At the present moment, there are any number of things with which you can take issue regarding the Sixers:

  1. Bryan Colangelo, for as of yet failing to move Jahlil Okafor
  2. Bryan Colangelo, for lying
  3. Scott O’Neil, for allowing Colangelo to lie
  4. Joshua Harris, for being the owner while every one of his GMs has stone-cold lied about injuries
  5. The ticket sales reps, for being misleading jackasses
  6. The medical staff, for not being able to rehab basically any lower extremity injury

Things with which you can not take issue at the moment:

  1. SAM HINKIE!

Everything is coming up Hinkie at the moment. He managed to win the DeMarcus Cousins trade all while sitting in the faculty lounge at Stanford with his newfangled haircut and stubble. Of course he couldn’t forsee the Kings trading the best center in the NBA for two cents on the dollar (though he did also obtain the Kings’ protected 2018 first round pick which became an unprotected 2019 first round pick, knowing that Cousins’ deal with the Kings was up in 2018), but he very well may have FORESAW that Vlade Divac and Vivek Ranadive would be completely inept at constructing an NBA roster and that owning their pick swap rights would give the Sixers two irons in the fire in what now shapes up to be a deep draft. That trade is maybe the best example of the philosophy of optionality– the Sixers gave up basically nothing and in return got a useful player (Nik Stauskas) and the opportunity to improve their draft standing a few years down the road. Put more bluntly, the Sixers got more from the Kings in a cap clearing deal than the Kings got from the Pelicans for DeMarcus Cousins. Just like no one could predict which lottery pick – Joel Embiid, Nerlens Noel or Jahlil Okafor – would become the star, no one could predict that the Kings would choose the last two months of this season to bottom out. But when you give yourself enough opportunities for success, you’re bound to hit the jackpot somewhere. Sure enough, thanks to Hinkie’s scamming – or is it scheming? – the Sixers now have a center to build around and a potential superstar in Simmons, and they’ll have essentially double the ping pong balls in the lottery for what portends to be a deep draft. And the Kings’ first round pick in 2019. But sure, old heads can keep yelling at clouds about how Hinkie didn’t know what he was doing.