Thread by @GeeDee215

This is the second time today someone has mentioned these @replyall eps to me.

https://twitter.com/catygreen/status/1063137698335125504

Maybe it’s time to update The Process for those who ain’t hoops obsessives. (Plus I’m on this Amtrak train and got time to kill.)

So to the 101 stuff we've covered before:

The NBA, more than any other pro league, is a league of stars/superstars. They have a wildly outsized impact on a team's on-court success (and for smaller-market teams, maybe even the team's financial viability).

LeBron, Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, Giannis Atentokuonpo — those dudes are so good that they can change the league. But there’s maaaaaybe 8 dudes like that? We NBA fans spend a lot (most?) of our time trying to convince ourselves that one of our guys can become one of Those Guys.

There’s only two ways to land a dude like that:

1) sign him when he’s a free agent after his contract is up — and compete with all the other teams trying to sign him

2) selecting him in the NBA draft and coaching him up into a superstar*

*(where you still run the risk of him eventually being poached in free agency)

In order to keep nerf the very good teams and buff the very bad ones, the league tries to assigns draft position based on a team’s win-loss record: the 14 teams who don’t make the playoffs are put in a lottery, and the team with the most losses gets the most balls

The more balls a team has, the more likely it is to get the No. 1 pick and draft a potential cornerstone player.

Which brings us to The Process, by which our heroes — that would be the Philadelphia 76ers — broke the league.

The sixers were in this interminable cycle of mediocrity. They were just good enough to flirt with making the playoffs and earn the honor of getting their asses whupped by an actual contender, but not bad enough to get a high draft pick.

Enter Sam Hinkie.

He’s the odd man who ran the Sixers front office and seemed only capable of talking in bloodless corporatespeak. He was a sentient cardigan, an avatar of late capitalism.

His plan was to make the Sixers as shitty as conceivably possible and do it for as long as the league would let him.

He promptly traded away every player of any NBA value. If a player could shoot or dribble or run, he might help you win, he had to fucking GO.

Hinkie was trying to amass a chest full of high draft picks to select young college players with superstar potential, while stripping the team bare of anything but the cheapest contracts so that he had the money to throw at another big-name player down the road.

It was audacious af and even if you agreed with the approach, completely maddening.

I went to a home game with my mom and the arena was so empty i could heat the players calling out plays from 20 rows up. Nobody was trynna pay $70 to watch this teams of scrubs get destroyed.

They were HISTORICALLY shitty: the year the Warriors set the NBA mark for most wins in a season — they finished the year with 73 wins in 82 games — the Sixers came thisclose to setting the mark for most Ls in a season — 73 losses in 82 games. ON PURPOSE.

And the NBA was quietly stewing: imagine having a franchise in one of your biggest media markets actively trying to be terrible! For YEARS! The Sixers experiment was bold and “outside-the-box” but the NBA saw it as a drag on the rest of the league.

And well, what if it WORKED? They ain’t want other teams to try the same shit.

So Hinkie’s plan of being hot gahbidge is polarizing fans and the league, and he’s not really talking to the media or giving press conferences. But when he does, he asks for patience.

And so even though he never actually says it, it becomes a kind of mantra for the die-hard fans who believe that it will all work out:

Trust the Process.

and people start chanting it at games in which the Sixers lose by 20 by bored teams who far outclass them.

TRUST. THE. PROCESS. 👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿

It is a rallying cry for the true believers stuck in this long trough, a proclamation that we might make it to the other side. That one day, we will have one of Those Guys and that we will be good.

And among the MANY players the Sixers cycle thru on their self-destruct were 2 legit finds: Robert Covington, a lanky dude from an HBCU who didn’t get drafted but turned himself into their best defender; and TJ McConnell, a short, scrappy dude who looks like he should be in NKOTB

(“Scrappy” = white, btw)

(Sorry. Had to walk to the hotel.)

