For all the hand-wringing, Sam Hinkie’s plan was fairly simple. He believed an NBA team needed two stars to transform into a perennial contender. Fifteen minutes into the 2014 NBA draft, it appeared he was halfway there. But there was no time to celebrate. There was more work to be done.
The Sixers also owned the 10th pick, acquired in the previous year’s draft night, and would be back on the clock in about thirty-five minutes. There were also the league-high five second-round picks that Hinkie had spent the previous year accumulating, and there’d be a host of other opportunities that would present themselves over the next few hours. For a team like the Sixers indifferent to on-court results and focused purely on asset accumulation, this would be the most important few hours of the year.
Hinkie was aware—more so than most—that the draft was an inexact science. He was open about this belief, too. He never tried selling himself as some sort of wizard; it’s why he had been so adamant about amassing as many picks as possible. He viewed the draft like a lottery—the more numbers he owned, the better his chances were at hitting a jackpot. But he also recognized that there were actions he could take to boost his odds. “We put more resources into the draft than anything else,” said a former colleague.
Like most GMs, Hinkie spent the year dispatching scouts all over the world. He wanted in-depth reports on every aspect of every prospect’s game. Not just the basics, like whether they could shoot or defend, but also the minutiae, like whether or not they could finish at the rim with both hands and, if not, what was holding them back. He was someone who paid attention to details like where a player positioned his thumb while shooting, and how that might affect the rotation of his jumper. He wanted his scouts to do the same. “We did a lot more work, a lot more detailed work than other teams or other GMs require,” former Sixers scout Frank DiLeo said. “But you could tell Sam was reading everything we were sending.” Hinkie believed all information was valuable—like, say, if one of his scouts knew a friend on a different team was visiting a certain school half a dozen times over a few months—and could be weaponized.
After the season, Hinkie gathered his front office and coaches at the team’s basketball offices at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, where the group spent more than a month evaluating, discussing, and debating players. His scouts often woke up with film assignments in their inboxes. These were assigned based on an algorithm developed, at the request of Hinkie, by Aaron Barzilai and Lance Pearson. “It was about coming up with a systematic way to determine how much info we have on guys and how much we should have on guys,” Pearson said. This meant weighing the importance of games (for example, the more NBA prospects in a game, the better), but also cataloging who among the staff had watched which player how many times. It was about trying to approximate the point of diminishing returns.
“We didn’t just use the so-called analytics stuff to spit out rankings,” a former member of the Sixers’ front office said. “We wanted to help make even basic things like watching film more efficient, too.”
During the lead-up to the draft, Hinkie would call the entire basketball staff into one of PCOM’s bigger meeting rooms. Together, the group of about twenty-five staffers would discuss every prospect. Hinkie encouraged everyone to participate. “Hearing a bunch of different views was something he deemed hugely valuable,” Barzilai said. But, wary of even accidental leaks, Hinkie kept his views to himself. Prospects were assigned a ranking of one through five in about a dozen different categories, from shooting off the dribble to pick-and-roll decision making. If a discrepancy existed between evaluations, Hinkie would have the attendees break for a few hours, watch film of the skill in question—maybe a point guard’s ability to drive to his left—and then return to share what they learned.
“If you are going to invest in the draft in a big way, you better be investing in scouting in a big way,” Hinkie said. “You better be trying to have an edge one way or another. You better be putting systems in place, a staff, and a way in which you make decisions that actually gives you an edge. Otherwise, you are just going to do something I call indexing. Where you take whoever is next on the board in the eyes of the public, and that’s a dicey situation.”
Draft night was the time for all that extra work to pay off. The Charlotte Hornets had selected a big man out of Indiana named Noah Vonleh ninth overall. The Sixers once again were on the clock. Holed up in his third-floor PCOM office alongside some team executives, head coach Brett Brown, majority owners Josh Harris and David Blitzer, and minority owner David Heller, Hinkie worked the phones and contemplated his options. Two whiteboards full of notes lined one wall. Binders featuring player rankings were splayed out on a table.
