A History of "The Process," Part IV: Failing
When The Process first started — or at least when I first became aware of it in the mid-2010s — I figured it was just basketball’s answer to Moneyball. That is, a way for teams to “win” without paying players their fair share. But as time passed, I realized that wasn’t exactly right. After all, the sabermetric revolution that was covered in Moneyball may have started with the Oakland A’s (although even that is an oversimplification), but it eventually made its way across all of baseball.
The Process, on the other hand, never really caught on anywhere but Philadelphia. For various reasons, like the power of stars in basketball and the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement, basketball teams could not compete with artificially low payrolls the way certain baseball teams could. And by 2020, the 76ers had the third-highest payroll in the league, so it was hard to blame The Process on a desire to win cheaply.
It wasn’t material interests that motivated The Process — it was ideology. When fans chanted Trust The Process, it was kind of a joke, but also kind of a profession of belief. It was a faith in wise men who ran the team, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Because by 2020, it was hard to deny that The Process was a failure. That was why it never spread much beyond Philadelphia…
Of course, to true believers, these failures were just signs that The Process had been betrayed by heretics like Bryan Colangelo, or that it just needed more time. And it’s true that The Process could have succeeded if not for a number of bad breaks. But the real failure wasn’t the lack of championships — it was how The Process failed the players who trusted it. Virtually every player who played for the Sixers in this era was let down by it. In Part I, we saw the players forced to suit up for teams designed to lose; in Part II we covered the draft picks who never panned out; in Part III we looked at the big acquisitions, like Jimmy Butler, who were quickly let go.
They still had Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons, but by the end of today, we will see how it weighed down even them. Because the ideology that undergirding The Process is a profoundly anti-labor ideology, an ideology that denigrates and devalues workers. So it’s no surprise that it failed the players who played under it.
The Dunk Not Taken
In late 2020, after getting swept by the Celtics in the bubble, the 76ers fired their head coach, Brett Brown, who’d had the job since The Process began in 2013. In retrospect, it is truly remarkable that Brown lasted seven seasons, longer than all but one coach in the history of the 76ers. Seven years is an eternity in the lifespan of NBA coaches — the average coaching stint lasts between three and four years. When Brown was fired, the only coaches in the NBA who’d been at their jobs longer than him were Gregg Popovich and Erik Spoelstra, who each coached multiple championship teams. Meanwhile, Brown never made it out of the second round and coached three of the worst years in franchise history.
That he survived so long was a testament to the respect Brown had within the organization. After all, nobody could really blame him for all the losing: That was what the team had been built to do. Still, it’s telling that none of his teams ever really congealed the way they were supposed to. By 2020 it was clearly time to go in a different direction.
But it wasn’t clear what direction that was. After firing Brown, there were reports that the team was divided on how to replace him, with owner Josh Harris supposedly favoring Mike D’Antoni, a divisive but innovative coach who embraced analytics, and Elton Brand favoring Tyronn Lue, a player-friendly coach who’d just won a championship coaching the LeBron-led Cavaliers. In the end, they hired Doc Rivers, which seemed somehow like both a compromise and the weirdest possible choice.
Rivers was one of the most respected figures in the NBA, having coached more or less continuously since 1999, with stints in Orlando, Boston, and Los Angeles. He was beloved by many former players, and respected around the league as a steward of the game. When the Donald Sterling controversy erupted while he was coaching the Clippers, players, league officials, and members of the media all credited Rivers for the leadership he showed. At the same time, people had always questioned his actual coaching acumen. His in-game strategic moves and the lineup changes he made throughout a season or playoff series were often baffling. When Philadelphia hired him, he had just come off the third playoff series in which his team had blown a 3-1 lead; no other coach has ever had that happen twice.
According to an interview Rivers did this week on The Bill Simmons Podcast, he was brought on to change the culture in Philadelphia, after the legacy of losing that surrounded The Process. But one knock on Rivers was that he was too focused on culture, and relied too heavily on players to make adjustments on their own. This could work on a team with a lot of veteran leadership, as it had on the 2007-08 Celtics, who won the championship, but the 76ers were still a young team when they brought Rivers on. Plus, Rivers was known to be pretty hostile to the analytical models that underlaid The Process.
Lest any fans think the franchise was moving away from those models: a few weeks after hiring Rivers, they brought in Daryl Morey, the founder of “Moreyball” to be President of Basketball Operations. Brand was still technically the General Manager, but Morey, basketball’s most well-known promoter of advanced stats, was now leading the front office. And Daryl Morey immediately started to do what Daryl Morey does: He went out and added a bunch of guys who like to shoot threes. He drafted Tyrese Maxey and signed Seth Curry and Danny Green.
