Allow me to anger the Process-ers.

I firmly believe Sam Hinkie did a very good job in not only tanking – that’s easy – but also in allowing the Sixers to stockpile draft picks and assets that have turned into Joel Embiid, Nerlens Noel, Jahlil Okafor, Dario Saric and Ben Simmons… and Lakers and Kings first round picks. And cap space.

The Bryan Colangelo salad-tossing stooges who write articles – many of which came before Colangelo did anything here – lauding the current Sixers GM’s abilities are just a bunch of butthurt normals not able to embrace the sort of radical, against-the-grain thinking Sam Hinkie was man enough to put into practice.

HOOOOOOOOOWEVER, Hinkie may have been the Sixers’ fall guy for good reason.

I shant give Joshua Harris and his nerdy, white colleagues any credit for actually planning for things to unfold this way, but hiring Hinkie and empowering him to blow the team to smithereens and then replacing him with a legacy basketball man, from a legacy basketball family, the Colangelos, which had THREE of their grown, human-sized zygotes in the Sixers’ war room on draft night (!!!)*, turned out to be a stroke of genius. Hinkie did all the dirty work, ruined the Sixers’ reputation with the league, nearly found himself on a hit list crafted by Adam Silver (probably), and took all of the abuse and blame for what was the most embarrassing era of basketball in Philly history. For all those reasons, he was never going to bring this thing home. After what he did to players, agents and the sanctity of basketball in general, he had little chance of succeeding both in future wheelings and dealings and in luring big-name free agents to his side of the tiny circle that is the NBA and its associated ecosystem of advisers, hangers-on, and enablers.

Enter Colangelo, who is already rumored to have wielded his family’s Team USA influence to potentially nab Harrison Barnes in free agency, whose presence is spawning articles calling Philly a free agency destination. I don’t know if he’s the right guy to bring this all together (I’m 50-50), but he certainly has the pedigree, name and league approval to do so. We can thank Hinkie for putting Colangelo in this position, but can also simultaneously acknowledge that he wasn’t the right guy for Phase 2.

This is where – and I can’t believe I’m about to do this – Joshua Harris gets credit. He enabled Hinkie to try this crazy-ass thing, and probably would’ve let it go on longer had the league not stepped in. He may deserve little praise for hiring Colangelo(s), essentially a league plant, but he does get credit for allowing Hinkie to exist as he did, even if it was all a ploy to keep costs down and maximize team value thanks to league-wide economics that have little to do with the Sixers’ on-court success or failure. And even though his state-of-the-art practice facility, opening this year, may have been paid for exclusively by New Jersey taxpayers, and even though he owns the Devils, and even though he is a billionaire dick who parks his fucking helicopter on youth soccer fields, he has somehow stumbled into having a team stocked with young talent, a world-class training facility, tons of cap space, and a GM with enough connections to actually land a high-profile free agent when the time is right. It’s… hard to argue with where the Sixers wound up, even if they mis-stepped their way here (Andrew Bynum, Adam Aron, horrible fan relations).

I will forever be grateful to Sam Hinkie, and I don’t think his so-called haters appreciate (or can even comprehend) his genius. But he had to go. Hinkie had to die. He served his role, his purpose. But, in some sort of sad irony, he, too, was expendable… just like his assets. We thank him for his service, and the countless second round picks he left Colangelo with.

*Picture splain:

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