met last Thursday when the Sixers selected Ben Simmons first overall in the NBA Draft. But that’s just the beginning now. With Bryan Colangelo at the helm as the team’s GM and president of basketball operations, his first offseason will be an interesting one. Joel Embiid is healthy. Dario Saric may come over from Europe. Jahlil Okafor and Nerlens Noel are, at the time of this writing, still on the team. So, what’s next?
It’ll be interesting to see. Nobody can really predict what’s going to happen. And maybe that’s why Hinkie opened up in this ESPN The Magazine article. Others, also, opened up about him and what he represented in the minds of others as the GM of the Sixers.
The perception of Hinkie had arguably reached a point where it was damaging the Sixers brand. During his time in Philly, he’d developed, for example, a reputation as a dogged negotiator. Knowing that he had unusual leverage — Philly’s unused cap space — he would aim to extract as much blood as possible in deals. But an industry with only 29 other businesses necessitates dealing with the same people over and over again.
“There has to be a level of understanding, a level of trust between teams,” one former GM says. “I think Sam had a hard time opening up in that process. If you are trying to win the deal each time, that’s fine, as long as the other side gets a win too. But if you are trying to kill them, then it makes it harder to work with them in the future.”
Adds one Western Conference executive: “Sam’s a hard-nosed negotiator, which is intimidating to some people. There’s a bit of ‘what’s behind the curtain?’ with Sam. People don’t know what his factors are. It’s not as straightforward as ‘I like that guy.'”
Agents had their own concerns. Hinkie became known for drafting players in the second round and signing them to four-year partially guaranteed contracts. Without any leverage, agents were forced to accept those team-friendly terms, but they didn’t have to like it.
Those decisions had consequences: Agents and rival GMs were happy to turn Hinkie into the embodiment of every negative stereotype of the analytics movement.
“I think Sam is a pure analytics guy,” says David Falk, who gained fame in the late 1980s as Michael Jordan’s agent and still represents a small list of clients. “I don’t think they had enough pure basketball people. While there’s a lot more utilization of analytics, it’s like painting by the numbers. And you can’t paint a masterpiece by the numbers.”
Interestingly enough, Hinkie hated that people thought that. He was a basketball guy after all.
On this point, Hinkie is adamant: More than anything else, he loathes the idea that he was representing a movement. And so it was that a week before he would step down as GM, Hinkie found a seat at La Colombe, a spacious coffeehouse in the Fishtown section of Philadelphia, booted up his laptop and spent three hours breaking down even the most minor, subtle actions on the court, eager to demonstrate his basketball chops.
His single goal, he said time and again, was to build a championship contender, not to prove to the world that a particular kind of thinking was superior: “It’s the caricature everybody wants to talk about — that all we have is a screen and we don’t treat people like people. It is ridiculous. And the more we talk about it, the more others talk about it.” 
And talk about it they did.
“We’re in a competitive business,” says one Western Conference exec. “I think a lot of people feared what Sam was doing: ‘What if it works? It will become the new model.'”
Adds the former GM, “There was a perception that Sam thought he was smarter than everyone else.”
What a bad look for other general managers. The good ol’ boys club has reached the NBA. It’s alive and well in the NFL. God forbid one general manager try something, you know, different, to get their franchise out of NBA purgatory. That’s why Hinkie had so many supporters. We trusted in his plan and that his end game was to build a contender, possibly a dynasty.
His game ended after only three years. Most general managers in professional sports get a five-year window by default. The Sixers’ owners were steadfast in their support of Hinkie up until this year. And you can’t tell me it’s not because so many people were in their ears about what Hinkie was doing and how it was “ruining the game.” He wasn’t. He, in fact, helped other teams while putting the Sixers in a great position for the future.
Says one Western Conference GM: “I really believe what Hinkie did was break something down masterfully. People say you can just tank and get picks. Sam did so much more. His deals brought multiple picks back every time. I never saw someone do more deals with more moving parts in such a short amount of time.”
To wit: Hinkie pillaged Sacramento last July by taking on the contracts of Carl Landry and Jason Thompson to acquire Nik Stauskas along with a 2018 first-round pick and the right to swap first-rounders in 2016 or 2017.
In 2015, he flipped former rookie of the year (and current marginal starter) Michael Carter-Williams for the rights to a future Lakers first-round pick. During the 2014 draft, Hinkie picked Elfrid Payton 10th, getting a player Orlando wanted, then negotiated a trade with the Magic that netted the Sixers No. 12 pick Saric, a second-rounder and a conditional future first — all to move back just two spots.
A multitude of moves, all part of The Process. And back at the coffeehouse on that bright March afternoon in Fishtown, Hinkie couldn’t hide his enthusiasm. “I think things are going to feel very different very soon for our fans, our players, our coaches, our staff,” he said. “I think people haven’t fully realized what different level of talent is about to hit our team in a variety of ways — draft, free agency, trade. I think you’ll see a real change in how we approach things going forward. We’ll be increasingly focused on fit.”
Well, we won’t be able to see the rest of Hinkie’s plan pan out.
Read the entire piece here.