Sam Hinkie's Plan (Part 1)

Let's begin with Sam Hinkie's so-called Plan that has torn apart the city of Philadelphia. We'll start with the history.

When Sam Hinkie came to Philadelphia the Sixers had just suffered the Andrew Bynum debacle. Bynum sat out a full season while Doug Collins tried to thread a roster together with Nick Young and Dorell Wright. You had Evan Turner, Lavoy Allen, Spencer Hawes, That Young, and Jrue Holiday. The big questions, to me and other linear-thinking troglodytes, was "do you re-sign Bynum" and "for how much?" Everyone was like: "if you can get him cheap blah blah blah." Hinkie came in and said something cryptic that turned out to be very smart. He said he'd treat Bynum like the "thousands of other basketball players playing all over the world." No one knew what that meant. It meant that Hinkie wanted no part of Bynum. Bynum ended up being a disaster in Cleveland and then a mere trashcan fire in Indiana.

On Draft Night 2013 (not that long ago, but eons in Sixer Time), the Hinkie Era began. Hinkie traded the one great player the Sixers had: Jrue Holiday for Nerlens Noel (the 6 pick) and a future first. He then drafted Michael Carter-Williams in the first round and Arsalan Kazemi, an analytics wunderkind due to his expert rebounding, in round 2. The Holiday trade, executed while I was in Korea, was stunning--especially b/c it was first reported to me as "Noel for Holiday and a future first." But moreso b/c you just don't trade your only All-Star while he's still really, really young and just shown that he can shoot a 3. This was an outside-the-box trade and Hinkie got the second first not just b/c Holiday is good, but b/c Noel was injured and probably out for the year. So you just lost a starting PG for a guy who won't play for a year.

The Sixers that year burst out of the gate winning and I remember making many jokes referencing the movie Major League. The GM clearly wanted to tank but the team was half-decent. They eventually calmed down as most teams led by Elliot Williams do and Hinkie proceeded to trade everyone Collins had except for Thad Young. ET and Lavoy went to Indiana for pennies (I believe one 2nd rounder); Hawes went to Cleveland for two seconds and Henry Sims (who turned out to be serviceable on an abysmal team); and soon you had a team that literally trotted out line-ups that D-League teams could beat. Year One was stamped as the Tank Year and everyone assumed that the Sixers would draft Andrew Wiggins and one other great player (with the first from New Orleans) and start on their road to redemption.

It didn't happen that way. There were two stomach punches in the 2014 Draft. First was when Joel Embiid was found to have a foot injury days before the draft. This was a stomach punch because the Sixers had the 3 pick and Embiid was supposed to be number 1. The draft order was prognosticated to be Embiid, Parker, Wiggins. Now things were turned upside down. It sounded like Cleveland would take Wiggins at 1, then you assumed Jabari Parker would go to Milwaukee, this left a big question mark for the Sixers. The assumption was that Aussie Dante Exum would be taken despite the presence of Michael Carter-Williams, who, by the way, was reported to be on the trading block. The Sixers bypassed Exum and took Joel Embiid--another center! And then took Elfrid Payton, stomach punch to MCW, who they traded to Orlando for Dario Saric, MCW's OK! Fans are down! This was the second big stomach punch: this one to fans. The team was abysmal, went on a 26 game losing streak and now drafted two guys that would probably not play the next year in addition to some second rounders like Jordan McRae and Jerami Grant.

Part 2 Next!

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Why I'm Rebooting Sixersfiend

Yes, it's been three long years since I last wrote.

A LOT has changed--my last post was about the Andrew Freakin' Bynum Trade!

There's still much to say about basketball and seemingly a plethora of places to get information.

The problem, to me, is that most of them are terrible.

