A History of "The Process," Part II: Reaping
Since we started our look back at “The Process,” the 76ers hired Nick Nurse to be their new coach. He seems like a good fit? It’s a little ironic, given the role his team played in killing Philly’s best chance at a title. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves… Anyway, if you missed Part I in our story, check it out here.
The Seeds Sprout… Slowly
After Sam Hinkie resigned as Philadelphia’s General Manager in 2016, Jerry Colangelo hired his own son, Bryan, as the new GM and head of basketball operations, before stepping down himself. Bryan Colangelo had taken over for his father once before, in Phoenix, where he’d helped build the :07 Seconds or Less Suns and won Executive of the Year. He’d then moved to Toronto, where he won the award a second time.
So Colangelo had an impressive track record, and he was not averse to innovating, as he showed in Phoenix. This made him a pretty attractive candidate to replace Hinkie. Even if he didn’t Trust The Process, he could help the seeds planted in the early years of The Process finally bloom. After all, Hinkie had planted a lot of seeds…
One such seed was the #1 overall pick, which the Sixers landed following their dreadful 2015-16 season. Going into the 2016 draft, Ben Simmons was the consensus #1 pick. And even though there were some concerns about how he’d played in college, and his mental makeup, there was never much doubt that Philadelphia would draft him first. But Simmons was an unusual player, and taking him was a sign that, whether Colangelo Trusted the Process or not, he would have to deal with it.
It was obvious why scouts liked Simmons, who was one of the most versatile players to enter the NBA. At 6-10 could pass like a point guard, rebound like a power forward, and defend the other team’s best player. But one thing he couldn’t really do was shoot. At LSU, he took only three 3-pointers all season, and shot just 67% from the free-throw line.
For many teams, this wouldn’t be such a big deal, but for a team building around three centers picked in the lottery, it presented an issue. Conventional basketball wisdom is that, if you have an elite big man, then you want to pair him with someone who’s comfortable playing on the perimeter, either a true point guard or a skilled outside shooter. It’s not the only way to build a team, but it is a tried and true method, going back as long as the NBA itself: There’s Bill Russell/Bob Cousy, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar/Oscar Robertson, Karl Malone/John Stockton, Shaq/Kobe, etc.
But building a team in such a traditional way would have been decidedly un-Process-like. And even if Colangelo had wanted to depart from The Process, it wasn’t obvious how. By drafting so many centers, all of whom had faced significant injury problems, it wasn’t even clear which player Philadelphia should build around. So they once again defaulted to the most talented option available in the draft, and that was Simmons. Then, in true Process fashion, Simmons broke his foot in preseason, and he missed the whole season. It was the fourth straight season that a Sixer lottery pick would miss the whole year due to a foot or leg injury.
Elsewhere, though, things were finally starting to turn around: Joel Embiid was ready! After waiting two years for it, Embiid’s debut had taken on outsized importance. The 2014 lottery pick had come to symbolize so much of The Process that he even had the team’s public address announcer use that as his nickname in pregame introductions. The organization seemed somewhat ambivalent about the way he and the fans adopted the Trust The Process slogan, but they couldn’t stop it. For his part, Embiid felt a degree of loyalty to Sam Hinkie, the GM who’d believed in him enough to draft him, and been patient with him through a long injury and slow recovery process. Embiid likely felt — somewhat correctly! — that it was his injury that cost Hinkie the job, so he was always quick to credit The Process for his success.
And he did have success. Embiid, it turned out, was worth the wait. In limited minutes in his first game, he scored 20 points with seven rebounds and two blocks. Five days later he recorded his first double-double. He was named Eastern Conference Rookie of the Month in November, December, and January, and was the runaway favorite for Rookie of the Year going into the All-Star Break. And his success helped turn the team around. While Philadelphia got off to another rough start that season, going 4-16 in their first 20 games, they actually won more than they lost for the next 24. Going into All-Star weekend, they were 21-35 — nothing great, but they’d already won more games than they had in any of the previous three seasons, and fans finally had a reason to Trust The Process.
Alas, that week it was revealed that Embiid had a torn meniscus in his knee and would have to miss the rest of the year. This cost him the Rookie of the Year, and derailed the 76ers, who only won seven of their final 26 games without him.