Hinkie and his scouts wanted Dario Šarić, a playmaking 6-foot-10 Croatian forward. Šarić, the twenty-year-old son of two former professional basketball players, had turned pro at the age of fifteen and had since established himself as one of Europe’s premier talents. He was coming off a season in which he’d been named Adriatic League MVP and had led his team to a league title. Most scouts believed him to be one of the ten best prospects in the draft. “Our guys had him around six or seven,” Pearson said. Hinkie had seen him play in Spain and the Sixers’ primary international scout, Marin Sedlaček, knew Šarić’s father and was a proponent of Dario’s. But Šarić had recently signed a new contract with Turkey’s Anadolu Efes, one that would keep him overseas for at least two more years. “It’s a better option for me, to stay two years more in Europe, to get more experience, to bring my basketball to a higher level,” he said at the time. This spooked most GMs. Few executive jobs offer less security and turn over more frequently. Wasting a lottery pick on a player unable to contribute for a couple of years was a risky proposition.
Hinkie wasn’t trying to add a few wins over the next few years. He had loftier goals, and assurances from Sixers ownership that they coveted the same things. Everyone was aware and in agreement that progress wouldn’t necessarily be linear.
“Sam would say that this is a unique ownership group with very lofty ambitions,” said a former colleague. “They were really focused on bringing a championship to the city of Philadelphia and were on board with what we were doing.” Some, like Heller, a minority owner who began regularly showing up at the Sixers offices about a month before the draft so that he could participate in meetings, were even helping to push that plan forward. “It was really the first ownership group to apply the private equity model to running an NBA team,” said a minority owner of a competing team. That model meant Hinkie had a runway that his peers did not, and with that came opportunity.
With the 10th pick, the Sixers drafted Elfrid Payton, a point guard from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. The decision confused onlookers and observers around the league. Payton was one of the top point guards in the draft, but he played the same position as Michael Carter-Williams, the reigning Rookie of the Year. Sitting in attendance at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, Carter-Williams appeared just as befuddled.
“I’m not really sure if I’m going to be moved or not,” he said minutes later during a live interview with ESPN reporter Jeff Goodman.
Hinkie wasn’t worried about position overlap—he figured that stuff often sorted itself out in the long run. There was also no rule stating that he was required to keep Payton. He knew, for example, that the Orlando Magic, picking at No. 12, had scouted him extensively throughout the college season. He also knew that Payton had wowed Magic executives during his private workout.
Hinkie and Magic general manager Rob Hennigan quickly agreed on a trade. The Magic would draft Šarić and deal him to Philly in exchange for Payton. They’d also send the Sixers a 2015 second-round pick, and a 2017 first-round pick (which had been sent by the Sixers to the Magic two years earlier as part of the Andrew Bynum megadeal). In the end, Hinkie had figured out a way to simultaneously grab the player he wanted and beef up his war chest.
Early in the second round, Hinkie picked up two long and athletic wings—K. J. McDaniels at 32 and Jerami Grant at 39. He also swung a couple minor deals, picked up another future second-round pick, and took a flyer on a twenty-year-old Serbian point guard named Vasilije Micić, who’d likely remain overseas longer for a few years, if not more. But the story of the night was what Hinkie had done in the first round. “You thought incrementally you’re going to continue to grow,” Sixers head coach Brett Brown said. After watching Hinkie select an injured player at No. 3 and then turn the No. 10 selection into a player under contract in another country with no buyout option, it was clear that there’d be no reinforcements on the way.
“Well, where are we now?” Brown asked Pearson in his office that night. He already knew the answer.
* * *
In August, Hinkie completed his purge. Thaddeus Young, a veteran forward and the team’s leading scorer the previous season, was sent to the Minnesota Timberwolves as part of a three-team deal. In return, the Sixers received yet another first-round pick and Luc Mbah a Moute, the career reserve from Cameroon who was a longtime mentor of Joel Embiid’s.
