When the Philadelphia 76ers parachuted in the legendary executive Jerry Colangelo earlier this month, it wasn’t just seen as a drastic measure for drastic times.
Mired in one of the most gruesome stretches in basketball’s history, there certainly was an urgency to get the bleeding finally stopped. But there has, transparently, been the sense that something else was also at play.
It wasn’t just a course correction. It was a rebuke of the course entirely.
The Sixers have been far and away the worst team in basketball two years running, with a 1-26 (and counting) start fast proving Year 3 to be their lowest low yet. They have taken the court with a genuinely sub-NBA level squad. It would be hard to picture them competing meaningfully even in Europe.
For two years and now well into a third, they have been the stench emanating from basketball’s basement. And this has been by design.
General manager Sam Hinkie, heretofore backed by Philadelphia’s owner, the private equity investor Joshua Harris, has been engaging in a mad NBA experiment. He has been constructing a team intended to lose, so that the 76ers might get higher draft picks, and accordingly better young players. He has traded most any players not considered foundational yet who might otherwise help them win for more draft picks, more stabs at acquiring the foundational types. And, conveniently, maintaining a cap on the team’s quality.
He has moved, in a sense, like a chess player hoping to arrange a checkmate while losing all his pawns. At some future point, the promise is that from all this losing there will spring forth a collection of young stars ready to contend for a title.
How thoroughly can you make a team putrid, so that it might all the more rapidly rise to the top?
This team-building strategy – both acidly derided and fiercely defended as “The Process”, as in “trust the process” – has yet shown little sign it is working. The big-ticket prospects haven’t offered much promise – Nerlens Noel, the sixth pick of the 2013 draft, is still a one-dimensional player; Joel Embiid, the third pick of the 2014 NBA draft, has through injuries yet to play an NBA game; Jahlil Okafor, the third pick of this year’s draft, has struggled with off-court incidents and generally poor play.
The team’s second-level prospecting has yielded little – maybe only a handful, few they’ve even kept, have looked like viable NBA rotation players.
The 76ers have lost, and lost, and lost – and they have remarkably little in the way of even projected progress to show for it. This is what, it was widely perceived, Colangelo was brought in to reverse. Harris, surveying the wreckage in front of him, called in the adults to help.
Hinkie, drunk on his own ego, is sidelined. The 76ers, cynical for so long in their machinations, are chided.
But the problem isn’t Sam Hinkie’s self-regard or Philadelphia’s cynicism. The problem is basketball.
Basketball, for as beautiful a game as it is, is prone to domination. It is a dynastic sport. Teams like the San Antonio Spurs and Golden State Warriors have altered the equation recently a little bit, but the game still largely boils down to whether you have two or three guys better than their best two or three guys.
This is why Philadelphia have been so extreme in their focus on unearthing a superstar. Because without one, you can do things as incredibly well at the margins as is possible, and you will still be topping out well short of realistic title contention.
And therein lies part of the problem. Because that’s all teams are really competing for to begin with, right? The NBA title?
Look at all the incentives available to, say, European football clubs – continental tournaments, cup competitions, avoiding relegation and, yes, the league title itself.
In just the last three years, the English FA Cup final has featured Wigan Athletic (who won), Hull City and Aston Villa. Swansea City (who won), Bradford City and Sunderland have reached the League Cup final.
The play-offs are supposed to be the league’s carrot for those kinds of middle-class clubs, and yet, since the 1995 Houston Rockets became the lowest seed (six) to win the title, only three teams to reach the NBA Finals have been so much as lower than a three-seed. Mid-level teams are given their invitation to the play-offs, but unlike in, say, baseball or American football, it just really doesn’t represent having gotten close.
The carrot is there for the NBA’s middle class, but the stick that is the inextricable nature of the sport keeps those in the second and third tiers from catching it.
The 76ers have only been so extreme in their pursuit of a difference-making talent because they know that it is the one and only true way to traverse the incredibly narrow path to a title.
Most of the brainpower directed at addressing this conundrum has focused only on one half of the cause for which the unrelentingly terrible Philadelphia 76ers are the effect.
The NBA can spin its wheels in trying to fix the lottery, which does in its way perversely incentivise the Sixers in what they do. But without European-style relegation – for many reasons, a non-starter in the NBA – you cannot fully disincentivise losing. At least for as long as losing in any way correlates to priority in young talent allocation.
Ultimately the standard by which basketball success is qualified is insufficient. Winning must be better incentivised.
You can praise teams for being, say, the Memphis Grizzlies – winners of 248 games the previous five seasons, in the play-offs each year, Western Conference finalists in 2013. And you can by all means shame teams for being the Philadelphia 76ers.
But by the one standard of achievement to which the basketball world attributes any meaning – titles – they are the same.
I have argued for an “NBA Cup” before, there’s no need here to expound any further on why one would be at the very least really cool. But it need not be the one and only way to broaden the NBA’s barometer of success.
There could be a Champions League-like mini tournament against the teams of Europe. There could be a Community Shield-like one-off championship. There are any number of imaginative ways for the NBA to give more than one team a year a chance to lift a championship trophy, of some sort. Maybe a consolation prize, but still a tangible prize.
With an excess of games on the schedule, the room is there to creatively replace some with more competitive games in a parallel competition.
The issue is not that Philadelphia’s system wouldn’t have worked. Given an infinite timeline, eventually anything will work. Now-gilded Golden State were themselves bad on accident for 20 years until Stephen Curry came along.
What the 76ers were only ever guilty of was too openly acknowledging an inconvenient truth to the NBA – if you’re not first, you’re last. And only three or four teams are ever really going to be vying for first. Might as well make the most of last.
Condemn Hinkie and the Sixers all you want – it’s on the NBA and its owners to fundamentally change the equation. Fix the lottery, sure.
But make the middle class aspirational, rather than purgatorial, too.
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