Embiid, the Kings Trade and the NBA's Stupid Moratorium

The news that Joel Embiid will "probably" be out for the season is yet another stomach punch in the now-excruciating Sam Hinkie rebuild.

Hinkie supporters have always pinned their hopes to Embiid and his potential. And, surely, we all saw that potential. But the kid never even finished a season of college basketball and will now be out for two straight seasons (more if you count the missed time at Kansas). To say that this guy is a foundational piece is to build your foundation on a really shaky foot.

I hate to say that I can't be optimistic about this. As much as Hinkie preaches "patience" and "process" what he did in the 2014 Draft is inexcusable. He nearly broke the professional sporting world's losing-streak record to grab the 3rd pick in that draft and decided to double down on injured centers. Every fantasy owner knows that you don't want to bet on too many injured guys...they tend to get REINJURED. They also tend to stay out longer than you hoped and produce less than you hoped. Noel was a nice get. Saric may be too. But how do you destroy your team and then use your two first rounders on guys that won't play for AT LEAST TWO YEARS??? Then, you go and trade your starting PG in the hopes of showcasing a guy you scouted, Isaiah Canaan, who by all accounts is not better than fringe NBA journeyman Ish Smith.

It seems that Hinkie's words post-Draft were very telling. The guy whose followers praise for his "best player available" strategy said: "I hope we would have" when asked if he would've still taken Okafor if Embiid weren't injured. Okafor was probably the best player available, but Hinkie knew this was major. He put out a freakin' press release about it. 

He is actually showing signs of desperation. Papering over the Embiid debacle with talk of seeing every doctor in the world (whatever). As if doctors visits will somehow translate to championship rings. Going to see if Dario Saric can somehow wriggle out of his Euro contract (he couldn't). Giving interviews! And talking about his process and plan. Releasing the Embiid news over a lazy weekend and trying to package the news with the Stauskas trade. 

The OKC rebuild everyone wants was predicated on the Blazers taking Oden and the Thunder taking Durant. Doug Collins' downfall came when he took Evan Turner over Derrick Favors and Demarcus Cousins--and then traded Iguodala and Vucevic for Andrew Bynum to try to cover that mistake. In 2014, Wiggins went to Minnesota (via Cleveland) and Embiid (that year's Bowie/Okafor) went to Philly. In 2015, Hinkie finally went for a more sure thing taking Okafor.

But it's one step forward two steps back with this rebuild. In year THREE, the teams starting point guard will either be a wild Tony Wroten, the unsigned Ish Smith, or a tiny guy (Canaan or Pierre Jackson). The starting two will probably be Stauskas (or Hollis Thompson). Robert Covington will be the three. The team is rejoicing over the picks it got from Sacto but Sacramento, a perennial bottom dweller, had no need for Carl Landry, Jason Thompson or Stauskas and who knows what will come of all the pick swaps?

The Sixers put out a This Starts Now marketing campaign just before the trade deadline this year with a pic of Embiid, Noel and MCW. Guess what? Only one of those guys actually plays for this team. Embiid is the anti-Iverson: he only practices, never plays games. MCW is gone. Noel and Okafor provide some hope but how is the team's roster so threadbare going into year three of the Hinkie remodel. 

Yes, LUCK plays a part but luck is what Hinkie has based this rebuild on. The luck of the draw. The luck of the lottery. The luck of drafting the right 19 year old player. 

Let's not pretend that Embiid is an established Hakeem Olajuwon sitting on the bench. By the time he plays he'll be rusty and behind the developmental curve. Perhaps his star will emerge eventually but while we wait, Rudy Gobert solidifies the Jazz bench, Giannis Antetokounmpo looks like a stud, Elfrid Payton throws lobs to Aaron Gordon. The Sixers passed on all of these players. Let's think about that next time Hinkie is lionized as a hero just for gathering potential.

2016 will surely be a big year now with Saric, maybe-Embiid, and four firsts probably joining the roster. So in Year Four potentially this team will be a couple years behind Boston and Orlando, and a couple more years behind Utah and Minnesota. Playoffs in Year Six? Who the hell knows?

