Jason Richardson was sitting at home watching the 2013 draft when he saw the news flash across his TV screen: The Sixers—his Sixers—were trading Jrue Holiday, just twenty-three years old and already the team’s best player, for a…draft pick?
The deal shocked Richardson. Thirty-two years old, he recognized that he was no longer the young, high-flying, 20-plus-points per game scorer that he once was and that his time in the NBA was winding down. But he wasn’t interested in spending his final days in the league playing for a tanking team.
Richardson fired off a couple of text messages. “I don’t know what’s going on here,” he wrote to Holiday. Another was to his manager, Paisley Benaza. He told her he was worried about his future. Benaza researched Sam Hinkie, the Sixers’ new general manager. She learned that he didn’t particularly enjoy dealing with agents or managers.
“You should speak with him in person and ask him these questions,” she told Richardson.
In September, a few weeks before training camp, Richardson and Benaza met Hinkie in his PCOM office. Hinkie came out from behind his desk, set up three chairs in a circle, and laid out his plan.
“He was very candid about what the strategy was,” Benaza said. “It was clear that this was tanking.”
But, Hinkie clarified, he wasn’t solely interested in constructing a team to lose games. Yeah, the Sixers would be running a young, inexperienced team onto the court. But, he said, he also planned on investing in player development in a way the Sixers never had. “He said he wanted to give the players everything,” Benaza recalled.
The team was going to build a new training facility, one where the players wouldn’t have to worry about tripping over med school student intramural games. They’d start utilizing technology to better track players’ on-court performances. Not only would analytics be employed, but the numbers and what they meant would also be explained to the players.
“You could tell how excited he was,” Benaza said. “It was definitely a ‘This is my dream job,’ kid-in-the-candy-store type of thing.”
True to form, it was Hinkie who asked the majority of the questions. He wanted to know how Richardson believed a team could build a winning culture, and how it could best support its players, and what examples from his career he could share.
The three met for nearly an hour. As Richardson was walking out, Hinkie asked if he had any good local restaurant recommendations.
“I need one that will be open late and let me use the back door,” Hinkie said. “Everyone in the city is going to hate me.”
Richardson and Benaza laughed.
“But it will all be worth it,” Hinkie said.
* * *
The Sixers had a little over a month to assemble a coaching staff for Brett Brown. Most NBA observers assumed they would surround him with a group of veteran assistants and maybe one person with experience as a head coach. That’s how teams with first-time head coaches typically operated.
Hinkie wasn’t concerned with conventional wisdom. And anyway, player development was his priority, not winning games.
Two of the coaches hired by Hinkie and Brown—Lloyd Pierce and Chad Iske—were known as experts in this area. A third, Greg Foster, was a former NBA big man who was coaching at the college level and, just ten years removed from his playing days, was still nimble enough to join players on the court. A fourth, Billy Lange, was an energetic forty-one-year-old Villanova assistant.1 The lone outlier was Vance Walberg, a longtime high school and college coach who broke into the NBA the previous season. Walberg was known for pioneering the “dribble-drive” offense, an attack predicated on spreading a defense thin and attacking its holes, exactly the sort of fast-paced, attacking offense Hinkie—and Brown—believed to be most effective. Both men knew the Sixers didn’t possess the players to win many games in the present, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t begin implementing the schemes they believed would produce wins once the talent arrived. Brown was upfront with all of them.
“He explained it all,” Foster said. “But he also explained why he thought it was an exciting opportunity. We were going to be on the ground floor of something.”
As he prepared for his first season at the helm, Brown leaned heavily on his Spurs background and the pedigree that came with being associated with one of the NBA’s most revered franchises. “He did a lot of things that [Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich] did,” Walberg said. “He wanted to bring that culture and offense, and just make a few tweaks.” Brown also did his best to invoke the Spurs name whenever possible. He’d bring up war stories during film sessions. He’d mention Duncan during practices. He’d begin each day with quick discussions about current events, just like Popovich did with the Spurs. The players, many of whom were young and receiving their first taste of the NBA, ate it all up. “We all had big eyes and were ready to listen because he came from the Spurs,” said Tony Wroten, a guard acquired by the Sixers in August. “He coached Tim Duncan. He was with Pop. He had championships.”
