Two Sundays ago, just a few days after Joel Embiid was named NBA MVP, the Philadelphia 76ers were bounced from the playoffs by the Boston Celtics. It’s the third straight year, and fifth time in six seasons, that the Sixers lost in the Eastern Conference Semifinals; the franchise has not made the Conference Finals since 2001. Just two days after they were eliminated, the team fired head coach Doc Rivers.
This inability to crack the NBA’s final four teams has loomed so large in Philadelphia, in large part because of the unfulfilled promise of “The Process,” the sustained period of tanking/rebuilding that the Sixers underwent in the middle of last decade, beginning under General Manager Sam Hinkie. The story of “The Process” has been told so many times now (Bleacher Report wrote a “definitive history” six years ago, for example) that yet another piece on it might seem redundant. I debated long and hard over whether writing such a piece was even worth it. But given that this is a socialist sports newsletter, and “The Process” has implications for labor and class that ricochet throughout the sports world, it feels like a story worth reviewing.
My goals with this piece — which will be told in three parts — are: 1) to define what “The Process” even really is or was, and why it caught on when it did; 2) to examine what it reveals about the relationship between labor and management; 3) to question whether it actually failed, and whether that failure was inevitable; and 4) to figure out whether the ideas behind “The Process” are still with us, and whether there’s anything in them worth salvaging. I think these questions have ramifications for not just the NBA, but sports in general, and even workers writ large.
What Even Is “The Process”?
Before we start, though, we should probably try to define what we’re even talking about. After all, jokes and memes about “The Process” have become so common that it’s easy to refer to it without really knowing exactly what you mean. Probably the simplest explanation of “The Process” is just something like, “the 76ers’ plan to rebuild through the draft,” since it generally refers to the talented core that Philadelphia drafted in the mid-2010s. But that can’t really be it because literally every team in the NBA builds through the draft. Every dynasty in NBA history was at least partially built using top draft picks, so that’s not really enough to separate what Philadelphia did.
No, what separated The Process was the number of top draft picks the Sixers acquired. They had a Top 3 pick for four consecutive years — quite an impressive feat in a league with a draft lottery. In order to do this, they had to tank. And boy did they tank: For four seasons between 2013 and 2017, the team averaged fewer than 18 wins per year. In the first season of that stretch, they tied the record for most consecutive losses by any team ever. The next year, they were one loss short of the most losses ever to start a season. The year after that they BROKE the record for most consecutive losses in a season, while finishing one loss shy of the all-time NBA record.
So that’s the first pillar of The Process: being really bad for a really long time, in order to stockpile a lot of high draft picks.
But that wasn’t the whole thing either. “The Process” was also about who the 76ers drafted, because Philadelphia’s draft strategy during this stretch was… unusual. They took guys with serious injury risks; they took guys with checkered college careers; they took multiple guys at the same position; they took European players who were not intending to come to the US for years. At times, it seemed like an incoherent way to build a team. But the driving force, really, was talent. The Sixers were trying to load up on talent. They were trying to find a superstar.
People who defend “The Process” will often contrast it with something they like to call “purgatory,” that state of limbo when a team is good but not great, unable to advance deep in the playoffs. Sixers fans were familiar with that feeling. Ever since they’d traded Allen Iverson in 2006, they’d been without a superstar. They’d had solid teams and good players — Andre Iguodala, Jrue Holiday, Lou Williams — but they could never get over the hump. They made the postseason four times in five seasons from 2007 to 2012, but only won one series. They seemed to be missing the superstar who could go toe-to-toe with Eastern Conference heavyweights like LeBron James or Derrick Rose or Dwyane Wade.
So “The Process” wasn’t just about hoarding draft picks — it was about finding superstars. The thinking was that it was better to be dreadful in pursuit of a future MVP in the draft than to be pretty good and get bounced from the playoffs in the early rounds.
And the last key pillar of “The Process” had to do with how they found these future superstars, specifically Philadelphia’s embrace of analytics. Sam Hinkie got his start in the league working for Daryl Morey in Houston, who was known for his use of advanced, unconventional statistics in scouting players and building teams. The specific nature of these stats is less important than how they were deployed — specifically as a way of shielding the front office from criticism. As the team mired in last place, as it drafted players who never played, as it set records with their losing streaks, GM Sam Hinkie could continually tell the public that he had metrics suggesting the Sixers would eventually reap the rewards. They would be winners… someday.
