The Ringer Names Sam Hinkie Executive of the Year
Though the All-Star break – the NBA’s de facto mid-way point – is still weeks away, most NBA teams have already passed the halfway mark. The Sixers have played 42 so far (on pace for just under 29 wins). So, we can start to reasonably predict the end-of-season awards. Mike D’Antoni is basically a lock for Coach of the Year. James Harden is the current front-runner for MVP. The Ringer handed those out and also predicted (or rather, bestowed) the other awards on whom they see as deserving. Two Sixers got hardware. Kinda.
The task of naming the Rookie of the Year went to Danny Chau who thought long and hard, weighed all of his options, and picked literally the only option:
From the summer of 2014 to 2016, the Sixers’ R&D laboratory was making crucial structural tweaks to their destroyer weapon behind closed doors. With over two years of rehabilitation under the shroud of front-office secrecy imposed by former Sixers GM Sam Hinkie, Joel Embiid was more idea than player, and in the bleakest moments of the Sixers’ run of premeditated futility, Embiid felt like an idea whose time had come to die. The life cycle of hype is volatile. Whatever greatness existed within Embiid’s gargantuan frame, it couldn’t possibly have survived such an extended stint of injury and inactivity.
Well, 30 games into his NBA career, it has. Oh my god, it has. Embiid — whose minutes cap was supposed to be a temporary precautionary measure — will likely play on a 28-minute restriction for the rest of the year, which effectively makes Embiid’s already-historic season a beta testing. Those team-imposed limitations have made him a per-possession titan of the highest caliber: Since 1973–74 — the season that blocks were first officially recorded in the NBA — no player has ever put up numbers like the 38.8 points, 15.3 rebounds, and 4.8 blocks that Embiid currently averages per 100 possessions.
With Embiid’s unearthly dexterity at his size, an overgrown Hakeem Olajuwon had always been a convenient comparison; but the more you watch him, the more it’s conceivable to align his impact on the game to Shaquille O’Neal’s 25 years ago. Of course, times have changed: Young Shaq devastated teams with raw power and inhumanly quick turnaround hooks and jumpers that took advantage of his wide-turn radius; Embiid’s shown similar capabilities, in addition to shooting at a higher percentage from 25-plus feet out (27 of 68) than Kyle Korver (or Klay Thompson, albeit on much fewer attempts) this year. O’Neal was at the vanguard of the NBA’s last golden age of centers. You could make the argument that there hasn’t been a center since Shaq who has magnified a generational style de rigueur in both athletic and personal charisma like Embiid has.
It’s the obvious and only choice. Embiid is gonna win Eastern Conference Rookie of the Month for the entire season – unless people start to feel bad, like when your teacher would tell that one dork to stop raising his hand, please – and his closest competition is either Malcolm Brogdon or Dario Saric. He’s going to be unanimous. Then, there’s Executive of the Year. Jason Concepcion was given that assignment and he gave the award to one man who I can guarantee you will not win the award– Sam Hinkie:
Joel Embiid, a 7-foot social media art installation on a minutes restriction, is putting up statistics which read more like apocalyptic metaphor than numerical representation of reality. Nerlens Noel is an energetic defensive terrorizer, roaming the paint and perimeter alike in search of lights to extinguish. The belated debut of no. 1 overall pick Ben Simmons — who has been garnering comparisons to Magic Johnson and LeBron James since he was … well, some unreasonably young age at which not much should be expected of anyone — is looming somewhere over the immediate horizon. Robert Covington is a dynamic, do-anything glue guy. Dario Saric just did this. And, a year after winning 10 games total, the Sixers are 15–27 midway through the season.
Boom. You’ve just been Processed…
That said, an admission: I don’t particularly find the Process, which is really just plain tanking but in a much more brazen and systematic way, all that clever. Neither am I a great admirer of Sam Hinkie, who has always struck me as being as much huckster as executive. He managed to weave Philly’s natural tribalism and his prepackaged mystique into a fine set of emperor’s robes, all encoded in a successful rebrand of TED Talks jargon. This is a dude who wrote a 13-page resignation letter studded with arcane academic and literary references, which defended, in detail, his tenure as Sixers GM, answering every charge leveled at him during his nearly three years at the helm of USS Tank. And he wants you to believe that he didn’t expect that the document would go public. Please. Hinkie was the GM of an NBA team — the subject of numerous media profiles — not the branch manager of a local bank. Do not for a second fall for this. That’s just a smart person’s version of Oh, this old thing.
Be that as it may. Sam Hinkie for Executive of the Year. It probably won’t happen. But it should.
It won’t happen this year, but with Hinkie saying he felt like he was “sharpening the sword” for an NBA return, the trophy could be his in the future.