Now the Sixers were ready for the season. If Hinkie was Leonardo da Vinci, then the team’s opening-day roster was his Mona Lisa. Five of the fifteen players were rookies. Only two had more than two years of legitimate NBA experience.1 Seven had gone undrafted out of college—three more and the Sixers would already eclipse the record for the most undrafted players to suit up for one team in an entire season. Combined, the fifteen players were making about $25 million, nearly equal to what the Knicks were paying an over-the-hill Amar’e Stoudemire.
This was a team built to lose.
“The Thad deal really hit us hard,” Pearson said. “Before that there was still some uncertainty about how deep the rebuild would go. That was one of those moments where it became very clear.”
The season tipped off on October 29 in Indiana. The Sixers lost. They lost again two nights later in Milwaukee, and again the following night at home, and again two nights after that, and again two nights after that, and then they traveled to Toronto and they lost there and they traveled to Dallas and lost there and they traveled to Houston and lost there and they flew to San Antonio and lost there too.
Hinkie never instructed Brown to intentionally lose games. But he didn’t mind watching his lottery odds improve every night. A player would be signed to a ten-day contract one day, inserted into the starting lineup the next—“Tim Frazier would come in and you’d shake his hand and say, ‘Nice to meet you, you’re the starting point guard,’” Brown said—and then waived nine days later. One time Brown began barking for a player to sub into the game—only to be informed by his assistants that he was addressing the player by the wrong name.
“We’d have to pull up video of guys we vaguely knew and quickly get Brett a summary of their strengths and weaknesses,” Pearson said.
The Sixers played six more games in November. They dropped all of those. They opened December at home against the Spurs and lost that game too, dropping them to 0–17, one defeat shy of tying the mark for worst start in NBA history. A win in Minnesota on December 3 kept the Sixers out of the record books, but the season was already lost.
Amidst it all, Brown did his best to promote a positive environment in the locker room. Recognizing that employing a roster full of individuals clawing for jobs could undermine team unity, he did his best to insulate his players from Hinkie’s plan. “Because of Brett, it never felt like we were playing for a team that wanted us to lose,” McDaniels said. Brown rarely berated players, and when he did, it was for lack of effort, not mistakes. He often huddled with them on the side and inquired about their lives away from basketball. He invited guest speakers. He organized field trips, including one to the University of Pennsylvania to meet psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth, whose work on “grit” earned her a “genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation. He continued holding his current-event “State of the Unions.”
“He’d come in and talk about, like, the stars, like, what new star they found,” said Isaiah Canaan, whom the Sixers acquired in February. “He opened my mind to lots of things off the court.” Brown also made a point of being open with the media and effusive when detailing the improvements of his players. Buddying up to the press often softened the coverage of him and his player, and also helped create a connection with the few die-hard fans following along.
The geniality was appreciated, but with a young team devoid of veterans it was not always the proper approach. The night before media day, Carter-Williams and Tony Wroten were busted by a New Jersey State Police officer for smoking marijuana in a parked car on the highway. A couple months later, Carter-Williams, who’d convinced the Sixers to allow his stepfather to attend practices and felt untouchable, failed to get back on defense during a blowout and, when confronted by Brown, pointed to the scoreboard. Nerlens Noel, who after being drafted sixth overall missed his entire first season due to an ACL injury, returned to the floor, but continued showing up late and smelling of weed. He and Carter-Williams also “hated each other,” said the agent of one of their teammates. The feud dated back to their days as AAU teammates in Boston.
The biggest headaches, though, came from the team’s biggest player.
* * *
Late on the morning of October 16, Joel Embiid was alone in his apartment in downtown Philadelphia’s Ritz-Carlton when his cell phone began to buzz. It was his agent. There had been an accident back in Cameroon. A truck, its brakes had broken. It had charged into a schoolyard. A lot of kids were playing. Embiid’s ten-year-old brother, Arthur, was one of them. He was dead.
Grief and guilt overtook Embiid. More than three years had passed since he’d last seen Arthur’s round face and sweet eyes. He was angry with himself, angry that he hadn’t carved out the time to make it back to Cameroon, angry that he hadn’t brought his brother with him to the United States.