Over and over again, Hinkie told fans and players not to worry about all the losses and confusing roster decisions. We know what we’re doing, said the Sixers front office, despite all evidence to the contrary. “They tell us every game, every day, ‘Trust the Process,’' then-guard Tony Wroten said in 2015, amidst a season in which they lost 64 games, more than all but two teams in franchise history (they lost even more the next year). That mantra — “Trust the Process” — was repeated so often that it took on a life of its own. It became a joke, then a nickname for the team’s best player, a term for an entire era of the franchise, and eventually an entire ideology for how to build a winning team.
But at its core, “The Process” is about: 1) tanking, or focusing on the long-term over the present; 2) drafting for talent over fit or need; 3) ignoring conventional wisdom in favor of advanced analytics.
The Process Before “The Process”
In order to really understand how “The Process” played out in practice, though, we need to zoom out, to go beyond Philadelphia and even beyond the NBA, to look at the material conditions that gave rise to an ideology like “The Process.”
Because “The Process” was really part of a general trend, like baseball’s sabermetric revolution that happened a decade earlier, of changes to front offices. It used to be that a team’s General Manager fit a certain mold. It was usually an ex-player who’d stuck around as a coach or a scout for a few years, before graduating to the front office’s top job. There were occasional exceptions, but mostly they were former jocks, or people who had come up in the game.
Around the 2000s, though, there was an influx of new people: People like Paul DePodesta and Jeff Luhnow in baseball, and eventually guys like Rich Cho, Daryl Morey, and Zach Kleiman in the NBA. These guys were not former players; they were, basically, nerds. They typically had very impressive educational backgrounds and advanced degrees (DePodesta went to Harvard; Cho had been a mechanical engineer; Kleiman had a law degree; etc.), and they were curious about new analytics and unconventional approaches. The thinking around front offices began to change. No longer did you want a veteran with decades of experience to run your team; now you wanted a smart kid from a good school. Think of the way the “Peter Brand” character (who was based on DePodesta) is introduced in Moneyball:
This trend mirrored one in the economy at large: the rise of private equity and the consulting class. It’s no accident that, around the same time that very smart young people with economics degrees started to think they could run the entire economy, that very smart young people with economics degrees thought they could also run sports teams. No longer did years of experience in a field or on the court confer expertise — now it made you a stodgy, set-in-your-ways incumbent who was vulnerable to “disruption.” And who was going to do the disrupting? Some rich guy from a bank.
One of those rich guys from a bank was Josh Harris. Harris grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, a wealthy DC-suburb. He went to The Field School, an elite and expensive private school in DC, then Wharton. He worked at Drexel Burnham Lambert for two years, then got an MBA from Harvard Business School and co-founded Apollo Global Management with Marc Rowan and Leon Black when he was 26. (In 2021, Black was pushed out of the firm due his decades-long relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, during which he paid Epstein hundreds of millions of dollars for “tax advice”.... Yeah, “tax advice.”)
Black had been known for leveraged buyouts at Drexel, and he brought that expertise to Apollo, which had raised a few billion dollars within a decade. They bought Allied Waste Industries and AMC Theaters and Claire’s jewelry store and Harrah’s casinos — they were not tied to any one industry or area of expertise. They were smart guys and they thought they could turn around companies, no matter what those companies did. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t, but Harris himself got very rich in the process, and in 2011 he got together an ownership group and bought the Philadelphia 76ers.
The first GM Harris hired was Tony DiLeo, a figure in the old model who’d been part of the Sixers organization since 1990. But just a year later, Harris replaced him with Hinkie. Hinkie had an MBA from Stanford and worked at Bain Capital before moving to the NBA, where he worked under Daryl Morey in Houston for several years. Morey was himself a forerunner of the new, analytic-driven model for the front office, so Hinkie’s hiring represented a shift to this style of thinking. Indeed, this is generally seen as the beginning of “The Process,” since it was Hinkie who kept repeating that mantra.