The Sixers opened training camp in late September. Brown’s primary focus was fitness. His practices resembled college workouts. He was energetic and enthusiastic but also tough. “If you messed up, he’d let you know, but then he’d come back with a positive message,” Richardson said. He’d force players to pass conditioning tests. He’d have Lange and Foster put players through college-style drills. It was all about developing skills and teaching the game.
The Sixers dropped their final four preseason games, all by double digits.
“You have six NBA players and then you have a bunch of guys who are fighting for spots and want to be seen and need an opportunity,” was how Brown assessed his team at the time. Oddsmakers, who in their preseason over/under totals predicted the Sixers would win a league-worst 17 games, agreed. “The challenge is harder than I thought,” Brown told reporters before the start of the regular season. “We were grounded and realistic coming in. But having lived and breathed it, you can see it a little bit more intimately for what it really is.”
On the last Wednesday in October, the Sixers welcomed the Miami Heat to Philadelphia for their regular-season opener. The Heat were the defending champions. They boasted a lineup full of future Hall of Famers: LeBron James, Chris Bosh, Dwyane Wade (who was out that night). The Sixers were starting a trio of mediocre veterans (Evan Turner, Spencer Hawes, and Thaddeus Young), a rookie point guard in Michael Carter-Williams, and a journeyman forward named James Anderson. Clash of the Titans this was not. The Sixers, though, managed to open the game with a 19–0 run. Wells Fargo Center was booming. Carter-Williams, making his NBA debut, was brilliant. His handle was smooth. He was quick and fast and athletic. One possession he’d strip a Heat ball handler and charge down the floor for a dunk. On the next he’d contest on a shot, grab the ball, and fire a pinpoint cross-court pass.
The outburst awoke the Heat. They charged back in the second half and took an eight-point lead with just six minutes remaining.
That’s when Carter-Williams took over. He hit Hawes under the hoop for an easy two and then found him again, this time for a three. Down one, with just over two minutes left, the Sixers stripped Heat point guard Mario Chalmers and Carter-Williams hit Hawes again, this time for a streaking layup, to put Philly ahead. With 27.5 seconds left and the Sixers clinging to that one-point lead, Carter-Williams soared high above the basket following a Heat miss, corralled the ball, was fouled, and then knocked down one of two free throws, putting the Sixers ahead by two. Eighteen seconds later he splashed another two free throws to seal the win. He finished the night with a video-game-like stat line: 22 points, 12 assists, nine steals, and seven rebounds, one of the greatest rookie debuts in the history of the game.
“What a debut for Michael Carter-Williams!” shouted Sixers broadcaster Marc Zumoff on the telecast as the final buzzer sounded. “Simply amazing.” Hall of Fame point guard Magic Johnson tweeted his praise.2
Brown and his players were ecstatic, and even more so after winning their next two games. Nobody—not analysts, not fans, not Brown, certainly not Hinkie—expected a 3–0 start. The Sixers were running and moving the ball and shooting lots of threes, and then running some more. All those preseason conditioning drills were paying off. Everything that former head coach Doug Collins—an old-school type who directed his teams to play slowly, take care of the ball, and shoot twos over threes deep—seemed to preach, Brett Brown seemed to scratch. “We were really excited,” third-year center Lavoy Allen said. The players knew better than to read into early season results. But they couldn’t help but feel a tinge of optimism or keep from wondering, What if?
* * *
Such flights of fancy didn’t last long.
Things got ugly fast. The Sixers started the year 4–2 before losing 26 of their next 30 games. With the season slipping away, Brown was approached by his assistants. They wanted to know if Hinkie would be willing to bolster the roster.