In other news:

• The Embiid debacle is a bitter pill to swallow any way you cut it, but the trade with the Kings was great. Carl Landry is not very useful to a team that has Furkhan Aldemir, Jerami Grant and Arsalan Kazemi. But Jason Thompson is a decent player who unlike Jason Richardson can ball some in addition to mentoring. The Sixers wanted Nic Stauskas and now they got him. That's a nice reset of the 2014 Draft and hopefully the kid can add some much, much, much needed shooting (just watched them play LA Lakers in summer league and Sixers have no shooters!). The 2018 pick (unprotected in 2019 and on) will be nice whenever it arrives and the pick swaps may or may not have value, they're like added fuel to the lottery. On the pick swaps: Sixers don't get them if Kings are out of the top 10 since Kings owe Bulls their pick in that case. I think the Sixers will be worse than the Kings this year, so perhaps next year the swaps go into effect. A great trade overall. Ultimate value will be predicated on the play of Stauskas and Thompson and whatever the swaps and picks become. On the downside: I know everyone is pillorying the Kings over this but, from their perspective, they could say that they gave a pick and some guys they don't want/need for A LOT of cap room that they used on some decent guys (Belinelli, Rondo, and Koufos). If Stauskas and the pick swaps don't amount to much, then perhaps the Kings weren't so nuts after all. Either way, a great get for the Sixers though I'll reserve judgment until I see how good Sauce Castillo can be on the court (he only averaged 4.4ppg on a bad Kings team).
• The NBA moratorium on free agent signing where everyone comes to verbal agreements has got to go! The DeAndre Jordan saga, funny as it was, is just one highlight. More important I think were the Kings and Suns salary dump trades that were done to free up cap space even though neither team knew who they would or could sign or even how much cap room they would have. The cap amount ended up being higher than expected and the Suns didn't get Lamarcus Aldridge, so why did they still trade Marcus Morris to the Pistons? Just weird. At least announce the cap figure first if you want to have a hokey verbal-agreements period.

Sam Hinkie's Plan Part 3

I think the naysayers are a little off on this one. Hinkie has said repeatedly that he believes in optionality meaning keeping your options open. The scuttlebutt says that Hinkie would have liked to have Andrew Wiggins, Dario Saric, Nerlens Noel, Avery Bradley, and D'Angelo Russell at this point. That would be a very good and balanced team.

The problem is that you don't create a team in a vacuum. There's competition. There's also chance where the draft is involved. So instead of the above the Sixers have Joel Embiid, Jahlil Okafor, Nerlens Noel, and some other stuff. Saric will come in next year along with what could be four other first rounders (at least two will be low firsts as Miami and OKC project to do a lot better this coming year).

A few predilections of Hinkie's that we've divined so far:

• He likes to draft players with athleticism who can't shootc yet. Will he teach them to shoot? We shall see. MCW and Noel examples make this a question mark.
• He doesn't mind renting his cap space for first rounders.
• It's unclear if he's loyal to any of the players he currently has. First it was the triumvirate of Embiid, Noel and MCW then just Embiid and Noel now is Embiid on the outs?
• The rebuild, everyone thought, would succeed or fail based on the projection of Embiid. Now with Okafor  either one can succeed and the Sixers will be in great shape. To this end, it's clear that Hinkie may be one to hedge his bets.
• He seems to not be concerned at all about on-court product, chemistry, the point guard position, or veteran leadership.
• He likes second round picks. He got some great ones in 2014. Most second round picks are crap though.
• He has sat out free agency two years straight and it's unclear if he'll do anything this year.
• He is tight-lipped and feels like being tight-lipped is a strategy. It certainly adds to the talk of a Plan.

So is there a Plan?:

• Most evidence points to there being a strategy not a point-by-point plan.
• Evidence for a Plan comes from Hinkie's acquistion (or, rather, Morey's acquisition) of James Harden via a series of asset grabs and maneuvers. The Rockets though are in a perpetual wind turbine of trying to attract every big FA out there. Philly was never a big FA destination. The Sixers always had to acquire big names via trade with the exception of the Elton Brand signing. I don't see big FA acquisitions in Philly unless the team becomes a true contender.
• The whole Joel Embiid thing is bordering on ridiculous. Has Embiid deep-sixed the whole rebuild by (1) falling to the Sixers at 3 instead of Wiggins, (2) being out a year-plus, (3) giving hope that he's the next big league star despite scant evidence, (4) forcing them to take a third center in 2015? Was his pick a mulligan in 2014? 
• In sum: if there was a Plan, it's met some detours. So far it's unclear that there's a point-by-point plan. There is a strategy. It's unclear when that strategy hits Phase 2. Phase 1 is blow-up/asset acquisition. Phase 2 is going for it. On trade deadline day 2015 the team put out a new marketing campaign saying "This Starts Now" featuring Embiid, MCW, and Noel. Will things start in 2016? This is the big question, when will Hinkie finally play a hand.