But I think it would be a mistake to see “The Process” as something Hinkie originated, as opposed to something that was in the air. The hype around Hinkie was really prototypical of the hype around a whole generation of “outside-the-box” New Bosses. In a 2015 piece for ESPN, which was crucial for establishing the mythology around “The Process,” writer Pablo Torre hit all the beats that these profiles always hit: The New Boss sends TED Talks to his employees! The New Boss installed a Silicon Valley-style open office! The New Boss has an app to monitor his players’ biometrics!
Indeed, the Sixers weren’t even the first NBA team to make that phrase, “Trust the process,” its credo. As Sam Anderson wrote in Boom Town, his 2018 book on the Oklahoma City Thunder, they had their own New Boss, Sam Presti, who repeated that line over and over again as GM of the Thunder while he turned that team into a title contender in the early 2010s. And Presti had his own New Boss-isms: Anderson’s book introduces Presti with an anecdote about him straightening balls on the rack at a practice. The New Boss pays attention to everything!
Hinkie was actually pretty explicit about copying Presti’s model for building a team. The Thunder had been built with top draft picks in three consecutive drafts: Kevin Durant (picked #2 in 2007), Russell Westbrook (picked #4 in 2008), and James Harden (picked #3 in 2009). This core led Oklahoma City to the Finals in 2012. Of course, they hadn’t tanked in the way the 76ers would. Their struggles had come from a change in ownership and relocation from Seattle to Oklahoma more than any intentional strategy of tanking. And even in the franchise’s worst year, they still won 20 games, which is more than the Sixers averaged over four seasons.
Still, they were able to turn their lottery picks into three future MVPs, which became Hinkie’s template. Except that even by 2013, there were cracks starting to show in the Thunder’s process. Before the 2012-13, Presti traded Harden to Houston over a $4.5 million salary dispute. But according to Anderson’s book, the decision was less about the money than what Presti saw as Harden’s unwillingness to embrace “The Process.” The pay cut was a “test of Harden’s civic commitment to the Thunder,” and because he failed that test, he was shipped to Houston, where he would win an MVP and knock the Thunder out of the playoffs in 2017.
But, still, the lesson to be learned from the Thunder was clear: If you could get high draft picks, you could build a juggernaut. But the only way to ensure high draft picks, was to lose, and lose hard…
The Process Begins
2013-14
Hinkie’s first big move as GM was one that perhaps perfectly defined The Process: On Draft Day 2013, he traded Jrue Holiday, a 23-year old point guard coming off his first All-Star season and morphing into the Sixers’ best player, to New Orleans for two draft picks. The first was that year’s sixth pick, Nerlens Noel. Noel had gone into that draft as the favorite to be selected #1 overall, but concerns about his torn ACL led him to slide down to sixth. The second pick Philadelphia got was a protected pick in the 2014 draft, which they later traded for Dario Šarić, a Croatian player who wouldn’t even come to the US until 2016.
In other words, Hinkie traded an emerging star for one prospect who would miss a year due to injury, and another who wouldn’t be drafted for another year, and wouldn’t play in the NBA for three years.
With their own pick, the 76ers selected Michael Carter-Williams, who would turn out to be a great choice. He became the first player drafted outside the Top Ten to win Rookie of the Year since 1987, and emerged as a decent replacement for Holiday at point guard.
The Sixers got off to a good start that year. They won their first three games, including a win over the defending champion Miami Heat on opening day. But things quickly went off the rails. From mid-November through the end of December, Philadelphia lost 19 of 23 games, with their only wins coming in overtime. In February, amidst a 26-game losing streak that tied an NBA record, Hinkie ripped the team down to the studs. He traded three of the four remaining starters from the previous year’s team: He traded Spencer Hawes to Cleveland for two second-round picks, Henry Sims, and Earl Clark (who was immediately waived); he traded Lavoy Allen and the team’s leading scorer, Evan Turner, to Indiana for Danny Granger (who they immediately bought out) and another second-round pick.
Somehow, the 76ers had traded almost their entire starting lineup and ended up with only one player on their roster to show for it. By the end of the year, Philadelphia’s lineup included guys even die-hard NBA fans would be hard-pressed to identify: Henry Sims, Hollis Thompson, Tony Wroten. These guys seemed to exist to play for the 76ers during their tanking phase, and then wash out of the league…
They finished the year 19-63, which was Philly’s worst season since 1996, the year before they drafted Allen Iverson.