“This is what we’ve got, this is the plan,” Brown told them. “We’re going to stay with it.”
The losses tortured Brown. He knew before he took the job what he was getting into, but expecting failure and experiencing it are two different things. Sometimes after games he’d call Popovich, looking for a pick-me-up. Sometimes Harris would come by Brown’s office to pick his brain and offer some reassurance. Brown would listen, then meet with his coaches, or take them out for dinner (he’d always pick up the bill). He did his best to keep his frustrations bottled up, especially in front of his players. The day after losses he often came in toting an uplifting quote. He knew that his ability to remain positive was one of the reasons he had been hired.
“At night the losses hurt,” Walberg said. “But the next morning Brett was always right back at it. To me that was, by far, the most impressive thing about him.”
That got harder and harder as the season inched along. The Sixers went all of February without winning a single game. They were 15–43 at the end of the month, and in a flurry of deals prior to the league’s February 20 trade deadline, Hinkie had gutted the roster even more. Allen and Turner were shipped to the Indiana Pacers. Hawes was sent to the Cavaliers. In return for three of his best players the Sixers received…four second-round picks, plus an NBA Development League forward named Earl Clark. Hinkie filled the open roster spots with cheap free agents.
“It was like a college team,” Brandon Davies, a rookie big man, said. “We had so many young guys trying to make a name for themselves and there were so many guys coming in and out, it was hard to develop chemistry.” NBA rosters are allowed to carry fifteen players. Most teams see, maybe, eighteen suit up for them in one season. The Sixers in Hinkie’s first year had twenty-eight come and go. Six of them were originally signed to minimum, ten-day contracts. Twelve had spent time in the NBA Development League. Some were acquired and then cut before ever putting on a Sixers uniform. Some would arrive the day of the game, meet Brown for the first time, and a few hours later take the floor with the starters.
“The turnstile,” Foster said, “made it really hard to build relationships with the guys.”
Brown did his best to remind himself that the Sixers’ priorities were long-term. He focused his energy on areas like player development. He worked with Lance Pearson, an assistant coach from a small Kentucky college with undergraduate degrees in mathematics, computer science, and philosophy, and a PhD in cognitive and neural systems, on laying the foundation for the future. Pearson, about 6-foot-4 with long hair, broad shoulders, and a thick Kentucky accent, had been hired late in the summer after applying for the job online. His résumé mentioned that he’d developed a tracking program to aid and enhance basketball scouting. It was exactly the sort of technology and thinking Hinkie appreciated. To him, traditional coaching and advanced analytics were part of the same equation, not competing ideals. That’s where Pearson came in. Instead of sticking him in a basement office, Hinkie made him a part of Brown’s staff. And Brown, Pearson said, “was open to anything that could give him an edge.”
One of Pearson’s primary projects was to chart games—but not in a traditional sense. The Sixers weren’t interested in the outcomes; they were interested in tracking the actions that led to the outcomes. They knew that, statistically, a team could get cleaner looks at the basket if it pushed the ball, so Pearson tracked how quickly Sixers players ran up the floor. He tracked passes deflected. He tracked shots contested.
“It wasn’t about things directly tied to winning and losing, because we knew that wouldn’t have a lot of payoff,” Pearson said. “We wanted to develop a culture so that when we did get the talent, everything was in place stylistically.”
During games, Pearson and a staff of nearly a dozen, all armed with laptops, would set up in the players’ lounge at PCOM. They’d follow the action on the four TVs hanging on the walls, shout out results, and mark them down. Each player would receive a grade for the game. The results would be cut up and packaged, with video clips to accompany each merit. The grades would be posted for the players the next morning.
“You could score 40 or 50 points and still someone would say how you didn’t box out enough or that you didn’t get enough deflections,” said Tony Wroten, a second-year point guard. “We weren’t being shown highlights of points.”
