Adrian Fedkiw
Sam Hinkie’s post-process life has been exposed.
Sports Illustrated’s Chris Ballard wrote a piece on Hinkie titled “After the Process,” which will appear in the Dec. 5 issue of the magazine. It’s honestly one of the best things I’ve read in a while. It’s also very lengthy, so make sure you give yourself some time to sit down and process everything you read.
Pun intended.
Ballard started spending time with Hinkie a day after the Philadelphia 76ers’ season opener when Hinkie was trending on Twitter and the fans were chanting “Trust the Process” every time Joel Embiid attempted a free throw. He also looks a lot different, the clean-faced, suit-wearing, hair-parted Hinkie is gone and replaced by a man sporting a bushy beard with a tank top and shorts.
He certainly looks different. In Philly he was clean-cheeked, with a perfect left-side part, a Mad Men character come to life. He owned 25 blue blazers, all size 40 regular. The goal: reduce decision fatigue, the psychological phenomenon in which the more choices we make in any given day, the worse we are at making them. So, like Steve Jobs (black turtleneck, jeans) and Barack Obama (blue or gray suit), Hinkie settled on a uniform and ran with it. Boom! Decades of choices, eliminated in one fell swoop.
Now, however, his thin brown hair is shorn to a stubble that matches his nascent tech-guy beard, and he is wearing shorts, a T-shirt and a fleece. He looks like he just arrived for your fantasy football draft. By the end in Philly, Hinkie couldn’t order from GrubHub without being asked to pose for a selfie with the driver. (He’d do it in the garage, so as not to disclose his location.) Since moving to Palo Alto in August he has yet to be recognized.
Hinkie currently resides in Palo Alto, where change and forward thinking is embraced, not frowned upon like the NBA did of his unusual tactics.
Besides the obvious reasons—weather, culture, networking, anonymity—Hinkie came here to be among what he calls “my people,” the quants, dreamers, AI geeks and visionaries. As opposed to the sports world, which can range from socialist to dictatorial but is often slow to embrace change, in Silicon Valley disruption is expected. Here no one tries to replicate the status quo or embrace average. Here companies operate for years without showing a profit, for better or worse. “When I meet someone out here, I’ll say, ‘I’m kind of between gigs,’ ” Hinkie says. “Or, if I’m being cute, sometimes I’ll say, ‘Oh, I’m like a founder that got pushed out for professional management,’ and they’re like, ‘Oh, first time? That happened to me in ’85 and ’93 and ’02.’ ” He pauses. “There’s not the sense of shame for failure here that there is some other places.”
Did Hinkie fail? When he took over in Philadelphia in May 2013, the team was soundly mediocre and trending down. Few assets. Bad contracts. Hinkie compares it to coming into a game of Monopoly midstream, only, “You don’t have any real estate, all the hundreds are gone, and they’ve got Park Place.” So he reverse-engineered NBA success and decided it looked a lot like Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and Shaquille O’Neal. Which is to say: stars. And the best way to acquire stars, Hinkie determined, is through the draft, though the odds are still low. So Hinkie shed his best players and built the Sixers to lose, and then lose some more. All the while he stashed talent overseas (like Dario Saric), and acquired injured big men with upside (Nerlens Noel and Embiid).
This did not go over particularly well. The league feared copycats and moved to reform the lottery to reduce the odds that the worst team would get the top pick. (The vote fell short.) Critics charged Hinkie with being anticompetitive and forgetting that pro sports are inherently entertainment, you a-hole, and how am I supposed to explain to my nine-year-old that his favorite team is now a series of Excel spreadsheets instead of hometown heroes?
Public perception will ultimately hinge on what happens next. If Embiid and Ben Simmons develop into two of the league’s best frontcourt players, and Saric continues to blossom, revisionist history may rule the day. Alternately, if the Sixers continue to falter, people may say, Told you so.
Both of these reactions would, to Hinkie’s mind, miss the point.
“Why do we watch basketball games front to back?” Hinkie asks. “Why not watch games back to front, or out of order?”
One of Hinkie’s least favorite topics … narratives.
Hinkie discusses one of his least-favorite terms: the narrative.
By doing anything in chronological order—reading a job candidate’s interview responses, watching clips of a player—he believes we end up overvaluing the context. I liked this candidate’s first three answers, so I’m predisposed to like the fourth.
The problem with narratives is that they contain heroes and villains and protagonists and character arcs and redemption and vindication, all of which can overshadow or obscure fact and truth and reality. They derive, as Hinkie puts it, from “the lizard parts of our brains.” Which means they’re simplistic and, for a man who believes there are roughly 2,000 shades of gray, this is troubling.
The other problem with narratives is that, whether you like it or not, they are really, really powerful. An oft-cited study found that if you embed details in a story, it’s up to 22 times more likely to stick. Remember Cecil the Lion? Sure you do, because some dentist went and shot a beloved animal and suddenly we all cared about lion preservation. But if an organization had just put out the information—African lions are being killed at a distressing rate—it may never have pierced your awareness.
Hinkie discussed the importance of structure.
Every hour between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., his Fitbit watch vibrates. Not to remind him to exercise; as Hinkie says, “I do not feel compelled to impress it.” Rather, it’s a cue to consider the previous hour. Was he productive? Did he achieve his goals? He then spends the following 60 seconds considering the hour to come. Once properly centered, Hinkie proceeds with his day.