Where were we? okay. So RoCo, TJ are good useful players and fan favorites, but not centerpieces.

And since they and the other castoffs on the roster are so inexpensive, the Sixers are consistently in Danger of running against the salary “floor” — the minimum amount of money the league requires you to spend on player salaries to ensure you’re fielding a competitive team.

And the problem with this strategy is that it’s always a gamble. Just because you have a high draft pick doesn’t mean there will be good players available for you to actually draft. A LeBron/Steph/KD level player only comes around every few years. You gotta get REAL lucky.

Anyway, after a few years of this intentional basketball incompetence and paltry attendance, the NBA is like

(I watched that gif of Gina Torres loop over and over for, um, a while. *straightens tie*)

This is a farce! They say. They literally take over the Sixers front office and install a person they picked — this oleaginous child of privilege named Bryan Colangelo* — to help steer the franchise back to respectability.

*the Colangelo stuff is a whole drama l unto itself + involves him being fired from the Sixers after his wife set up burner Twitter accounts to defend her husband and talk shit abt Sixers players #onhere (including sensitive medical information abt them) nytimes.com/2018/06/07/spo…

ANYWAY, Hinkie is out; Hinkie is a martyr. On his way out, he pens this epic, meandering screed about “thinking outside the box” and “zigging when others zag” and other sanctimonious business school bullshit and you gotta wonder if he coulda hung on were he not so insufferable

BUT BEFORE HE LEAVES

He drafts this kid from Cameroon. Barely 20 years old. He’d only started playing basketball four years prior, on a whim, and is just learning English. He played one year of college basketball. He’s got a bad foot, which makes teams scared to touch him.

His name is Joel Hans Embiid.

He is goofy and sarcastic and great on Twitter. And although he is on the roster, his bad foot (and other injuries) keep him from playing for nearly two years. He might never be healthy.

But there are whispers coming out of the team. He’s gooood. Like REAL GOOD. And some of us who have learned to be skeptical are like: he’s beating up bums in practice. So what?

And one day two seasons ago, he finally plays in an actual NBA game against actual NBA players.

And it becomes clear. This jokey, humongous man moves like a gazelle and is as strong as as an ox.

He is absolutely one of Those Guys.

Joel Hans Embiid:

bit.ly/2Px1AvK

JoJo is exactly what we have been waiting for, and he knows it. He gives himself the nickname: "The Process."

bit.ly/2Puegnt

The Sixers get ANOTHER top draft pick — and use it on a 6'10 kid from Australia via LSU named Ben Simmons. He misses a whole year with injuries. But then he plays ...and holy shit, he looks like some kind of 21st-century update of Magic Johnson!?!?

bit.ly/2PwOzTc

Which brings us to now.

The Sixers now have two of Those Guys — both have legitimate "Best Player In The World" potential.

And JUST LAST WEEK, they traded Robert Covington, the beloved HBCU grad who was one of the gems they unearthed during The Process, for Jimmy Butler. And Butler is EXACTLY the kind of expensive, top-tier player they hoped to land in free agency:

bit.ly/2PryCNU

After that Butler trade, Brett Brown, who coached the Sixers through all of those dark years, nodded to the since-fired Sam Hinkie.

Hinkie didn't last to see it, but his crazy-ass plan to be as trash as the rules allowed...it WORKED.

https://twitter.com/YaronWeitzman/status/1062838764475764737

?

In 2015, the Sixers won TEN out of a possible 82 games; last season, they won 52. There are expectations now.

And they find themselves with THREE of Those Guys — all with big egos and quirky personalities that might not mesh.

It's not perfect, but this? This was the plan.

(The NBA, btw, has since changed its draft rules to make it less likely that being the worst team will nab the top pick. They wanted to discourage teams from tanking like the Sixers. So there will be no more Processes.)

It looks like the Process is finally over for the Sixers, too.

Now comes the FUN part. Now comes the HARD part.