"Sigh."

“Sigh.”

One month ago, Sam Hinkie was asked how we’ll know when his plan has come to fruition. “You’ll know,” he replied. “We’ll all know.” It was a completely understandable thing to say — that the team will be so successful (hopefully) that we’ll know it worked — that lazy writers harped on for being ambiguous or avoiding the question. And while everyone else used that argument for their first column after the trade deadline, Sam Donnellon saved it for now, for some reason.

But really, that’s not even the laziest part of Sam Donnellon’s column today. The whole thing is a cover-all bingo winner of lazy sports tropes. Self-righteous “what about the children” nonsense? Check:

I fear for the children … I fear for the ones too young to have seen Brad Lidge drop to his knees, Allen Iverson break Michael Jordan’s ankles, the Flyers rally from an 0-3 hole against the Bruins, the Eagles finally make it to the Super Bowl.

Hinkie only knows math? Check:

[The Sixers’] bold master plan of accumulating enough high draft picks to eventually leapfrog over the middle of the pack and straight to the top is authored by a man without any championship pedigree, just a math plan.

Ruben doesn’t know math? Check:

The task of rebuilding again will fall on the shoulders of Ruben Amaro Jr. – the same guy whose little-in-return trades might have accelerated the team’s demise, the same guy who championed the one-last-shot philosophy over the last two seasons, defying some obvious and stark realities.

Chip Kelly doesn’t care because he could always just run back to college? Yup:

[Chip] is our greatest hope – and greatest fear – for the immediate future. In acquiring not one, not two, not three, but four potential impact veterans with recent histories of serious injury – three to multiyear deals – Kelly is clearly going for broke this year … But if it blows up on him? He’s got an escape hatch in every major NCAA conference

I get that all of the local teams sucking (or at least 3 of 4) makes columns hard to write. It makes blog posts hard to write too — and I am honestly thankful to Ron Hunter — but when your columns become harder to write, you work harder to write them. You don’t just recycle the memes of the Cataldis and the Eskins and the Hayeses of the world. No one is reading that and saying “Hmm, so you’re telling me Sam Hinkie is a math nerd and Chip Kelly just wants to go back to college? Interesting.” Lazy analysis feeds lazy fandom and lazy thought. And it’s just the same thing over and over. If “Sam Hinkie isn’t a basketball guy” was your actual newsprint, it would be past the stage of being recycled into insulation and well into the “animal bedding products” stage. We’re lining rabbit cages with it.