He spent the night in his apartment, mourning alongside Hinkie, Mbah a Moute, and Brown, who skipped the Sixers’ preseason game that evening. “That, for me, was one of the darkest nights of my life,” Brown said. “To see Joel in the state that he was in, and to feel very helpless on anything you could do to help other than to be with him. It was a long night.” Hinkie, who as a kid lost his older brother to suicide, could relate to Embiid’s sorrow better than most. “To learn that you have lost a sibling or a child is unfathomable,” he said in a statement released at the time by the team. “We are poorly designed for that kind of loss.”
Embiid flew back to Cameroon for the funeral. He spent about three weeks there before returning to Philadelphia toward the end of the month. He was already despondent over the foot injury that was sidelining him for the season. Now he was emotionally shattered, out of shape, and with nothing but FIFA and Madden to serve as distractions.
“When you’re going through so much, loss of your brother, that you haven’t seen in like three–four years, and you just had surgery and all that stuff, you’ve got thoughts coming in your mind,” Embiid said.
On the surface, Embiid seemed fine. Better than fine. His ability to master American humor was uncanny. He was jolly in front of cameras and clever on social media. He tried recruiting LeBron and Kim Kardashian (for different purposes) over Twitter. He live-tweeted a fake date with Rihanna, writing, “RENDEZ VOUS tonight (that’s actually French words) I bet she will love it when I speak French. They all do actually.” It all went viral, making him a sensation.
In reality, Embiid was depressed. He’d show up late to team flights and practices. He’d stay up all night and sleep in the afternoon. “I was a vampire,” he said. He amassed all sorts of team fines, none of which altered his behavior. He repeatedly defied the team’s insistence that he keep his surgically repaired foot in a walking boot. He preferred walking around in flip-flops, even when getting off a team bus during a snowstorm in Boston. He drank Shirley Temples instead of water and devoured fried chicken fingers instead of baked chicken breast. In the past, when he was healthy and playing, he could get away with consuming an entire plate of brownies. But now he was blowing off cardio sessions, which, due to the injury, were limited to begin with. As a result, his weight ballooned up to nearly 300 pounds (he weighed in at 240 pounds at the NBA Draft Combine in May). The team tried filling the fridge in his apartment with healthy food. The staffer tasked with restocking the supply would usually discover the previous week’s delivery unopened.
“It was a really hard year for him,” said Francois Nyam, Embiid’s agent at the time.
There was no question Embiid was acting unprofessionally. But there were understandable reasons. “I think if he could have played immediately there would have been no problems,” Pearson said. Here was a twenty-year-old kid (he turned twenty-one in March) who in the span of four years had seen his entire life uprooted. He’d gone from playing volleyball in Cameroon to basketball in the NBA. He’d changed homes four times in four years, and now had to cope with the death of his younger brother.
In late December, Embiid was in the visitors’ locker room in Portland’s Moda Center watching the Sixers–Blazers game on a TV when James Davis, a Sixers strength coach, approached him. Davis had been told to record Embiid’s weight. Embiid refused. He didn’t see the purpose. He wasn’t playing—why did his weight matter? Davis continued insisting. He had a job to do, and he couldn’t leave without getting a number. Embiid tried ignoring him. Davis refused to let up. Finally, Embiid lost his patience, unleashing a verbal tirade.
“He was reacting emotionally to someone with a job that was frustrating to him,” said Pearson, who witnessed the incident. “But I’ve been in other situations in locker rooms where there have been fistfights with coaches and players. This was not that. This was a four on a scale of one to ten.”
After the game, Brown was told about the altercation. The team flew to Utah that night. Embiid was sent home.
“Joel has all the resources that he needs back in Philadelphia,” Brown coyly told reporters before the Sixers’ game the following day against the Jazz. “It’s more of a structured, stable environment where he has the machines that he can lift on, the people that he can see, team-doctor-wise. He’s at an interesting stage of his recovery. Imagine when you are a big man like Joel Embiid, and you are trying to make sure his diet and his weight are where they need to be so we can help him. We feel like we can achieve that better in Philadelphia.”