2014-15
It seemed clear to everyone that the 76ers were tanking for the 2014 draft. Which was fine, honestly. Not ideal, maybe, but tanking for a single season has been part of the NBA since the draft was first implemented, and the 2014 Draft had a lot of high-level talent that had teams salivating. As bad as the 76ers had been, they weren’t even the worst team in the NBA that season: The Milwaukee Bucks finished with only 15 wins in 2013-14, and ended up picking one spot ahead of Philadelphia in the draft.*
*The #1 pick that year went to Cleveland, who actually finished with a respectable 33-49 record, 14 games ahead of Philadelphia and 18 ahead of Milwaukee… such is life in a league with a draft lottery.
Falling to the #3 pick looked at first like it might be a blow to The Process, but it ended up working out quite well. Three different college players — Andrew Wiggins, Jabari Parker, and Joel Embiid — had been jockeying for the top spot on mock draft boards all season. But just six days before the draft, Embiid underwent foot surgery, which would keep him sidelined for four to six months, making him seem like the biggest risk of the three. Which, of course, fit perfectly with The Process: Philadelphia had already shown a willingness to bet on injured players in the draft, with the belief that it would pay off down the road.
The only problem was that Embiid and Noel were both centers, and it didn’t really make sense to draft one if you had the other. But this was also part of The Process: You were drafting to acquire talent, not necessarily to build a complementary team. After all, both faced injury risks, so who knows if both picks would pan out? And if they did, you could always trade one down the line.
The 76ers also added a bunch of second-round picks in 2014; Hinkie loved second-round picks. Torre’s story on Hinkie featured a chart showing all the second-round picks he had acquired via trade. According to Torre, the rest of the league viewed these picks as “penny stocks,” but Hinkie thought they were undervalued. Maybe a better analogy, given the franchise’s connection to Drexel Burnham Lambert, is junk bonds: a probably worthless investment that, if spun right, could yield riches.
Hinkie believed these second-round picks, who rarely turn into impact players in the NBA, could be valuable trade pieces or cost-controlled assets. In reality, almost none of the second-rounders Hinkie took in his time as GM amounted to much more than roster filler during the tanking seasons; most never played a minute for the 76ers. Ironically, the best ever second-round pick WAS taken during Sam Hinkie’s tenure as Philadelphia GM…. but not by Hinkie: Nikola Jokic was selected in the second round by Denver in 2015.
ANYWAY, by this season, people were starting to pay close attention to what Philadelphia was doing. Before the season, they traded Thaddeus Young, who was their last real connection to the pre-Process period. But there was so much hype around the future. Torre’s story ran with a photo of Embiid, Noel, and Carter-Williams — the stars of a supposedly budding dynasty. Carter-Williams, the reigning Rookie of the Year, was emerging as a star, and resented the idea that the team was losing on purpose.
In November of that year, MCW wrote a piece for The Players’ Tribune called, “Don’t Talk to Me About Tanking,” where he pushed back on the idea that the team was losing on purpose: “You can question my shooting. You can question my ceiling. Just don’t question if I’m giving my all every single night. Don’t talk to me about tanking.”
The piece was actually a window into the uncomfortable position The Process put its players into. Because the team was OBVIOUSLY still tanking… but that wasn’t the players’ choice. Tanking doesn’t mean that the players are losing on purpose — it means they are being sabotaged from above. That season, the 76ers had 19 (19!) different players start games, but only three started for more than half the season. So many people cycled through the roster that it was impossible to find a stable lineup. Even Carter-Williams himself, the supposed cornerstone of the team’s future, was traded that February, for yet another draft pick. The team ended up finishing one game worse than they had the year before.
The lone bright spot was Nerlens Noel, who finally took the court after missing a whole year, and looked pretty good, if not quite at the level of a superstar.
2015-16
The 2015 Draft was really the moment when The Process started to seem like a joke. It started a few weeks beforehand, when it was revealed that Embiid’s foot had not fully healed, and he would need another surgery, meaning he would miss ANOTHER season. Then, the 76ers ended up drafting yet another center, this time Jahlil Okafor from Duke, who fell to them at #3. Hinkie also made five (five!) second-round picks, one of whom he immediately traded for two future second-rounders.
