I don’t know this guy and don’t have anything against him, but these tweets pop up every year when the Sixers crash out of the playoffs and they’re always a reach:

We do this annually. Whenever the season ends, we get a referendum on the process, which ended years ago. There’s only one draft pick remaining from the process (Joel Embiid) and we’re multiple GMs removed from the era, which started with Sam Hinkie and took us through Bryan Colangelo, the Brett Brown + Elton Brand gap year, and now Daryl Morey. We’re also on our third coach in 10 years and one week away from marking the 11th anniversary of when Hinkie was first hired.

You can make an argument for the process ending in a few different spots, namely:

  1. when Hinkie, the guy who started and engineered the entire thing, left in 2016
  2. when the last of Hinkie’s acquired assets was used
  3. when Brett Brown was fired and Doc Rivers and Daryl Morey entered the picture

Those are the obvious, clean break points, in my mind, and they all happened several or many years ago. A lot of folks will argue that the process ended the day the architect resigned. Others will argue for a continuation of the era through the exhaustion of Hinkie’s accrued assets, which looks to be 2021, when the 2nd round pick acquired in 2015 was used to draft Filip Petrusev. You could also say that the Brett Brown and Ben Simmons departures put the final nail in the coffin, if you’re considering Simmons/Brown/Embiid/Fultz to be the main pieces of the rebuild. But to argue that the era continues because of Embiid himself feels flimsy. He’s literally the only player remaining from an epoch that began a full decade ago. It’s Embiid and ownership, and that’s it.

I touched on this in a 2023 column titled “There is No Point in Redefining The Process After Every Sixers Playoff Exit,” writing this:


“It’s pointless and exhausting and repetitive. What happens is that people make up arbitrary process end dates to fit whatever narrative they want to peddle. If you were anti-Hinkie and anti-Process, you’re likely pushing the ten years angle, because you want to keep attaching the failure to the rebuild that you disagreed with in the first place, likely to score cheap “I told you so” points. And if you’re a Hinkie apologist, you’re saying the Process ended when he left, rendering the project incomplete and putting the blame on people like Bryan Colangelo and Elton Brand instead.

…

In truth, there’s so much blame to go around, and everyone knows this. Hinkie deserves his share of the blame for this lack of success. Bryan Colangelo deserves his share. Same with Brett Brown, Elton Brand, Josh Harris, Doc Rivers, Daryl Morey, Barbara Bottini, Adam Silver, Jerry Colangelo, Alex Rucker, Ned Cohen, Marc Eversley, Joel Embiid, James Harden, Ben Simmons, Klutch sports, Tobias Harris, Markelle Fultz, Ebony Fultz, Raymond Brothers, the peanuts that tried to kill Zhaire Smith, Drew Hanlen, Keith Williams, and dozens of other people or inanimate objects we’ve probably mercifully forgotten about. Ten years spun us a vast web of errors that continued to hamstring whatever batch of players or executives were next in line.”

In 2025, when the Sixers crash out again, perhaps we will simply re-rack the previous year’s story. Work smarter, not harder.