Sam Hinkie's Plan Part 2!

In the 2014 Draft, Hinkie collected Joel Embiid (injured), Dario Saric (2 years away), KJ McDaniels, Jordan McRae (sent to Australia), Vasilije Micic (Euro Stash), and Jerami Grant. Instead of adding as many as five good players in a very deep draft, the team immediately added only two second rounders.

There were then a series of deals (in the season and off-season) that brought in-and-out players like Ronnie Turiaf, Marquis Teague, and Andrei Kirilenko, none of whom played for the Sixers. All of these deals exacted Hinkie's "troll toll" of a second round pick.

The only free-agent acquisition the Sixers reportedly attempted was a move toward the Celtics' Avery Bradley.

The only first-rounder the Sixers obtained was for Thad Young in the Kevin Love trade.

Now Hinkie had completely blown up the team with a mess of second rounders to show for it, a first rounder that would come from Miami, an out-for-the-year center, a Euro stash guy, a center coming back from injury, and some prospects like Tony Wroten, Hollis Thompson, and Jerami Grant.

Wishful thinkers thought the team would be loaded soon with an Embiid that was the next Hakeem, Dario Saric who was the next Toni Kukoc, Nerlens Noel swatting shots, etc.

Pessimists saw a bare cupboard full of "assets."

I worried that the Sixers, like the Rockets before them, would become a revolving door team that players would avoid. No one wants to be a chess piece in someone else's game. You want to be a respected employee of a loyal organization.

The team began coalescing around MCW and Noel and new-addition Robert Covington until the 2015 trade deadline when Hinkie hit reset again. The (really) poor-shooting MCW was traded to the Suns for the Lakers first-round pick. JaVale McGee was added with a first-rounder from OKC coming to Hinkie for his troubles. Then, KJ McDaniels, who looked like a low-cost keeper, was swapped for Isaiah Canaan and yet another second-rounder. Hinkie, on that trade, said that he'd essentially gotten two 2nd rounders for one. Well, whoop-de-freakin-do. He also seemed to be high on his latest Rockets pick-up Canaan like he was on his previous Rockets scoop-ups Royce White (never made the team) and Furkan Aldemir (playing despite performance saying he shouldn't).

This reset was yet another stomach punch. What started with a bold move: Jrue for Noel and Saric, now looked like his only move: trade budding players for future picks. With no PG, Brett Brown became depressed for the first time and said he didn't want to coach a bunch of "gypsies." Isaiah Canaan looked worse than pick-up Ish Smith. Thomas Robinson, another pick-up, looked decent. Noel raised his game. Covington flitted in and out of being a good player. Aldemir got some minutes. The season ended with a whimper.

Then came the 2015 Draft. What could've been as many as four first-rounders turned out to be 1 when OKC and Miami fell out of the playoffs and the Lakers made sure that they optimized their chances of keeping a top 5 pick. The Lakers got pick 2, the Sixers pick 3. The draft went: 1 Minnesota (now with Wiggins): Karl-Anthony Towns; 2 Lakers: D'Angelo Russell; 3 Sixers: Jahlil Okafor. The Sixers then forewent their usual wheeling and dealing in round two and instead went for two low-ceiling players (JP Tokoto and Richaun Holmes) and two Euro stash picks that didn't sound like they would ever come to the US (Hinkie never really talked them up).

Now some of the "dividends" from the original blow-up were coming to fruition and none were actual material things. A bunch of detritus in the 2015 second round, some Euro stashes for later. On the court chemistry, cohesion, and consistency were thrown out the window. And, yes, Hinkie now had three potentially elite centers and no decent point or shooting guards and only Covington at SF.

Obviously Hinkie backers can say he got SOMETHING for Evan Turner, Lavoy Allen, and Spencer Hawes but when that something is a Euro Stash pick that will never come over that something is actually nothing.

The 2015 trade deadline pick-up on two first rounders in addition to the Thad Young trade (Billy King now gets to pay him in Brooklyn!) should turn up 4 firsts next year. Picking best player available should yield some decent players and hopefully begin filling out the roster, but we're talking about three LOST seasons in order to get to a fourth where your roster will still be one of the youngest in the league. Meanwhile, Hinkie has passed on Giannis Antetokounmpo, Rudy Gobert, and Elfrid Payton. These three guys are healthy and can play basketball well.

The next post will deal with the question of whether Hinkie has a plan.