Let's have a rundown:

• Bill Simmons got fired from ESPN for calling out their boy Roger Goodell. He writes fantastically. He still makes an inordinate amount of movie, porn, and wrestling references. He is a twelve year-old boy. He is funny. He knows his stuff.
• Simmons' replacement Zach Lowe does a great job of taking stills and gifs of basketball plays. This was his thing until it became a lot of other people's thing. Lowe cannot write at all. He is terrible. He uses the following adjectives to describe black athletes: frisky, cute, snarky. He is fond of saying a player does basketball things and he is known for tweeting "Sports!" when a game is getting hot. All of this is nice and meta in his poor man's Dmitri Martin world. He even has a little drawing of himself at the bottom of his articles. A frisky, cute drawing. I can imagine him batting a ball of yarn. In addition to terrible writing, he is fond of pushing a view of "the new NBA" that every horny writer has his hornball on. The new NBA has a ton of pick-and-rolls and super complex strategy. I definitely saw that in the Finals when the Cavs had a lot of complex action setting a lot of interesting stuff when they all stood in the corner watching LeBron. Lowe is tolerable, but barely so.
• Chris Sheridan has a web site called sheridanhoops.com that, to his credit, broke the Lebron-to-Cavs news. The web site looks like it was conceived and laid out in 1992 and usually has passable articles. It is a decent but forgettable site.
• Bleacher Report has burst on the scene with tons of speculative lists such as Top 20 Draft Picks Your Team Might Be Worried About and Top 20 Things We Love About Summer League. Their feed, full of twitter goodness, is great. Their articles are fine. They suffer from the Internet's recent clickbait headline drama where every headline says something like 3 Things You Wish You Didn't Know About Michael Jordan or 20 Hot Moms Over 50 or Things We Thought Were Stupid But Really Aren't. To say this phenomenon is annoying is like saying that teenage boys are pleased with the availability of nude images in the 21st century. It's a massive understatement.
• There is HoopsHype--now populated by massive pop-up ads--and RealGM--where news is broken about Stanko Barac's latest workout for Olympiacos--and NBADraft.net--where European prospects are carefully placed in the second round of the 2018 Draft.
• On the Sixers side of the ledger there are a few sites. LibertyBallers.com is written by people who truly love the Sixers and Philly but who cannot write. Lowe-ian headlines like Robert Covington does Covingtonish Things that make the players into dorky cartoon characters or, worse, cute little kitties litter the site. The Hinkie Koolade has been supped in massive quantities. I'm not trying to be Howard Eskin here, but the press should criticize and analyze not cheerlead. Everything Hinkie does is supported and explained and supporxplained by LibertyBallers. Okafor will play point guard! Embiid is the next Hakeem! Etc. Etc. Hoop76 is another decent Sixers site that looks like what I'm trying to do here but without the sarcasm and cynicism earned in six long years of grad school. Sixers.com is a nice place to find out when the next Sixers Dance Team tryouts will be.
• Finally, the Worldwide Leader trots out Chris Broussard whose hatred of gays isn't bigotry, it's religion. Religotry? Brian Windhorst whose analysis of LeBron's every eye-blink and knee-scratch is excruciating. Literally this fat guy from Cleveland who they call "Windy" (a fart reference?) writes stories where he dramatizes every glare and eye roll LeBron James emits. He uses sources like "veterans on the Cavs" though for some reason instead of his muse since, of course, he is more likely to hear "the real deal" from benchwarmer Shawn Marion than from LBJ. Marc Stein is a mensch who attempts to break real news in this mess. Ric Bucher left a while ago to join Howard Beck at Bleacher Report and both are doing a helluva job making us forget they once had real gigs. ESPN also has a new stable of idiots who babble nonsense, cannot read teleprompters, cannot speak English, do not know anything about sports, etc. etc. Stephen A. Smith is still livid about something Jose Calderon did in 2013 and Skip Bayless is seriously ready to tear into this myth that you need to watch basketball games to analyze basketball on a basketball show. 
• People that are doing nicely: PTI rolls on, the TNT boys are doin' their thing, David Aldridge is still "DA," and NBATV is a nice place to watch Vinny Del Negro creepily stare at everyone like he's at a Maggiano's and he's been waiting 20 minutes for his veal parmesan.

With so much Sixers gossip and news going on, I just can't leave it to the morons. So SixersFiend is back!