The Sixers spent the next week playing in Golden State, Phoenix, and Los Angeles before returning to Philadelphia. One afternoon that week, a few hours before a game at the Wells Fargo Center, Brown was ushered into a large room. Nearly every member of the Sixers’ basketball staff was awaiting him.
“Why are we here?” Brown asked. He knew the meeting was about Embiid, but didn’t understand why dozens of his colleagues felt compelled to meet with him in this sort of setting.
One of the assistant coaches stood up. “Coach, we’re here because there’s a problem with Joel,” he said. “He’s disrespected just about everyone in this room and has become a major distraction.”
Brown was livid. “Jesus Christ!” he screamed. “You mean to tell me my entire staff is here and this is going on and no one told me?” He turned to Billy Lange, an assistant coach whom he’d designated as his chief of staff. “Billy, why the fuck didn’t I know about this? Why wasn’t this brought to my attention? I got the whole fucking staff here for one guy!”
Lange believed he had tried passing along the staff’s concerns. He tried reminding Brown.
“You did not tell me,” Brown shouted. “I’m sitting here and I’ve got my whole staff here—I’ve let everybody down.”
Brown promised to address the issues. But disciplinarian was never a role he was comfortable playing.
“Even after that meeting nothing changed,” said a person who was present. “It was a fucking circus.”
* * *
Hinkie was aware of it all. But he felt it best to devote his energy elsewhere, to asset hunting and preparing for the following summer’s draft and laying a new foundation for the future. The day-to-day stuff was left to Brown. This, Hinkie believed, was the way it had to be. “The coaching staff and front office are operating under different incentive systems,” he once told Pearson. One group was trying to win games; the other was constructing a team that it hoped would lose. These two values could coexist, but only to a point.
Part of this was continuing to modernize his front office. Courtney Witte, a former college basketball player and the team’s longtime chief scout, was let go. Sachin Gupta took on even more responsibility. Hinkie also recruited Ben Falk away from the Portland Trail Blazers, naming him vice president of basketball strategy.
Falk was twenty-five, wore glasses, and had hair like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. He wasn’t tall and his basketball career had ended before high school. But what he was was brilliant. He’d scored 1600 on his SATs. He’d landed an unpaid job with an NBA analytics guru during his freshman year in Maryland. After he graduated, the Blazers hired him to be their “basketball analytics manager.” Players and staff nicknamed him “Wiz.” He was great at crunching numbers, but “he was also very helpful in the basketball part beyond analytics,” said Blazers head coach Terry Stotts. Stotts credited Falk with convincing him during one off-season to change the way his teams guarded opposing pick-and-rolls (big men were told to stay back at the rim and concede pull-up jumpers), a tweak that bolstered the Blazers’ defense. More than that, Falk approached his job like Hinkie: He was relentlessly curious, had no interest in regurgitating NBA tropes, and understood the difference between process and results.
Gupta and Falk became Hinkie’s chief lieutenants, making the Sixers the rare team to be led by a group of executives who had never even played college ball, let alone in the NBA. The three spent countless hours huddled together, searching for potential edges. A favorite was hunting for second-round picks. The group recognized that most GMs considered them to be like scratch-off tickets, investments generally not worth the time or trouble. Hinkie disagreed. For one, players drafted in the second round weren’t granted guaranteed contracts. This gave Hinkie leverage to sign them to a team-friendly, risk-free, high-upside deal. After the 2014 draft, Hinkie offered his top second-round picks, Jerami Grant and K. J. McDaniels, similar four-year contracts, the longest offer permitted. The first two years would be guaranteed with a salary around $850,000, about $300,000 more than the minimum teams were required to pay second-rounders and a major boon for kids about to earn their first paychecks. But there was a catch: The last two years of the deal were not guaranteed. If the player stumbled, he’d be cut; if he played well, he’d be drastically underpaid for four years. These deals came to be known around the league as Hinkie Specials.
