Roast the Sixers—But for the Right Reasons

The Philadelphia 76ers are worthy of mockery. After dropping 18 straight games to start this season, the team now has lost 27 consecutive time, spooling back to last year on some family plan rollover shit. The Sixers score the fewest points in the NBA while leading the league in turnovers, in part due to a point guard rotation that includes marginal pros T.J. McConnell (undrafted out of Arizona) and Phil Pressey (undrafted out of Missouri). Only two of the team's five lottery picks in the last three drafts have touched the floor this season, combining for barely more than 1,000 minutes. By all means, roast away.

Bad teams are always targets for jeers. Last year's blatantly tanking New York Knicks were an unending source of comedy; the dysfunctional Sacramento Kings and their tinkering owner Vivek Ranadive are easy punchlines; current incarnations of the Los Angeles Lakers (2-14) and the Brooklyn Nets (4-13) are case studies in big-market buffoonery. With the Houston Rockets struggling, even James Harden, who finished second in last season's MVP voting, has become a bearded embodiment of the Jordan crying-face meme.

But the lousiness of the Sixers, a franchise in the third season of a dramatic top-to-bottom rebuild, has engendered a peculiar variety of fury from basketball's self-appointed moralists. The venom is aimed at general manager Sam Hinkie, who has shown total disinterest in short-term success by declining to sign free agents, drafting several players who were injured or under contract overseas, and relentlessly flipping talent for future assets. It doesn't help that Hinkie is a pasty non-jock with an MBA from Stanford who rarely speaks to the press and previously worked under analytics advocate Daryl Morey in Houston. Besides presiding over a terrible team, he's the kind of guy a traditionalist like Charles Barkley lusts to wedgie.

Those who find Hinkie's methods distasteful have eagerly sought surrogates through which to channel their grievances: the players who allegedly acquire bad habits, the innocent sports agents who have been mistreated by Hinkie, the suffering fans strong-armed into witnessing bad basketball, coach Brett Brown and his career record. Last year, the Philadelphia Daily News wrote that management had created a "toxic" environment with its "mostly non-NBA roster," and Chris Broussard tweeted, "Sixers r a disgrace, creating a losing culture that good young players may likely want to leave." Bill Simmons, in a Grantland article called "10 Steps to Tanking Perfection," wrote, "There are no good lessons from intentionally getting your asses kicked every night."

The handwringing has only intensified, particularly over the past week, as it was revealed that 19-year-old rookie center Jahlil Okafor has been involved in a series of incidents that included a pair of late-night altercations, a ticket for driving 108 miles per hour on the Ben Franklin Bridge, and owning a fake ID. In a roundball version of "Please think of the children!" wailing, Okafor's issues are not evidence that he might be a bad drunk and a teenaged doofus but a damning indictment of the entire rebuilding process. On ESPN's First Take, Stephen A. Smith suggested that the Sixers players could be "psychologically warped from perpetual losing" and that upper management was "pathetic and inexcusable."

The prevailing narrative of the moment is that Okafor, who was presumably molded into an upstanding citizen by Mike Krzyzewski at Duke, is vulnerable because the Sixers lack enough veteran leadership on the roster. But in recent months, other NBA players have also run afoul of the law. Jordan Hill was charged with reckless driving after being nabbed speeding at 107 miles per hour. Mike Scott was busted with weed and molly after leading police on a car chase. Ty Lawson was arrested for drunk driving. The Morris twins, Markieff and Marcus, faced assault charges. Rarely was the organizational methodology, team composition, or on-court performance of the Pacers, the Hawks, the Nuggets, or the Suns blamed as a contributing factor.

While the Sixers are indeed young, there's no evidence that a long-toothed teammate could have prevented Okafor from mashing the accelerator—and the team's roster includes Carl Landry, a nine-year vet, as well as Tony Wroten and Kendall Marshall, both fourth-year players, anyway. Should Philly monitor Okafor more closely going forward? Obviously. But it's a disingenuous angle from which to vilify Hinkie.

As Philly's general manager, Hinkie hasn't been perfect. In the 2014 draft, he used the third overall pick on Joel Embiid, a freakish athlete with a broken foot who still has yet to play a game. In the following draft, Hinkie took Okafor. While he leads all rookies in scoring, Okafor has appeared a less ideal frontcourt fit than the Knicks' Kristaps Porzingis, who was selected with the next pick.

It hasn't been all glum news, however. Nerlens Noel is already one of the most destructive defenders in the NBA, and second-round pick Jerami Grant has a delightful penchant for trying to sledgehammer dunks on the domes of anyone within a 15-foot radius. Even as pundits cry that the team lacks veterans, Hinkie used his finite roster spots to sift through D-League talent, eventually unearthing Robert Covington, a silky-shooting forward who currently leads the NBA in steals per game and has an egregiously team-friendly contract.

In optimal conditions, the Sixers were going to be bad this year. On top of youth and inexperience, they've been saddled with a difficult early-season schedule and tormented by injuries (only some of which were expected). Landry, Wroten, and Marshall have yet to play a game; Embiid is out for his second consecutive season. Noel and Covington, the team's two best players, have missed a combined 13 games. If Philadelphia gets healthy, it surely has more talent than the group that won 18 games a year ago. That's what a rebuild is supposed to look like, and the Sixers also have a potential trove of four first-round picks in the upcoming draft.

Despite the Sixers' ghastly record, there have been granular signs of progress. The team always plays hard, and has blown fourth-quarter leads in five straight games, all of which have been single-digit losses on the road. During that stretch, Philly's Net Rating is -4.0, the same or better than ten other teams, including the Jazz, the Suns, and the Wizards. Like last season, the Sixers' offense features a gorgeous, high-value shot chart and wretched execution—it's kind of like a Fibonacci spiral finger-painted by toddlers (and splattered liberally with turnovers). But the defense is rounding into decent stinginess again. Currently ranked 22nd due to a porous start, Philly has been stymying opponents at roughly a top-ten level in recent weeks. The Sixers could get obliterated by 30 on any given evening and send these numbers into a noxious plume of black smoke, but they're glimpses of promise.

In truth, the Sixers' elongated losing streak will have far less impact on the players, the coach, or the franchise's future than it does in sculpting the public perception of the team. The bleating from skeptics has never been louder, and the mantra of "Trust the process!" is now shifting toward "Trust the process?" With a few more unlucky bounces, both on the court and in the lottery, the rising crescendo of noise and discontent could jeopardize Hinkie's patiently laid plans. So, yeah, a few wins here and there would help.