The Sixers are Just Like "The Big Short" so Let's Cast the "Trust the Process" Movie

The Big Short failed to win any big Golden Globes, but it wasn’t for a lack of nominations. Both Steve Carell and Christian Bale were up for supporting actor awards (they likely cancelled each other out). So, that’s some of the high praise the movie is getting. The low praise? Bryan Windhorst thinks the Big Short is just like the Sixers.

As much as my opinion of Windhorst is that he’s terrible – note he mentions the Sixers cut Ish Smith twice, which just isn’t true – he does a good job tying the two together:

In the recently released film “The Big Short,” actor Christian Bale portrays a brilliant but awkward loner named Michael Burry. Burry was one of the first people in the world to predict the subprime mortgage crisis that sent the U.S. economy reeling starting in 2007.

Based on his own unique analysis, Burry wagered more than $1 billion of his hedge fund’s money against mortgage bonds (or “shorted” them) starting in 2005. Of course he ended up being dead on, and made incredible profits, which is why there’s a major Hollywood movie about it.

The true story of Burry, though, has a melancholy side. His investors disliked his methods and personality so much — Burry was often defiant and abrasive in the two-plus years it took for his bet to hit — that many of them left him even after he made some a 400 percent profit. Most never even said thank you. Despite incredible profits, the fund was closed without ceremony.

When Burry set up his investment he had perfectly read the market, but he didn’t have a perfect way to manage his investors for all those miserable days before everything reached fruition. In the early days, his investors had to watch their balances shrink as others won. He was more convinced in the outcome of the timeline than anything in his career, but that line of time itself turned sharp. Burry developed a bleeding ulcer.

It’s in this phase that Burry and Philadelphia 76ers general manager Sam Hinkie would find odd kinship. Like Burry, the studious and highly intelligent Hinkie was resolute about precisely how to tear down and rebuild the 76ers not just so they’d be decent again, but so they’d play the long game to maximize the likelihood of championships. Neither of them came to the decision without exhaustive study.

Also like Burry, Hinkie appears to have struggled to find backers with similar pain thresholds for that line of time that he dubbed “the process.”

And that’s not all. There’s actually some real-life crossover. While Burry was “winding down his position and getting out of the business in 2008, a brash investor named Joshua Harris was buying up the debt of failing investment banks.” That brash Josh Harris would eventually go on to fund the process. So, in a way, a Trust the Process film could actually be a pretty direct sequel of The Big Short. And with that in mind, let’s cast the (TV) movie based on The Process:

Go ahead. Tell me you wouldn’t watch that.