Sam Hinkie Was Right to Leave the Sixers

Sam Hinkie was barely a month into his tenure as general manager of the Philadelphia 76ers when he shipped out the team's best player. During the 2013 draft, he sent point guard Jrue Holiday, coming off an All-Star season in which he averaged nearly 18 points and eight assists, to the Pelicans for sixth pick Nerlens Noel, then recuperating from a blown-out ACL, and a future first-rounder. At the time, writing for Grantland, I said the move was indicative of an organizational shift toward "bold, coldblooded dedication to asset collection." Three years later, that phrase still works, both murmured as praise by Hinkie's admirers and spat with disdain by his critics.

Yesterday, Hinkie tendered his resignation from the Sixers and with it ended one of the NBA's most compelling storylines. During his three years in Philadelphia, the 38-year-old with a background in finance and advanced metrics became one of sport's most polarizing figures, a one-man lightning rod for debates on "tanking" versus "losing culture" and chilly econometric analysis versus warm, beating, edible human hearts. He was heavily criticized for the team's dismal performance—the Sixers are currently 10-68, 30th in offensive rating, 25th in defensive rating, and have won three of their last 27 games—but he also scooped up a trove of young players and draft picks that may soon turn the franchise around.

In a bullet-pointed, 7,000-word letter to the team's equity partners—a manifesto that swirls (fake) quotes from Abraham Lincoln, references to extinct flightless birds, and documentation of the state of the Sixers—Hinkie explained his decision to walk away. "Given all the changes to our organization," he said, "I no longer have the confidence that I can make good decisions on behalf of investors in the Sixers."

"Changes" is oblique, but Hinkie is referring to specific events and people. In a midseason coup allegedly orchestrated by Commissioner Adam Silver, 76-year-old Jerry Colangelo, one of the league's good ol' boys, was wedged into the Sixers organization as Chairman of Basketball Operations. Then, in the kind of sleazy nepotistic maneuvering that eventually dooms franchises, the Sixers reportedly informed Hinkie that they were going to bring in Bryan Colangelo, Jerry's large adult son, as an equal voice. With his decision-making marginalized by the cronyism of basketball lifers and the cowardice of team ownership, Hinkie chucked up the deuce. It was the right decision.

Hinkie's departure has already inspired deep discussions about where his rebuild went awry. Which players he should have drafted. Which free agents he should have signed. Whether he should have been more cordial with agents or whispered more secrets to the beat writers who griped about a lack of access. Was he too smart and smug for his own good? Was he too blatantly uninterested in short-term competitiveness? Was he simply unlucky in how ping-pong balls ricocheted around the popcorn machine? In different circumstances, sure, he would still have his job. No shit.

None of that matters. For the Sixers, the painful part is over. The team is heading into this offseason with as many as four first-round picks, more cap space than any team in the league, a collection of young players on cheap contracts, and the possible arrival of both a healthy Joel Embiid (the third pick in the 2014 draft who has missed two seasons with a foot injury) and Dario Saric (a versatile Croatian forward who has twice won FIBA's Europe Young Player of the Year award). Hinkie did not construct a functional basketball team that made incremental annual progress, but that was never his intent; he was nourishing a dish of undifferentiated cells that could sprout in any direction. Going forward, the Sixers are in fantastic shape.

While amassing his war chest, Hinkie endured three years of ridicule and derision; he was accused of being more spreadsheet than human, of befouling the Great American Spirit of Sports. In his parting letter, Hinkie alluded to that vitriol: "To attempt to convince others that our actions are just will serve to paint us in a different light among some of our competitors as progressives worth emulating, versus adversaries worthy of their disdain." However overwrought his language, he weathered the brunt of letting haters hate.

Jerry Colangelo, a rich septuagenarian who lives in Arizona, entered the picture in December. The Sixers were mired in a losing streak and dealing with the aftermath of a drunken brawl in Boston that involved the team's rookie center Jahlil Okafor. Pressured by the league to polish up the team's optics, ownership acquiesced, allowing Silver to lodge an inside man deep within the organization. Colangelo began undermining Hinkie immediately, and his snakeskin prints were smeared across a succession of moves: the coughing up of two second-round picks for replacement-level point guard Ish Smith, the hiring of assistant coach Mike D'Antoni as a bench-riding mole, and the PR stunt of signing veteran Elton Brand as a glorified babysitter for Okafor.

The Sixers have been a laughingstock for three years and the public perception is that the franchise is in shambles. But Colangelo knew better. Bryan, who drafted Andrea Bargnani with the first pick in the 2006 draft while running the Raptors, was conveniently unemployed after failing to land a general manager position with the Brooklyn Nets. Now he has that job with the Sixers, well positioned to reap the benefits of three years of torturous team-building suffered by someone else. For a child born with a silver spoon protruding from his gums, this is how the tumblers of life clink into place. Doors simply swing open.

While it is truly grotesque that the Sixers have been deposited into the claws of the Colangelos, it couldn't have happened without spineless ownership. Josh Harris and his cabal of private equity investors bought the Sixers in 2011 for $280 million. According to Forbes, the franchise is now estimated at $700 million. One can see how their partnership with Hinkie was forged; they all come from a financial background and speak the language of distressed assets and market inefficiencies. There is no question that that ownership understood Hinkie's plan and, for a while, embraced it. Maybe they still do—after his resignation, the team released a statement saying they were "disappointed in Sam's decision." But their best attribute was patience; Hinkie could not have operated with such disregard for short-term success without a leash that few GMs ever enjoy.

So what changed? How did a group of investors who likely pride themselves on being disruptors transform into servile company men for the NBA? Why did they blink and let the Colangelos wrest away control of the team? It's hard to know. Maybe they're looking to flip the Sixers and believed Hinkie's refusal to sacrifice the future for the present would depress the asking price for the franchise. Maybe they're dweebs who enjoy hanging with the jocks more than their own pencil-pushing ilk. Maybe they're the same guys who mortgaged the team's future for Andrew Bynum. At any rate, the Sixers' owners have made one intelligent decision since buying the team: hiring Sam Hinkie.

Now he's gone.