Philadelphia had spent two years losing at a historic pace. They were not done losing — they didn’t know it yet, but they were, that off-season, in the middle of the longest losing streak in the history of American professional sports (10 games to close out the previous season, and the first 18 of the next one). Yet all they had to show for it was three centers, one of whom was still injured, and a bunch of cast-offs from other teams.
Unsurprisingly, Okafor and Noel did not really click as teammates, with one always forced to play out of position when they were on the floor together. Okafor also had trouble adjusting to the NBA: He got into multiple fights, faced a suspension, and eventually had to be accompanied by a security guard so he wouldn’t get into off-the-court situations.
The team was even worse than it had been the previous two years, and by December they brought in 76-year-old Jerry Colangelo to be Chairman of Basketball Operations. Colangelo was about as traditional a hire a basketball team could make, having been originally hired as a General Manager in 1968. He’d run the Phoenix Suns for decades, winning Executive of the Year four times, and was one of the most respected names in the game. Hinkie was still technically GM, but Colangelo wasn’t going to take a back seat to anyone.
Why the abrupt change? After all, Hinkie had been very clear about his plans. The losing was not exactly a surprise. But the rest of the league was getting sick of it. Philadelphia was so bad that they were literally dragging down the league’s revenues; other teams’ ticket sales would suffer when the Sixers came to town. Not to mention the negative effect it had on competitive balance. Other teams had complained since Hinkie’s first year, but finally enough was enough. Harris, the team’s owner, had to bring in an experienced hand like Colangelo to mollify the other owners in the league.
Hinkie would hang on for the rest of the year — a year in which the Sixers finished 10-72, dead last in the league — but the writing was on the wall. At the end of the season, he delivered a 13-page letter of resignation to “the equity partners of the Philadelphia 76ers” that was meant to outline the philosophy he used to build the team. It is written in that insipid, business-school way, just leaden with aphorisms and quotations. On just the first page, it references Abraham Lincoln, Atul Gawande, and Warren Buffet. It’s only on page nine that he actually starts to talk about the 76ers, assuring investors that the club, which had just had the second-worst season of its history, was “on solid footing.”
But there IS something kind of endearing in this letter. Hinkie seems thoughtful and self-critical, while still clearly believing in his vision, and he highlights the contributions of many unsung members of the organization. And “Trust The Process” IS an appealing mantra. Hinkie comes off almost as a disciple for a religion, one that is both optimistic and forgiving. The Process recognizes that sometimes bad things happen that are out of your control, while also assuring you that, if you do the right thing, then over the long run, you will be successful.
It’s real opiate-of-the-masses shit. Because “Trust The Process” is also a way of deflecting any criticism. The 2013-2016 76ers had the worst three-season stretch of any NBA team ever, but instead of criticizing them, we’re supposed to trust that it’s all part of the plan. This is profoundly bad for basketball. It’s bad for a league trying to maintain competitive balance. It’s bad for fans, especially young fans, who are likely to lose interest if a team is intentionally dreadful for years on end. And most of all it’s bad for players.
The worst thing about “The Process” was the way so many players got caught up in it, in ways that altered the course of their careers. Athletes have only so many prime years, and they are so vulnerable, especially early in their careers, to the vicissitudes of the league. So many little things can alter the course of a career: Whether you land in a good spot or not, what kind of first impression you make on the league, etc. And “The Process” churned through so many players over these three years, using them as fodder for wasted seasons, and then spitting them back out on the league as damaged goods. Who knows what would have happened to guys like Michael Carter-Williams, Nerlens Noel, and Robert Covington, had they spent the early seasons of their career on teams that gave a shit?
But before you can speak out on behalf of players like this, The Process dismisses you, assuring you that they suffered for the sake of something better. Pay no attention to the suffering we are making you endure, for it will pay off in the next life….
Ironically, the way Hinkie was forced out before his experiment could bear fruit ensured that, like a great TV show canceled too early, fans would build up expectations of what could have been. By the next year, pro-Hinkie graffiti popped up around the Sixers’ practice facility: In the rafters, on equipment, in offices, anonymous people were jotting “TTP” — Trust The Process — in black magic marker. Fans started podcasts and came up with chants about The Process. Even the team’s biggest star adopted The Process as his nickname.
In some ways, The Process died with Hinkie’s firing. After all, anything that went wrong could now be blamed on someone else, on someone straying from The Process. But in truth, The Process was only beginning, and it was about to get so much weirder…