As was the case often with Hinkie, this strategy set off alarm bells throughout the league. The players’ union advised agents to reject these offers. “You can understand a team wanting to have some financial control early on, but to attempt to impose this on players in that position was very cold,” one union executive said. “It’s playing within the rules, but we didn’t think the right way to do business.” Some agents were able to protect their clients. Grant took the deal, but McDaniels, on the advice of his agent, Mark Bartelstein, rejected Hinkie’s offer. “That’s just not something we would sign,” Bartelstein said. “We negotiated a lot but Sam had a structure he really wanted and he didn’t want to come off of that.” Bartelstein explained to McDaniels that he was better off accepting the one-year, unguaranteed $507,336 offer granted to all second-rounders and taking his chances on the free agency market, either the following summer or, if he got cut, over the upcoming season. McDaniels did and, after being traded in February, signed a three-year, $10 million contract with the Rockets in July.
Hinkie began scooping up second-rounders wherever he could.2 A favorite tactic was using all the cap space he had to absorb other teams’ flotsam, and then charging a pick as a broker’s fee. An added bonus was that it happened to be a way to save his owners millions of dollars.
NBA rules stipulated that all teams spend a certain minimum on player salaries (90 percent of the cap). In the 2014–2015 season, that number came out to $56.8 million, meaning the Sixers entered the season about $30 million short. There was no punishment for failing to reach this mark, just a rule forcing a team to divvy up among its players the difference between its total payroll and the “floor.” There were loopholes, though, ones Hinkie was more than happy to exploit on behalf of his owners.3 One was that a team had all season to reach the floor. Another was that if a team traded for a player, his salary for the year would count against the cap, even if he were waived, and even though he’d be paid at a prorated amount. Twenty-five players suited up for the Sixers over the 2014–2015 season, mostly on minimum salaries. But Hinkie made sure to acquire a few with bloated contracts as well, pushing the Sixers above the floor and doing so while also keeping that money out of the pockets of their players (and their commission-seeking agents).
The union was furious. So were agents, who were already exasperated by Hinkie’s ways and agitated by one of the league’s thirty teams essentially removing itself from the marketplace. Hinkie frustrated many of them. He was difficult to deal with. He ignored texts. He tried crushing them in every negotiation. He wasn’t interested in strengthening relationships over two-hour lunches, or placing phone calls to check in or pass along player updates. “It was heavy lifting dealing with him,” said one prominent agent. For many of them, this represented a swift change from how business was typically conducted. For all the money it brings in, the NBA is a small world. There are a few fringe shops here and there, but the same dozen or so agents represent the majority of the league’s players, a status that often granted them the upper hand in negotiations.
“This is a world where you have to deal with the same people for a long time in many different settings,” said an assistant general manager of a different team. “The my-way-or-the-highway thing, it doesn’t work. If I completely annihilated you this time, then why would you help me at all in the future?”
There was more to the resentment, though. It wasn’t just that many agents felt slighted. Fair or not, many of them believed Hinkie to be dishonest.
In December, the Sixers acquired thirty-three-year-old forward Andrei Kirilenko from the Brooklyn Nets. The Nets were desperate to wipe Kirilenko’s $3.3 million off their books, and, for the price of a second-round pick, the Sixers were more than happy to help.
But Kirilenko had no desire to play for a tanking team. More important, he was a father of two whose wife was pregnant and on bed rest in their Brooklyn home. Kirilenko had stopped accompanying the Nets on road trips and his agent had informed all suitors that he would likely be in and out until his wife gave birth. Nets general manager Billy King had told Kirilenko’s agent that Hinkie had agreed to waive Kirilenko after the deal so that Kirilenko could sign wherever he wanted on his own timeline. The problem was that the message was never passed along to Hinkie.
After the deal, Hinkie asked Kirilenko to report to the team. He figured Philadelphia being so close to Kirilenko’s New York City home made this feasible. The goal was to showcase Kirilenko to the rest of the league and then flip him to another team for a future asset before the February trade deadline.
Kirilenko refused. In early January, the Sixers decided to try bullying him into reporting. They began fining him around $50,000 for every day he refused to show up, which continued until the union mediated. Only after the passing of the February 19 trade deadline did Hinkie finally agree to a buyout.