But Embiid’s emergence gave fans something to finally be excited about. The Process had (kind of) worked in that it had given them one of the most talented players in the league. In fact, the team felt good enough about Embiid (and were confident enough that his new injury wasn’t serious) that they traded one of their other centers: Nerlens Noel, who had been the first acquisition of The Process era, was traded to Dallas that February for a modest return.
There were also trade rumors surrounding the team’s other spare center, Jahlil Okafor, who was held out of multiple games in February, seemingly in anticipation of a trade that never came. This soured Okafor’s relationship with the team, which was already strained by his off-court controversies, and the relationship quickly deteriorated further: Okafor missed the end of the season with a knee injury, and that off-season Philadelphia declined to pick up his fourth-year option, which led Okafor to request a trade. In December he was traded to Brooklyn as part of a package that netted them Trevor Booker, a reserve who only played 33 games for the Sixers.
This meant that, in little more than a year, Bryan Colangelo had significantly turned over the roster he inherited from Hinkie, trading two of Hinkie’s lottery picks for forgettable reserves. He’d also drafted Ben Simmons, but his biggest splash came in the 2017 draft. Philadelphia drew the #5 overall pick, but had the right to swap picks with Sacramento (something Hinkie had pulled off in one of his trades for second-rounders), which moved them up to #3. Colangelo still wasn’t satisfied: He also traded a future first-round pick to move up to #1.
This was a lot to give up in order to move up two picks, so clearly Colangelo had a big move in mind. Obviously he was going to select a point guard. The team had been without a difference-maker at point guard since Hinkie had traded away Jrue Holiday, and now they were hunting for a perimeter player to pair with Embiid and Simmons. Luckily, the two top prospects in the 2017 draft were both point guards. The flashiest was Lonzo Ball, out of UCLA, who had tons of hype and attention around him before he even showed up at college, thanks to his father’s… personality.
But the most talented guard in the draft, according to most scouts, was Markelle Fultz. While Ball had been surrounded by hype at UCLA, Fultz had been almost completely anonymous, playing at the University of Washington for a terrible, 9-22 Huskies team. But Fultz averaged 23.2 points, 5.7 assists, and 5.9 rebounds per game, numbers only two freshmen had ever put up in NCAA history. Making him even more attractive to Philadelphia, Fultz’s skill set seemed to complement their roster. Unlike Lonzo Ball, Fultz was not a traditional point guard, most comfortable with running sets in the halfcourt. But for the 76ers, whose offense was going to run through Embiid and Simmons anyway, this was fine; Fultz would serve as a shot creator operating on the perimeter. It seemed like a natural fit…
…and it went wrong almost immediately. Less than a week into the season, there was confusion about a shoulder injury Fultz was supposedly dealing with. First, there was a report that Fultz had had fluid drained from his shoulder just before the season, causing pain so intense that he couldn’t raise his arms for his typical shooting motion. Then, mere hours after that report surfaced, the story changed: Actually, Fultz had not had fluid DRAINED from his shoulder CAUSING pain; he had a cortisone shot INTO his shoulder to TREAT the pain. Then Colangelo suggested to the press that the injury had been caused by changes Fultz made to his shooting form in the off-season, changes that head coach Brett Brown said were made without supervision of the team. At which point Fultz’s personal trainer said, No, that’s not what happened at all.
A few days later, the team announced that Fultz had been diagnosed with “scapular muscle imbalance” and that he would be out for three weeks. Some medical experts pointed out that such a diagnosis was not compatible with that timeline; if he really had scapular muscle imbalance, it meant his muscles would need to be “retrained” and surgery might be necessary. In the end, Fultz would miss 68 games — over 80% of the season. While he was absent, the team suggested to the press that his problems were psychological, that the changes he had made to his shooting form prior to the season had caused him to lose confidence in his shot. By December, the team was saying that Fultz had no more pain or muscle imbalance in his shoulder, yet he wouldn’t play again until the end of March.
For his part, Fultz and those close to him have always insisted that he made no intentional changes to his mechanics, and that his struggles were in response to an injury. Whatever the cause, though, Fultz’s offensive game — the whole reason the Sixers had picked him — was broken. The guy who had been compared to James Harden going into the draft now couldn’t score outside the paint. He attempted only one three-pointer in 14 games — this after averaging five attempts per game in college.