Wroten never scored 40 or 50, but, in averaging 13 points per game, he was a pleasant surprise. One morning, after a particularly impressive performance—“One of the best games of my life,” he said—he arrived at PCOM smiling, expecting plaudits and pats on the back. Then he was handed his grade for the previous evening, a D.
“I thought it was a typo,” Wroten said. The coaches sat down with him and explained why his grade was so low. They had clips of missed box-outs, of not sprinting up the floor. “It made sense after they showed me the reasons,” he said.
The tracking wasn’t limited to in-game performance. Players were given bracelets to wear at home, so that the team could monitor their sleep. They were told during practices to wear devices from an Australian-based company named Catapult, so the team could monitor biometric data such as heart rate and cutting speed. They were outfitted with individual water bottles so that the team could monitor each player’s hydration.
“I never had any of that type of stuff before,” Richardson said.
Initially, there was some pushback, especially from the veterans. “Things like tracking sleep feel like too much,” Allen said. Richardson often felt like the Sixers were “babysitting” the players. But as time went on, he and his teammates grew to appreciate how much effort the team was putting into maximizing their performances. The charting also provided the players with a form of competition where they could actually succeed. Players took pride in seeing their name at the top of the deflections list the day after a game. Some compared heart rate levels after practices. They’d lobby assistant coaches for more merits. The younger players, most of whom were fringe talents fighting for their NBA futures, viewed these metrics as an avenue toward proving their worth.
“Every day was like a tryout and lots of those numbers were visible in practice,” Davies said. “I’d kill myself on the court.”
Recognizing the reality of his job, Brown devoted as much energy to preparing for practices as he did for games. He’d map out the sessions to the minute, and apply lessons learned as the son of two professional teachers. “He was so energetic,” Richardson said. He’d keep film sessions short and to the point. He used visuals. He showed players data so that they could understand why their mistakes were problems. “He wouldn’t pull a player for taking a bad shot,” Pearson said. “But he would tell them why it was bad.” He also did his best to make the players feel valued and comfortable.
“He was always telling us that we could come speak to him if we had any sort of issues with anything,” Allen said. “I think that was the greatest thing about him.”
Brown first passed this message along to Allen in October, a few weeks before the start of the regular season. It was a meeting with Brown the day after Allen had missed a practice, one made open to fans. He’d partied the night before, overslept, and, upon calling the Sixers that morning to let them know he’d be late, was told to stay home.
The next day he was summoned to Brown’s office. He was told that he was fined. “But instead of scolding me he asked me if there was anything going on in my life, he just wanted to make sure I was all good,” Allen said. “It was great to see our coach actually cared about his players.”
The interaction earned him Allen’s admiration. It also laid the foundation for a problem that would plague the Sixers for years to come.
* * *
Jason Richardson had seen a lot over his twelve seasons in the NBA. This, though, was something new.
“I know we ain’t waiting for no goddamned rookie who’s not even playing,” he shouted over and over.
It was a winter afternoon, and Richardson, one of the last remaining veterans on the roster, was settled into his seat on the Sixers’ chartered plane. Everyone—the players, the coaches, the support staff, some executives—had already boarded. By this point the travel day schedule was routine: Practice in the morning, media availability afterward, 3 p.m. flight. Most players arrived at the airport between 2:15 and 2:45. Occasionally, one would hit traffic on the drive over and notify the team’s head of security, Lance Williams, via text.
Nerlens Noel was different. Describing him as someone who’d be late to his own funeral would be a cliché. It would also be accurate.
“I definitely had to grab him by the collar a few times,” Foster said.
A year earlier, scouting services had ranked Noel the top high school prospect in the country. A 6-foot-11 pogo stick with a 7-foot-4 wingspan, he could run and jump unlike any other player in his class. He enrolled in Kentucky and would have likely been picked first in the 2013 draft if not for tearing the ACL in his left knee during a late-season game.
That night, on the bus home, Kentucky coach John Calipari found Noel, head lowered, shoulders slumped. He sat down next to him and wrapped his arm around Noel’s neck.