That same week, Hinkie dealt Carter-Williams to the Milwaukee Bucks. Carter-Williams hadn’t grown the way the Sixers had hoped, with his shooting regressing even further. But his raw tools intrigued the Bucks. “We liked Michael’s ability at the time to run a team, we liked his size and his fit with our roster,” John Hammond, then the Bucks’ general manager, said. Hinkie agreed to trade him in exchange for the rights to a future Lakers first-round pick that the Suns owned. It was a savvy deal. The Lakers and their star, Kobe Bryant, were both on the decline. Hinkie recognized there was a strong chance this pick would end up in the lottery, and even in the top five, and that Carter-Williams’s numbers were mostly hollow, and so he pounced.
Old-school fans and media panned the move—How can you trade the reigning Rookie of the Year? Fans and reporters more steeped in the sport’s advanced metrics and in favor of Hinkie’s plan praised it. The trade was in line with Hinkie’s general approach—he’d taken an 11th pick and a year later turned it into a likely top-five selection—but in his haste to complete the deal he’d failed to notify both Carter-Williams and his agent of the impending trade.
“I was pretty up-to-speed and pretty involved. As far as I heard I was involved in the long-term plan, especially with me, Joel [Embiid] and Nerlens [Noel],” Carter-Williams told reporters a few days later. “It was really us three that was the core group and were told that we were going to be [there] for a pretty long time and we really want to build around [you guys]. I understand that things change and plans change. I guess that Sam and the rest of those guys thought that to move me was the best move. That’s on them and it is what it is.”
Later that week, Carter-Williams’s agent, Jeff Schwartz, issued a directive inside the office of his agency, Excel Sports Management. “He told all his colleagues and employees that there’d be no more dealing with Hinkie or the Sixers,” a longtime basketball executive said. Schwartz, one of the league’s most prominent and powerful agents, typically represents around thirty players at a time and his firm usually represents around 25 percent of the league.
Hinkie’s view was that all this would be mended when the Sixers eventually took that next step. Maybe Schwartz could enforce his Sixers ban with his lower-level clients, but if the day ever came where Hinkie was offering one of his players a max contract, would Schwartz or any other agent really be able to block a deal—and be willing to reject a possible commission—because of an old grudge?
“It wasn’t that Sam didn’t know how to act,” said a former Sixers colleague. “It was that he was making business calculations and had different priorities.”
Hinkie didn’t feel the need to kowtow to agents, and he certainly wasn’t going to put those relationships before his chase for high-level assets, like a potential top-10 pick. Unlike many of his peers, he had no line. It didn’t matter if he was chasing an All-Star, a lottery choice, or the chance at a future second-rounder. In his view the job was black and white, and he had trouble seeing the ways in which carrying this mentality was laying the foundation for his process to be cut short.
It wasn’t just the players and their representatives whom Hinkie was alienating. Executives with other teams grew frustrated with his lowball proposals. “He was always throwing out the worst fucking offers,” one opposing general manager said. His propensity for taking hours to respond to calls and texts in the middle of negotiations frustrated everyone. Opposing owners noticed all the open seats in their arenas whenever the Sixers came to town and worried that Hinkie’s strategy was hurting business. “It’s not complicated,” said Milwaukee Bucks co-owner Marc Lasry. “No one likes coming to see a horrible team.” Over the summer, at the behest of the rest of the league’s GMs and in response to Hinkie’s plan, the NBA nearly flattened the draft lottery odds so as to not reward teams for losing (the potential change was surprisingly and narrowly shot down in an October vote among NBA GMs).
Worse, in the wake of their draft night decision to send the Sixers Šarić and a first-round pick for the rights to Elfrid Payton, the Orlando Magic began telling colleagues that Hinkie had only managed to fleece them because he had a friend inside Orlando’s offices passing along inside info. The allegation was never substantiated, nor, for that matter, did it explain why Magic general manager Rob Hennigan felt the need to part with two extra draft picks to get Payton. Even if there was a man on the inside, he had no power to force Hennigan into agreeing to a trade.