Remembering The Picks
At this point, it seems prudent to review the draft picks made during The Process era. By 2017, the 76ers had five years worth of top picks to build a team around, not to mention all the picks acquired via trade during their original team teardown. So what did they have to show for it? In truth, not much…
It is rather remarkable, given all the losing the Sixers fans had to endure, just how little the team had to show for those drafts. None of their first-round picks in 2013 (Michael Carter-Williams, Nerlens Noel), 2015 (Jahlil Okafor), or 2017 (Markelle Fultz) ever meaningfully contributed to a good 76er team, nor did they return much value in trades.
This certainly seems like a real condemnation of the philosophy behind The Process. And, indeed, many of the mistakes in their drafts are directly traceable to the strategy Hinkie implemented. Drafting so many injured players, for example, seemed to backfire. As The Process dragged on and the Sixers supposedly built around a “young core,” it was totally unclear who was actually in that “young core” because none of them were healthy at the same time.
And when they were, they were often playing out of position, thanks to the other pillar of Hinkie’s drafting strategy, which was to focus on talent over need. That led to him taking three different centers for three straight drafts, which likely stunted their development. Recall how Okafor and Noel spent most of the 2015-16 season fighting for playing time, with one of them typically playing power forward. Given that, is it any wonder that neither saw much improvement after his rookie year, and both quickly lost most of their trade value?
Still, it’s hard to criticize the team’s drafting strategy too much. After all, it netted them two different Rookies of the Year, as well as valuable role players like Jerami Grant and Dario Šarić. Most of all, it got them the crown jewel of all these drafts: Joel Embiid. If you look back at all the players selected in the top ten of every draft from 2013 to 2017, and rank those 50 players from best to worst, Embiid would likely be #1 on that list.* And Embiid was a perfect expression of the drafting philosophy behind The Process. Embiid was an injured center — had Philadelphia been wary of taking players with injuries, or overly concerned about drafting for need, they would have missed out on him.
*I’m cheating a little here with this framing: The two best players taken in these drafts were Giannis Antetokounmpo and Nikola Jokić, but neither of them was a top prospect (Giannis was taken 15th overall in 2013; Jokić was a second-rounder the next year) and it doesn’t seem fair to criticize Philadelphia for missing them. Not even the teams that drafted those guys likely foresaw what they’d become…
In reality there is nothing wrong with the drafting principles The Process emphasized: Sometimes it IS worth it to draft a player with an injury; sometimes you SHOULD draft for talent over need; sometimes it DOES make sense to try to improve your draft position by losing; etc. It’s just that none of these ideas are new, and each of them is counterbalanced by competing values: Sometimes an injured prospect will never be healthy enough to contribute; sometimes the best player available won’t fit on your team; sometimes, believe it or not, winning really IS better than losing.
The problem with The Process wasn’t that the ideas behind it were crazy. If anything, they were pretty banal. The crazy part was thinking these ideas were new and committing to them like a religion. The reason no teams had ever tanked before to the degree the Process Sixers did wasn’t that no team ever realized that it’s good to have high draft picks — it’s that the draft is too risky and random of an event to put all your hopes into. You could end up with a franchise-defining icon like LeBron James, or you could end up with a bust like Greg Oden.
Indeed, Philadelphia had its share of luck over the course of these five drafts, some of it good (they probably don’t pick Embiid had they had the #1 or #2 pick in 2014) and some of it bad (what does Philadelphia do in 2015 if Los Angeles takes Okafor instead of falling in love with D’Angelo Russell?). But either way, you can’t get mad at your luck when you’ve gone all in on such a random process. Not to mention that the strategy that the Sixers committed to was particularly high risk, with its focus on distressed assets and injured players.
Really, the elephant in the room here is all the injuries Philadelphia had to deal with among its draft picks. In the five seasons between 2013 and 2018, players drafted in the first round by the 76ers played in 576 total games, and MISSED 525 games due to injury. These injuries were often mysterious, dragging on for far longer than the team initially indicated. Embiid was expected to miss a season due to his foot injury; he ended up missing two. Simmons was expected to miss three or four months with an ankle injury; he ended up missing the whole season. Fultz was expected to miss three weeks; he ended up missing five months.
