Nick Piccone
Former Sixers president and general manager Rod Thorn recently joined The Vertical Podcast with Woj to talk about the 50 years he’s spent in professional basketball.
Thorn and Adrian Wojnarowski also talked about Thorn’s time with the Sixers and the Andrew Bynum trade, the talent the Sixers had back then, and the franchise moving on from all of that after the Bynum trade was deemed a failure.
“You know, at that time, Tony DiLeo was doing a lot of the day-to-day stuff for us. My deal with them was for three years. Now, I was gonna be there three years. I signed a deal with the late Ed Snider and that was all I was gonna do when I signed. Mr. Snider and I agreed on that, I’d do three years and see where we go here. The Bynum trade that I was for doing, Tony did all the legwork on that. I’m not sure who called first, but that changed the fortunes of, obviously, Philadelphia, because when it didn’t work, then they made a lot of changes. You know, which Tony, who was I thought very good, was one of the changes that they made. But, you know, the funny thing about Bynum – we get Bynum and Bynum goes to Germany to have the procedure that is done there [that Kobe Bryant made famous] – he comes back and he can’t practice. So, I’ll give Bynum credit. He worked every day he would come and work and lift weights and work like crazy. Whatever they wanted him to do. Every day.
“Around the All-Star Game, Bynum’s knees are getting better and he’s going to practice. So he comes out and practices and he’s rusty. You know, he’s big and dominant with us, but he’s rusty. You know, he looked OK. The second day of practice, he totally dominated the workout and Thad Young said to me after the workout, ‘Wow. We’re gonna be good.’ We had a game the next day and then we had a day off and then we’re gonna practice on Monday. And on Monday, [Bynum’s] knees were so swollen he couldn’t practice. Now, from that time on, because I think he saw he wasn’t gonna be able to play, his work ethic from that time to the end of the year dropped off dramatically. But until then, he worked at it. His knees just couldn’t do it.
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“Josh Harris came in [Editor’s note: He was majority owner when the Bynum trade happened], and their thing was, ‘We wanna win. We wanna win and we wanna win the championship.’ You know, everybody talks about wanting to win the championship and they did. Then they went in another direction. It’ll be interesting now when you look at some of the pieces they have. If Embiid turns out to be good, they could be a whole lot better this year.”
Listen to the audio below. You can listen to the entire podcast here.