Around the same time, the Pelicans issued an accusation of their own: The Sixers, they said, had not fully disclosed Jrue Holiday’s injury history prior to the two teams’ 2013 draft night deal.4 Holiday had suffered a stress fracture in February 2014, about seven months after being traded. That he had undergone a physical with Pelicans doctors before the trade, or that the injury the Sixers were accused of not disclosing had never prevented him from playing and had nothing to do with the stress fracture, was beside the point. None of it prevented Pelicans general manager Dell Demps from lamenting to colleagues how Hinkie had lied to him. All that mattered was how the accusations fit with the image so many around the NBA had of Hinkie.
Everyone—agents, opposing owners, opposing executives—began excoriating Hinkie and the Sixers to reporters. A narrative began to form, one that Hinkie declined to push back on. Contrary to popular belief, he was more than happy to chat with reporters on background, but rarely offered on-the-record opinions.5 He didn’t see the value and was worried about doing the very thing he was often accused of—celebrating himself and his methods while running a last-place team.
“[Hinkie] is the biggest fraud I have ever encountered during my 40 years in sports media,” wrote Angelo Cataldi, one of Philadelphia’s most prominent sports broadcasters, in a column on the website PhillyVoice. “He is a charlatan, a snake-oil salesman. He is the Pied Piper of the young and the naïve, people who are not savvy enough to spot the con.”
This, in turn, triggered aggressive responses among his supporters, both inside and outside the league, and it all coincided with a point where sports were suddenly being consumed from the perspective of management, with fans and media members pretending to be GMs and viewing players as “assets” that are bought and sold. Hinkie was now the face of this. Suddenly, he represented something greater than the Sixers, whether he wanted to or not. To detractors he represented everything that was wrong with the data-over-people modern GM. To his supporters, he was a revolutionary leading the army of progress onto the beaches of an anachronistic NBA. Hinkie never claimed such a role. But that didn’t stop the rest of his detractors—both inside the league and out—from projecting it onto him so that they could pick it apart.
“Tanking wasn’t unique, but he went further than anyone else and the people tried to make it sound like he was reinventing the wheel,” one GM said. “That was one of the reasons he was met with so much resistance. All that stuff poisoned the public well.”
The losses piled up as the season inched along. Ownership, previously in Hinkie’s corner but now hearing the noise from friends and the media, began pushing him for a timeline. “But Sam didn’t believe in setting dates like that,” a colleague said. “There was a plan on where we were going and how we were going to get there, but Sam knew it needed to be flexible so that you can properly react when things don’t go your way.”
The pressure was starting to build. Hinkie, Gupta, and Falk thought about ways to explain their vision, and Hinkie presented all the progress he believed the Sixers had made. Nerlens Noel had returned to the floor and made the NBA’s All-Rookie team after nearly averaging a double double and flashing some advanced defensive skills. Joel Embiid’s fractured foot was healing well. Dario Šarić was a year closer to coming over. They’d added three first-round picks and six second-rounders to their war chest and, after finishing the season on a 10-game losing streak to fall to 18–64, the league’s third-worst record, would once again be drafting in the lottery.
“They tell us every game, every day, ‘Trust The Process,’” guard Tony Wroten told ESPN The Magazine’s Pablo Torre in January 2015. Hinkie never publicly deployed the phrase, but it would become a rallying cry around the Sixers and their faithful. No phrase better represented Hinkie’s vision or the war he was now fighting.
1 Technically, Malcolm Thomas, a 6-foot-9 forward, was entering his third season in the NBA, but his “experience” consisted of a grand total of 135 minutes played for four different teams.
2 Between the 2014 and 2015 drafts, Hinkie picked up seven second-round picks, including one for the year 2020, a draft so far into the future that it would feature a crop of players who at the time of the deal were still in middle school.
3 And which, thanks to the Sixers, would be closed in future collective bargaining sessions.
4 The accusation would make it into the press in June 2015. Contrary to reports of a $3 million fine from the NBA, the two sides settled for an amount closer to $1 million.
5 The one anecdote he would share with reporters on the record? That his favorite author is Robert Caro, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who spent decades working on biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson. (No one ever accused Sam Hinkie of being subtle.)