The team had actually had problems with injuries even before The Process (see: Elton Brand, Andrew Bynum) but once Sam Hinkie came on board in 2013, it began to seem like a deliberate strategy. Fans and people around the league started to suspect that these injuries were exaggerated — or even invented — as part of the team’s plan to hoard assets without fielding a competitive team. Jahlil Okafor, for example, was shut down for the season because of “right knee soreness” just around the time the team was hoping to trade him (and didn’t want him to hurt his value by playing badly or actually getting hurt for real).
But the Fultz situation was by far the weirdest. Here the team was openly disagreeing with its own player about whether an injury had even happened. None of it reflected well on the team. If they were right, and Fultz had messed with his shooting form, then why was their #1 pick making such a dramatic change without the oversight or input of his team? And if they were wrong, and Fultz was dealing with an injury, then how could a player suffer an injury of such consequence without the team even knowing about it?
Had this been a one-off incident, perhaps you could consider it a fluke, but given Philadelphia’s long history with injuries, it seemed to confirm the worst suspicions about the team. The Sixers had tried so many tricks with their roster that they were undermining their development of the young stars they had drafted. By treating injuries as something to be arbitraged instead of healed — by treating young players as assets to be leveraged instead of prospects to be developed — they ended up squandering much of the talent that fell into their lap over the course of The Process.
The Process… Works?
And yet, despite once again getting almost no production from their #1 pick, the 76ers actually had a great season. Ben Simmons finally made his debut, and it turned out he was the versatile superstar scouts had predicted before the 2016 draft. He had a triple-double in his fourth NBA game — the first player to do it that early since 1967. On November 3rd, he had another triple-double in a win against the Pacers. It was Philadelphia’s fourth win in a row, and it made the Sixers 5-4; it was the first time they had been above .500 since November 15th, 2013.
Perhaps the most impressive thing Simmons did that year was stay healthy: He started 81 games that season, the first 76er to get that many starts since The Process began. Robert Covington also made 80 starts, and even Joel Embiid was generally healthy. He missed some time at the end of the season with an orbital fracture, and the team was managing his workload throughout the season. But all together he played in 64 games, and emerged as a superstar. Before the season started, the team had bet big on Embiid, offering him a rookie-scale max deal worth $148 million over five years, and Embiid had proven himself worth it.
In 2018, Embiid became the first Sixer to start the All-Star Game since Allen Iverson; Simmons won Rookie of the Year. The team also got major contributions from free agent signing JJ Redick, and Dario Šarić (one of the European players drafted by Hinkie). It was enough for them to win 52 games — the most of any Philly team since the one that made the NBA Finals in 2001. It was good enough for 3rd place in the Eastern Conference, and the first playoff appearance of The Process Era.
In the first round, they easily dispatched the Miami Heat in a series most memorable for being Dwyane Wade’s last postseason series. In the Eastern Conference Semifinals, they were matched up with the Boston Celtics, who had finished second in the conference, three games ahead of Philadelphia. But the Celtics were a weakened team, having lost their best player and leading scorer, Kyrie Irving, shortly before the playoffs started. So going into the series, Philadelphia was actually a heavy favorite.
It was kind of surprising, then, when Boston blew them out in Game 1… and then won again in Game 2… and then again in Game 3… and then finished off the series in Game 5. It was a very strange series. Philadelphia actually had the leading scorer in four of the five games, and the leading rebounder in all of them, yet they won only once. In Game 2, the Sixers led by as much as 22, and led with five minutes left, before the Celtics came back in front of their home crowd. Game 3 was a back and forth game, with 12 ties and 15 lead changes, that the 76ers sent to overtime on a buzzer-beater hit by… Marco Belinelli.
Belinelli was a journeyman wing who had played for eight different teams over a dozen seasons before getting picked up in the middle of the year by Philadelphia. The fact that he was getting his number called in the final seconds of a must-win game was, on some level, a testament to the team’s depth and its unconventional planning.
