Hot, expected, garbage. That’s what the behind the scenes look at Hinkie’s departure from Adrian Wojnarowski seems to unveil. After sitting behind the scenes while Jerry Colangelo leaked whatever he wanted to beat writers both local and national, Hinkie is out:

He expected ownership to respond to him and work toward a joint public announcement on Thursday, sources said. Within two hours of sending the email, the letter had been leaked – Jerry Colangelo was Hinkie’s strong suspicion, sources said – to a media outlet.

Hinkie was mortified to see his words in the public arena, never expecting that a private correspondence to his superiors would become public and turn into something of a mocked manifesto. He wanted to tell his staff of his decision on late Wednesday or Thursday morning, once he talked with ownership about how his departure would be made public.

Woj’s sources – who may actually include Hinkie this time around – speak of a concentrated effort to force Hinkie out from the day Colangelo signed on with the Sixers:

In the end, Colangelo wanted two things: to turn Hinkie into a glorified director of analytics, or run him out completely, sources said. In several parts of the Sixers’ ownership group that wasn’t well-received. Even today, Hinkie still holds strong support with several members of the Sixers’ ownership group. They believed his plan could have harvested results this summer, sources said, and that he should’ve been afforded more time on this grand experiment …

From the start, Colangelo felt that Hinkie didn’t have the necessary people skills to run an NBA organization, that he was too buried in numbers and pie graphs and PowerPoint presentations. Jerry Colangelo constantly lamented the absence of what he termed “real basketball people” in the organization …

For several weeks and months, Sixers ownership, Colangelo and Hinkie discussed different scenarios of front-office partnerships, sources said. Colangelo had convinced ownership that it needed a more basketball-savvy executive with better interpersonal skills to join Hinkie; or even simply to overtake him.

The Sixers had Hinkie meet with Danny Ferry to discuss bringing him aboard alongside (or in place of) Sam, but people across the spectrum told Joshua Harris and David Blitzer that sharing power would never work. “Nevertheless,” Woj says, “they had given Colangelo authority to make changes to basketball operations, and Colangelo was pushing for change.”

Hinkie always believed Jerry planned to find a way to put his son Bryan in power – weird how that worked out, huh? – but Bryan reportedly had to be convinced to take the Sixers job. He’d have rather taken the Nets job that he was a finalist for but didn’t get. “Ownership and O’Neil insist[ed] that Bryan Colangelo was the best candidate to turn the Sixers’ two potential lottery picks and salary-cap space into a playoff team sooner than later,” according to Woj.

The Sixers will undoubtedly scoff at the charges of running Hinkie out of his office for flexing nepotism muscles, but it’s a tag they won’t (and shouldn’t) be able to shake.