If that day is a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, it rarely includes email. Similarly, he doesn’t check his texts in the mornings because, “You can’t let someone else’s agenda hijack your day.” If his wife, Ali, needs him, she calls twice in a row. Otherwise, he rarely takes out his phone. “If you don’t create structure, your time will get eaten up pretty quickly,” warns Hinkie. “And the alternative is harsher than you think, because the world will suck it up.”
Mornings are reserved for creative tasks when his brain is fresh. Afternoons for meetings. Built in throughout are “opportunities for serendipity.” During one such window, at Blue Bottle, an old friend saw him and mentioned he was headed to lunch with the Google Translate guy. Did Sam want to come? Yes, yes he did. Two hours later, after a deep dive into linear algebra, Hinkie had gained a new pocket of knowledge.
Who is Hinkie the person?
People who first meet Hinkie are often surprised. For one, he’s funnier than you expect. (At one point he jokes, “If Pop turns David Lee into a great defender, he’s a wizard and we should burn him.”) But mainly it’s the contrast between his affect—amiable, Oklahoma twang—and his ability to clinically, ruthlessly deconstruct situations. Will Weaver, who worked for the Sixers and is now a special assistant to Nets coach Kenny Atkinson, first met with Hinkie while trying to break into pro basketball in the mid-2000s. Says Weaver, “He’d say the nicest things about me that didn’t feel like compliments. He had this ability to assess without dragging himself into an emotional state.” When Weaver left the meeting, after an hour and a half, he called his mom and told her two things. First: “That’s a guy I want to work for someday.’ ” Second: “He’s the weirdest dude I’ve ever met.”
This is something of a recurring theme with Hinkie. “There’s a huge disconnect between who Sam is and who the world thinks he is,” says Than Powell, a grad school friend … He is both hyperrational and a man of deep faith. He’s the kind of guy you’d like to have a beer with—good company, wry—but he doesn’t drink. He’s unemotional but also sentimental. A friend recounts how, while first wooing Ali, Hinkie spent his winter break feeding quarters into a pay phone to call her long distance from the lodge at Disneyworld, where his family was staying. (The Hinkies love Disneyworld.) Later Sam convinced the lodge to sell him the actual phone, which is now in their house in Palo Alto. He also has a slat from the bench in Paris where he proposed to Ali.
So, will Hinkie get hired again by an NBA franchise? It seems like he’ll get another opportunity at some point, but he’s on a non-compete clause until the summer.
“I’m a huge fan of Sam,” Mark Cuban said in September. Daryl Morey, Hinkie’s former boss in Houston, is clearly biased, but he’s also optimistic. Asked if Hinkie’s methodology will be embraced again, he says, “One hundred percent it will be. First off, Philly will do really, really well. It’s a copycat league. Second, every year there are better and smarter owners.” Morey says he’d hire Hinkie back as an assistant “in a second,” but that, “I don’t think he’d be interested. He’s destined for bigger things.” Adds Morey: “My advice is to go long on Sam Hinkie. He’s a growth stock.”
A half dozen other GMs and execs—an admittedly unscientific survey—voiced largely similar sentiments. Some pointed out that while fans and media get hung up on the narrative, people in the league move on much more quickly. “Sam’s respected, and that’s the biggest thing for sure,” says one GM. Another points out that just by having confidence in his ideas, Hinkie is appealing to owners. Because, for one, how many people can do the job of NBA GM? And within that subset how many of those actually have a plan? (See the last 10 years in Sacramento.) In Philly, Hinkie became known as a cutthroat negotiator, sometimes to his detriment. But at least one rival GM thought his rep was earned partly because Hinkie’s combination of certainty and patience was intimidating. He knew what he wanted and was willing to wait for it. This is not the norm in pro sports, where, as one exec says, “To be honest, most of us are just plowing through.”
On one thing all agree: To get a chance to run a team as a GM again, rather than in a consulting or assistant role, Hinkie needs to have learned from his mistakes. “Communication is a big part of the job now,” says one GM. “You can’t ignore it.” Former colleagues note that his affinity for “the idea of self sacrifice for the larger good” leads him astray at times. “I think, in retrospect, his media strategy was wrong,” says one. “I think it came from the right place. He felt that revealing things, or doing things that felt self-aggrandizing, would come at the expense of the franchise and any competitive advantage.” It’s that damn narrative again. It’s hard to relate to someone you don’t know.
Hinkie is definitely inching for a comeback.
To date, Hinkie says he’s been approached by a couple of teams, informally, but he won’t know the market until the end of the season, when his noncompete is up. That is, if he goes back to basketball. When I first saw him in October, he seemed unsure. He needed to evaluate. Find a focus. “I’m working 30 hours or so a week, and if I’m being honest I’d rather it was 50,” he said.
As time went by, though, he began to circle back. By early November he seemed more certain. “I think the world probably assumes that I’m recharging and unplugging, and there’s a little of that,” he said one evening. “This will get me in trouble if I say it, but I think I’m mostly sharpening the sword to come back.”
If Hinkie does get hired, don’t expect him to repeat “The Process.”
“He’s way too smart for that,” says one rival GM. “He was just doing what made the most sense for that team.” Instead Hinkie will likely react situationally, based on where he thinks he can gain an advantage on the system. That’s why the fear of crappy teams suddenly copying the Sixers’ strategy never made sense. If 10 franchises all vie for lottery positioning, the advantage is gone.
Whether or not “The Process” was a success or massive failure remains to be seen. I was always all for it. It’s a lot better to be among the worst teams in the NBA, accumulate assets in the NBA Draft with high selections and build rather to be stuck in mediocrity.
But if turns out to be a failure, there won’t be any shame or regrets from Hinkie.