Glen Macnow:

As a fervent critic of The Process, it would be disingenuous for me to deny that. Anyone with eyes can see that the Sixers are nicely set up for the future, with more lottery picks coming. Hinkie deserves a good deal of credit for that.

…

Was Hinkie a genius? I don’t think so. By not signing a point guard one season and rotating through dozens of “gypsy players,” as Brett Brown called them, Hinkie showed guts more than brains. His plan was to deliberately lose for as long as it took, even as external pressure kept building to pull the plug.

So give him credit for brass balls. And, while I still can’t figure why he drafted both Nerlens Noel and Jahlil Okafor, give him credit for foresight in taking Embiid and Dario Saric.

Eat crow? Maybe a wing’s worth. I’ll never apologize for refusing to root for my team to lose. I still cannot abide charging patrons full fare and deliberately putting out an inferior product year after year. Yes, my problem may be mostly with the NBA’s inane structure, but I still consider long-term tanking a sports crime.

I like Glen and respect his contrition here – good luck getting the same out of anti-Hinkie zealots Marcus Hayes, John Smallwood and Howard Eskin – but dismissively giving Hinkie credit for being bad (a backhanded compliment at best) is a convenient way for process-haters to sample their crow without ever swallowing. No argument that Hinkie never really started to build a team, because doing so would’ve literally been antithetical to the process or, more specifically, tanking. So when Macnow pats Hinkie on the back for drafting Joel Embiid and Dario Saric and then criticizes him for drafting two other centers, I think it misses the entire point of the process, which was to accumulate as many assets as possible with the stated goal of having optionality.

In an alternate universe, Embiid would’ve never recovered from his foot injuries and become Andrew Bynum 2.0, and Saric would still be playing in the aftermath of a failed coup, while Jahlil Okafor was an all-around stud and Nerlens Noel a third-year starter. The point is, drafting three centers and taking a shot on Saric and not trying to build a roster was an intentional effort to draft the best, most-talented available players and cross your fingers that one or two of them would work out.

It would’ve been very easy for Hinkie to pass on Embiid, but he possessed the most upside. And when you have the number of assets and picks the Sixers had – and oh by the way continue to have – it affords you the opportunity to swing for the fences. Hinkie hit a home run with Embiid, a double with Noel, struck out on Okafor, and [insert feat from whatever the hell game they play in Croaita] for Saric. He was 2-for-4 with a home run. He was playing the odds. If he tried to build the perfect team through draft picks and trades, it’s possible the process could’ve been accelerated, but it would’ve required exactness and certainty where exactness and certainly are far from guaranteed. One draft miss or a bad trade could’ve set the Sixers back years or jettisoned them to the heights of mediocrity. But by stockpiling enough so-called lottery tickets, the Sixers were sure to hit on one or two, thus giving them a chance to become great. The only way to put themselves in that position, however, was to keep losing. So what the criticism of Hinkie really amounts to is a somewhat irrational hate of losing on the part of some, which Macnow readily admits.

I talked to Glen about his piece and he was quick to point out that his issue was never that it could work, but that the method was unacceptable. That’s fair. He’s no Smallwood or Eskin. He’s no Angelo Cataldi, who today complained about fan acceptance of the Sixers’ handling of Embiid and said the phrase “trust the process” makes his blood boil. There’s certainly a generational divide here. But I still fail to see why it is so hard to admit that what Hinkie did was not only the best option, but also that there was actually a little bit of method to the madness. The Sixers are in the position they are because he never tried to build a team. Because he was a martyr.