“This is going to kill our team, that’s how good you are,” Calipari told him. “But this isn’t close to the end for you. This is not going to hurt you at all.”
Calipari explained how a torn ACL wasn’t the injury it once was. Science, he said, had advanced to the point where players now almost always returned to the court.
“NBA teams won’t be concerned,” Calipari told Noel.
Noel spent the next four months rehabbing in Birmingham, Alabama, and in June was picked up by the Sixers in a draft-day trade. To Hinkie, Noel was the prototypical modern NBA center. He was big and mobile. He was athletic. He’d already proven that he possessed the proper instincts to protect the rim. If the Sixers weren’t going to compete, what did it matter if Noel spent the year watching from the bench?
Hinkie permitted Noel to remain in Birmingham through September, an allowance some on his staff, who had scouted Noel at Kentucky and been briefed on his immaturity, viewed as a mistake.
Noel hadn’t grown up with much structure. His parents separated when he was young. He and his three siblings lived with his mother in Everett, Massachusetts, a city just outside of Boston. She supported them by working double shifts as caregiver in assisted living facilities.
Noel learned at a young age just how much power his athletic gifts afforded him. His parents rarely attended school functions or games, and their absence created a power vacuum. Noel watched in high school as various adults—his high school coach, a former college assistant coach a former star recruit, a club coach, a low-level agent—all flocked to him, hoping to secure a piece of that soon-to-be-delivered NBA bounty. It wasn’t a surprise that basic professional skills like punctuality seemed confounding. Noel had grown up watching the world revolve around him.
“I tell everyone who drafts one of my kids, ‘You’re getting a nineteen-year-old, not a twenty-four-year-old, you need to understand that,’” Calipari said. “Here, we’re on top of them. They have no choice but to do the things we want.”
“We knew Nerlens had some issues,” one former Sixers front office staffer said. “Drafting him only made sense if we were going to surround him with vets.”
Sixers staffers who had traveled down to Birmingham to check in on Noel’s progress received troubling reports. In September, right around the start of training camp, he joined the team in Philadelphia. It didn’t take long for the problems to present themselves.
Noel was almost always late, be it for a team flight, practice, or rehab session. Guessing his arrival time became a part of his teammates’ pregame routine. He’d often show up to practices smelling of weed. Sixers security would sometimes receive calls from the team hotel about the stench of marijuana emanating from his room. He accrued tens of thousands of dollars in team fines during his rookie year, each one issued via a pink slip. Sometimes teammates would walk by his locker and see a stack of them on top of his chair.
“You understand that things happen, but when they become a constant issue, like you’re late for everything, then you’re not being a professional,” Richardson said. “You’re not taking your job seriously.”
One problem was that Brown didn’t seem to know how to address this sort of behavior other than by issuing fines. “He wanted to be more of Nerlens’s friend,” Walberg said. But Hinkie didn’t push him either. He’d drawn a clear line between the work he was doing in the front office and what was happening out on the court. He rarely attended practices, almost unheard of for NBA GMs, who view those sessions as a prime opportunity to evaluate their players, build relationships with them, and show their support. “I don’t see the value,” he once offered a staffer as his reason. He told Pearson that much of this was by design; after all, the coaching staff and front office had different incentives and goals. Brown wanted to win games. Hinkie did not. He was better off devoting his time to other endeavors.
Noel did finally arrive at the airport that winter day. It was around 3:30 when he pulled up in his white Range Rover. His lateness had delayed takeoff by about a half hour. He parked his car, met Lance Williams by the TSA checkpoint, and climbed the stairs toward the plane’s cabin. He walked by the coaches and straight to his seat. No one said a word.