And it worked! Within six games of the new season starting, the Sixers were in first place, and they stayed there for most of the 2020-21 season. For the first time in 20 years, they finished first in the Eastern Conference. Morey’s philosophy actually worked great for the Sixers roster. With all the shooters around him, Joel Embiid’s scoring went up by 24% under the new system, as he finished with career high in points-per-game.
Of course, surrounding a skilled big man like Embiid with a lot of effective shooters who can stretch the defense is not exactly reinventing the wheel. As a basketball strategy, it’s about as old as dribbling. And yet the Process Sixers had never really tried it, because they were focused on amassing talent more than finding complementary players. In all the years since The Process began, they had never been a particularly good three-point shooting team. A principle of the Process draft strategy was to draft for length and size over shooting ability. This was why Philadelphia believed so fervently in Ben Simmons, a 6-10 point guard with no outside shot. The idea was that a player’s shooting could improve over time, but you couldn’t teach a player to be taller.
Except Simmons never did develop an outside shot. In his entire career, he made five three-pointers. If anything, his shooting seemed to get worse over time. In 2020-21 — Simmons’ fourth year in the league — his shooting percentages got worse on both free throws and field goals, and so his scoring overall dropped to the lowest it had been since he entered the league. At times he looked lost in the new offense, as if he were afraid to take shots.
This would rear its ugly head in the playoffs. In the first round, the Sixers easily dispatched Washington, but even there, Simmons’ poor shooting was on display. With Philadelphia nearing a sweep the Wizards took a two-point lead in Game 4, and intentionally fouled Simmons, daring him to make two foul shots to tie the game. He missed, and the Wizards forced a Game 5.
After dispatching Washington, the 76ers faced a young Atlanta Hawks team, led by Trae Young, whose Game 1 performance — he had 25 points and seven assists by halftime — gave the Hawks an early series lead. But then Philadelphia righted the ship and won Games 2 and 3 easily. With a minute left in the first half of Game 4, the Sixers were up 18, seemingly en route to a 3-1 series lead going back to Philadelphia. But they somehow blew that game, with Joel Embiid missing an easy game-winning layup in the final seconds. Then in the next game they were up by 18 points at home going into the fourth quarter… but they blew that too.
In all three losses, Philadelphia’s offense seemed to disappear in big moments. Everyone deserved some blame, but Simmons’ struggles were most visible: In the three losses, which had come by a combined 10 points, Simmons missed 21 free throws. The team was able to gut out Game 6 on the road, but Simmons again disappeared, scoring only six points in limited time due to foul trouble. In Game 7, he was even worse, scoring only five points in ten more minutes of playing time.
But more than any statline, the game was defined by a single play with 3:29 left to play. The Hawks had just scored to take a two-point lead, and Simmons had his defender, Danilo Gallinari, one-on-one in the low post. He spun past him and had a clear path to the basket for either a dunk or a layup to tie the game; instead, he passed the ball to Matisse Thybulle, a second-year back up who averaged 3.9 points per game.
You couldn’t even blame Thybulle when he missed one of his free throws. He was not supposed to be the guy taking the shot with the game on the line — Simmons was supposed to dunk that. It’s one thing to not be a good outside shooter, but this was the most high percentage shot you’ll ever get. Heck, the only help defender was Trae Young, who is NINE INCHES shorter than Simmons! Watching it live was baffling, like watching a player forget how to play mid-game. You could hear the crowd react in confusion. You almost had to feel bad for Simmons. It was clear, as Jim Jackson said on the broadcast, that the game was in his head.
There were still three and half minutes left, but the 76ers would never get another shot to tie the game again. They lost 103-96, and were bounced from the playoffs. In the second round. Again.
After the game, Joel Embiid called that play the turning point. Doc Rivers, when asked if Simmons could be the point guard for a championship team, said “I don’t know.”
Simmons’ play was bad, but he was also being made something of a scapegoat for the team’s loss. Whose fault was it that the point guard of a team built around a star center + shooters was a 6-10 guy who’d never had a jump shot and hadn’t developed one in five years? That was a consequence of The Process, a philosophy that believed fit was unimportant, and talent was something that could just fall into your lap from the draft.
The truth was that the team failed to put its stars, either Simmons or Embiid, into the best position to succeed, and so both of them had bad plays and big turnovers down the stretch. Doc Rivers’ decision-making, as usual, left much to be desired. It wasn’t all on Simmons, but his non-dunk was the most memorable failure, and it raised the question of what his role on the team was even supposed to be.
Perhaps sensing this — not to mention the feeling that his teammates and head coach had thrown him under the bus — Simmons requested a trade that off-season, telling team officials that he wouldn’t report to training camp the following year. The situation quickly got ugly: The team refused to trade him, so Simmons refused to show up, so the team fined him, and then kept fining him, and withheld his salary. They put $8 million — over a quarter of his salary that year — in escrow, and deducted over $1 million in fines from it.