But in another sense, it hinted at a fatal flaw in the team’s construction, which is that its stars were not built for big moments. This is not even to raise the question of clutchness — although that question will come up again several times in our story — but simply to say that, for all their skills, neither Embiid nor Simmons was someone who could create his own shot on the perimeter. This meant that, in crunch time, defenses could lock them down. Indeed, over the final three minutes of regulation, plus the full overtime period of Game 3, Simmons made only one layup; Embiid did not score at all.
In the game’s final seconds, with a two point lead, Embiid turned the ball over, fouled Al Horford to send him to the line, and then missed a jump shot on the other end. Simmons got the rebound and missed the put-back that likely would have sealed the win. After the Celtics took the lead with five seconds left, the Sixers had one last chance… but Simmons turned the ball over on a pass to Embiid. The Celtic went up 3-0 on the series, and that basically clinched it. Philadelphia would avoid the humiliation of a sweep, but that was cold comfort after they went into the series with such lofty expectations.
Still, all things considered, Philadelphia had to consider this a successful season. Embiid and Simmons finally played a full season together, and they seemed worthy of all the hype that had been built up around them. Other role players, like Šarić, Redick, and Covington, seemed to perfectly balance out the roster. The playoffs might have ended in disappointment, but the team was still young, and early playoff setbacks are a rite of passage in the NBA. Now the team had hope. The Process was no longer just a promise; the fans could see it coming to fruition in front of their eyes. Now just don’t screw it up…
Death By Posting
Three weeks after the 76ers were eliminated from the 2018 postseason, The Ringer published a story about five random, anonymous Twitter accounts. These accounts had few followers or original tweets — they mostly seemed to argue about the 76ers with fans and reporters. Many in the Philadelphia media had blocked some of these accounts, figuring they were just trolls.
But, according to The Ringer, these accounts were all tied to 76ers General Manager Bryan Colangelo. At first, he denied any connection to four of the accounts, but admitted he used one of them “to monitor our industry and other current events.” The day after the story went up, the team opened an investigation, and a few days later Colangelo’s wife, Barbara Bottini, admitted that she was behind three of the other accounts. Both she and her husband insisted he had nothing to do with her posts, and was not the source for the information she shared; nevertheless, the investigation couldn’t confirm that because Bottini deleted information from her phone, and Colangelo resigned that day.
Whoever was ultimately behind the accounts, though, they promoted an unmistakable pro-Colangelo agenda. They trashed his predecessor, Sam Hinkie (as well as Masai Ujiri, the executive who replaced Colangelo in Toronto), and undermined players he selected. The accounts repeatedly touted Ben Simmons (who Colangelo had selected) as the future of the 76ers, while insisting Joel Embiid (who Hinkie selected) was overrate and undisciplined.
Even worse, the accounts seemed to reveal private information about players in its attempts to defend Colangelo’s moves. When people criticized Colangelo for how he handled Jahlil Okafor, the accounts alleged that Okafor had failed a physical in 2017, negating a trade the GM had arranged. When people wondered why the team traded Nerlens Noel, the accounts said he was a bad clubhouse influence, and that the coach had demanded he be traded, which Colangelo was magnanimously keeping to himself. And when people criticized Colangelo for drafting Fultz, who seemed like a bust, he claimed there was video of Fultz’s private instructor altering his shooting form. The accounts even defended Colangelo’s sartorial choices…
What’s clear in looking over these tweets is how much Colangelo clearly resented Hinkie and the idea of “The Process.” It probably shouldn’t have been surprising that a GM could be consumed by jealousy and personal grudges like this, but seeing it play out in such a petty, vindictive way like this — having your wife post your defenses on Twitter! — was so silly and embarrassing for everyone involved.
To true believers in The Process, the whole incident was proof that Colangelo was the wrong guy to lead the team into the future. He couldn’t see Hinkie’s vision. He didn’t know what he had. Indeed, the tweets made it sound like he was rooting for Embiid to fail because otherwise Hinkie might get credit for the team’s success.
The Process, then, was like a ghost hanging over everything Colangelo did as GM. Every move he made was compared to some idealized alternate history of The Process, even as Colangelo oversaw the team’s first real success since the era began. And it was true that The Process had left Colangelo with the pieces that built this playoff team. But they were not pieces that naturally fit together, and it was clear the puzzle wasn’t finished. Now someone else would have to put it together…