I get it. You have to ask questions – dumb, insightful, and everywhere in between – to encourage people to call in. It’s the nature of the game. But I’ve seen this same question posed in a couple of different ways over the past week or two and I want to address its fatal flaw: Those aren’t two different things, goddammit!

Here’s what The Process is/was: Turn a painfully mediocre team into a painfully bad one, with the goal of making them a remarkably good one. Losing, taking on salaries, and trading for future draft picks all served one purpose. You tank to increase your chances at attaining at least one star-level talent. The way the NBA is built now, the general consensus is that once you have three stars, you’re a good to great team, and what you do around those three stars determines how high you can climb. The Sixers have one star in Embiid and likely a second in Simmons. The third star can come through the Sixers’ own pick*, through swapping said pick with the Kings, using the Lakers’ pick, or a trade/free agency.

Right now, the Sixers are playing very good basketball. They have the NBA’s best defense in 2017. They just beat the Clippers, without Joel Embiid, behind the play of Richaun Holmes and T.J. McConnell. These are Process wins.

Sam Hinkie was often critiqued for “trading the Sixers’ best players.” What he actually did was trade players who were not foundational pieces but had mid-to-high level value. Embiid is a foundational piece. Simmons is a foundational piece. There is nothing you can do right now to purposely make this team worse just for the purpose of making them worse, and you shouldn’t. This team is the Process. The Process is this team. And that stays the story no matter how many wins they get this season.

*FiveThirtyEight is currently projecting the Sixers to win 30 games, and still end up tied for the NBA’s third-worst record. They have the Lakers at #2. With a little lottery luck, the Sixers could have two top-5 picks, and still win 30 games. That’s about as Process as it gets.