Embiid called Simmons’ behavior “borderline disrespectful”; at one point, after Simmons had started showing up, there were allegations that he refused to take his cell phone out of his pocket during practice. (He later said on a podcast, and video seems to confirm, that it was a folded up jersey in his pocket.) Later, when Simmons attributed his absence to mental health issues, the team stopped fining him, but given the timing many assumed the “mental health issues” were just a cover for the holdout. Eventually, the fines resumed.
The whole thing dragged on for months, until Morey could find a willing trade partner. Luckily for him, the Brooklyn Nets were in a similar situation with James Harden, who had demanded a trade. Morey had traded for Harden back in Houston, and clearly believed in Harden’s skillset, so it seemed like a natural fit. Some criticized Morey for giving up too much; in addition to Simmons, he traded Seth Curry, Andre Drummond and two first-round picks to get Harden. But Harden put up a triple-double in just his second game with the 76ers, and he seemed to fit naturally into the team, allowing Tyrese Maxey to move to shooting guard and spacing the floor for Joel Embiid.
The one thing the trade did cost the Sixers was depth, which seemed to catch up to them in the playoffs. Four of their five starters averaged 37 or more minutes per game in the playoffs, and by the second round, they looked gassed. Meanwhile, they ran up against their former teammate, Jimmy Butler, who put up 27.5 points, 7.5 rebounds, and 5.5 assists per game against his old team (this was the “Tobias Harris over me?” series mentioned last week).
The End of “The Process”
With Simmons now gone, there was almost no connection between this 76ers team and the Process-era 76ers. They had shuffled so many pieces in search of a winning team that none of the original building blocks were left: Michael Carter-Williams (traded in 2015), Sam Hinkie (fired in 2016), Nerlens Noel (traded in 2017), Jahlil Okafor (traded in 2017), Dario Šarić (traded in 2018), Markelle Fultz (traded in 2019), Brett Brown (fired in 2020), and now Ben Simmons (traded in 2022) were all gone. Even most of the players recouped in those trades were gone. The only one left was Joel Embiid.
The Process died many times, but a part of it will stay alive for as long as Embiid is in Philadelphia. He is exactly the kind of franchise-altering talent that The Process was designed to capture. You can miss nine out of ten times, but as long as you really hit it on the tenth try, you can make it work. As long as you get a player like Embiid — a generational talent, well-liked by teammates and coaches, beloved by fans, always improving — you have a shot.
In his first year without Simmons as a teammate, Embiid’s scoring average jumped again, giving him 30.6 points per game, becoming the first center to win the NBA’s scoring title since Shaquille O’Neal in his MVP-winning 1999-2000 season. Then this season, in his first full year with James Harden — and his first full year playing alongside an elite point guard — his scoring jumped up another 2.5 ppg, making him the first center to win the scoring title in consecutive years since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in the early 1970s. The team came to rely on him even more: He played significantly more minutes the last two years than ever before, and he led the league in usage rate last year (he was second this season).
As a result of all this, he finally won the MVP this year, after finishing second to Nikola Jokić the previous two seasons. But even this victory came with some questions. In the early spring, when Jokić seemed to be heading for his third straight MVP title, former Celtic Kendrick Perkins went on ESPN’s First Take and said his choice was Embiid, and that Jokić was being favored by MVP voters because he’s white.
Perkins got a lot of flak for that, most of it deserved. For one, he misstated the percentage of NBA awards-voters who were white — ESPN had to issue a correction. And suggesting that Jokić was an undeserving MVP because he wasn’t among the league’s top scorers misses what makes him a great player. But he wasn’t totally crazy — race obviously plays a role in how players are perceived, and those perceptions certainly play a role in MVP voting. And soon after Perkins voiced these concerns, the MVP odds started tilting towards Embiid. In the end, he won the award handily, with 73 votes compared to 15 for Jokić, even though Jokić played more minutes, averaged more rebounds, twice as many assists, and more steals.
Ultimately, I think most voters just felt it was Embiid’s time. Winning three consecutive MVP awards is rarefied air in the NBA: Only Larry Bird, Bill Russell, and Wilt Chamberlain have done that, and people were understandably wary of elevating Jokić to that category. On the other hand, people respect Embiid, and feel like his accomplishments deserve recognition.
But as the postseason rolled along, the decision has started to look questionable. Jokić put up a record-setting 10 triple-doubles as he led the Denver Nuggets to their first NBA title in franchise history. This week, he was unanimously voted Finals MVP, and claimed the unofficial mantle of Best Player in the World. Meanwhile, Embiid was bounced, yet again, in the second round. After taking a 3-2 lead over the Celtics, the Sixers lost Game 6 at home, once again blowing a fourth quarter lead with Embiid not scoring at all in the final six minutes. In Game 7, he and Harden combined for only 24 points, and the Sixers got blown out.