* * *
The Wells Fargo Center was nearly full for the first time in months. Attendance during the season had dipped to an average of 13,869 fans per game—the second-lowest number in the NBA. Sometimes tickets would be available on StubHub for a nickel. Some fans would show up with brown bags covering their heads. Yet on this March Saturday night, 17,438 fans had filled the arena to watch the 15–57 Sixers take on the 26–46 Detroit Pistons. Dozens of reporters and prominent talking heads, vultures eager to pick at the wreck, had descended too. “We knew it was going to be a circus when ESPN flew in Stephen A. Smith,” Carter-Williams recalled. In their locker room before the games, Sixers players could barely dress without tripping over cameramen searching for B-roll.
Two nights earlier the Sixers had fallen to the Rockets, their 26th straight loss, tied for the most in NBA history. One more would solidify their spot in the NBA record books. Their last win had come on January 29, in Boston, on a Turner buzzer-beater. “Tell you the truth, I don’t even remember it,” Thad Young told reporters before the game against the Pistons. Fifty-nine days had passed since then, all of February and now almost all of March. TV ratings had plummeted. Callers flooded Philly talk radio calling for Hinkie’s head. Hosts labeled him a disgrace. Local sportswriters blasted him in their columns. The streak had also brought national attention to him and his plan, changing the narrative around both. “Embarrassing,” is how Stan Van Gundy, a former Miami Heat and Orlando Magic head coach, described the Sixers during an early March panel on tanking at the MIT Sloan Conference. “If you’re putting that roster on the floor, you’re doing everything you can possibly do to try to lose.”
NBA commissioner Adam Silver, also in attendance at the conference, was asked to share his thoughts on the Sixers.
“You don’t like to see any team have to go through a losing streak like they currently are and flirt with the longest losing streak in the history of the NBA,” he said. “That’s bad for everyone. It’s potentially damaging to the players involved and the culture they’re trying to create.”
Brown tried his best to keep his players insulated from the attention bubbling around the streak. “Play Hard, Smart, Together and Have Fun!!” he’d write on the whiteboards before games. But by this point the team’s failures had become one of the top stories in all of sports.
“All the players watch SportsCenter and see all the coverage,” Pearson said. “You could tell it was weighing on all of them. If anyone in the world thought they, or the coaches, were trying to lose every game—if they just looked around they would have seen it wasn’t true.”
Against the Pistons the Sixers rolled out a starting lineup of Carter-Williams, Young, two undrafted players (Henry Sims and Hollis Thompson), and one who’d spent a chunk the previous season in the D League (James Anderson). The game remained close for the first few minutes, but midway through the opening quarter the Sixers began pulling away. They led by 19 at halftime and 30 by the end of the third. About a half hour later, with the scoreboard reading 123–98, the final buzzer sounded. The streak was over; the Sixers’ seldom-used victory music blasted out of the Wells Fargo Center speakers. There were hugs in the stands and smiles on the court.
That night, players, coaches, and even members of the front office went out for drinks. Some coaches made the ninety-minute drive to Atlantic City. “Everyone felt the need to celebrate,” Pearson said. The Sixers’ season would end eighteen days later, with consecutive wins, bumping their record up to 19–63. They’d beaten Las Vegas’ prediction, and even avoided finishing with the league’s worst record. The Milwaukee Bucks, a team not built to lose, had won just 15 games—in the view of Hinkie and his supporters, delivering a point in his favor. Lots of teams were bad. The Sixers at least had a plan, and with it came a bright future.
They had cap space. Thanks to their terrible record and the Jrue Holiday deal the previous year, they’d be receiving two high picks in the upcoming draft. Noel would be returning to the floor the following season. And Carter-Williams had just become the third player since 1951 to lead all rookies in points (16.7), rebounds (6.2), and assists (6.3); he’d later be named Rookie of the Year. Reinforcements seemed to be on the way. Harris and his partners were happy. The only direction left to travel was up.
1 He also hired a bunch of younger intern and player development coaches who in upcoming years would be tasked with coaching Brown’s middle school son. Excited to be in and around the NBA, none had any issues with the request.
2 We’d learn a few years later that this wasn’t exactly the compliment we all once thought.