It has simply become too hard to ignore Embiid’s record of playoff failure. In truth, he has had some great playoff performances, but they almost always come early in a series, or against clearly inferior teams. He has never really had a great game with the team’s back against the wall. Even when he puts up great numbers, his absence in crunchtime is noticeable. Embiid’s best Game Score in the playoffs came in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Semis against the Hawks in 2021. He put up 37 points, with 13 rebounds, five assists, four blocks, and two steals. But he did not score over the final seven minutes of the game, missing four shots from the field and two free throws — the 76ers lost by three.
Pairing him with James Harden was supposed to fix this issue by giving Embiid someone to share the scoring burden. But Harden is another guy with a reputation for coming up small in the big moments. In last year’s loss to Miami, Harden only once in six games scored more than 20 points, and never cracked double-digits in assists. And despite two huge games against the Celtics this year, he again disappeared in the closeout games, scoring only 13 points in Game 6 and just nine (!) in Game 7.
Now, going into this off-season, Harden has a player-option to come back to Philadelphia, although rumors are swirling that he wants to return to Houston. But it’s unclear if Philly fans should even want Harden to come back. He will be 34 by the start of next season, and while that isn’t ancient, his best days are likely behind him. It is very possible we’ve seen the Harden/Embiid pairing reach its ceiling. At the same time, the 76ers have a limited window of Embiid’s peak, and it isn’t at all obvious that there is a better fit out there for him. If Harden leaves, they will almost certainly be worse next year. On the other hand, if he comes back, it’s not clear how they will be any better. Ten years after The Process began, the 76ers are in exactly the position The Process was meant to avoid: stuck between Good and Great, trapped in NBA purgatory…
What Did We Learn?
You might expect me to gloat about the failures of The Process, to insist that Philadelphia’s inability to get past the second round of the playoffs proves that illegitimacy of the supposedly brilliant minds who cooked up The Process. But when you review the last decade of 76ers basketball, what stands out are all the What Ifs. As usual, the line between success and failure is thin, with luck playing a far greater role in our fates than any of us are usually comfortable admitting. What if Markelle Fultz’s shoulder had healed? What if Ben Simmons had dunked the ball? What if Kawhi Leonard’s shot is just an inch shorter? The Process failed, but it could so easily have worked.
No, I think the real lessons of The Process are not really about what happened on the court. In fact, that absence of basketball lessons is itself a lesson: No General Manager or front office guy is going to solve basketball, and you should be very wary of anyone who claims they have. Did Sam Hinkie have some good ideas? Absolutely. If you read the manifesto that is his 2016 resignation letter, there are some good insights there about the direction basketball was going, and the value of certain types of players.
But a few good insights weren’t what made The Process distinctive; what made it distinctive was the hubris of committing to a development strategy with such an obvious downside (three years of being completely non-competitive), in the hopes that it would pay off down the line. Could all that tanking have worked for Philadelphia? Sure. But success was never guaranteed, while the costs were. A GM who ignores those costs better be damn sure it’s going to pay off — but given the uncertainty inherent to the NBA draft and the development of young athletes, that was impossible. Chance plays a bigger role than most people want to admit, but chance is not a total surprise. So any executive who tells you, Trust me, I’ve got this is not telling the truth.
Which is not to say that they’re lying. This brings me to the bigger lesson of The Process, which is really about ideology. Specifically, The Process was a natural, if extreme, outgrowth of a particular ideology that has consumed all professional sports over the last two decades. You might call it the cult of the General Manager. Since roughly 2000, GMs have surpassed coaches, and sometimes even players in how lauded they are by fans and the media. This has its roots in the material interests of owners, who have looked to GMs to help them build competitive teams on the cheap in an era of high player salaries. But the ideology has taken on a life of its own, and now exists even when the material interests aren’t as clear.
In other words, I think Sam Hinkie and people like him — your Sam Prestis, your Daryl Moreys, your Jeff Luhnows — really believe in their ability to control their team’s performance. That is, after all, their whole job. And all the hoopla surrounding people like Billy Beane and Bill Polian and Theo Epstein has only reinforced the importance of a good front office.
Certainly it is important to have a good front office, and people like Epstein and Polian and Pat Riley are great at their jobs. But The Process shows the dangers of this ideology which can undermine labor by inflating the power of executives. Indeed, over and over again during The Process, Philadelphia had amazingly talented players fall into their lap — only to squander them in the development process. This is what happens when you think the process of getting draft picks is more important than who those draft picks are.
Every team has draft busts. That’s just the nature of the draw. But so much of the talent the Sixers acquired seemed to get worse the longer they played in Philadelphia. Even “successes” like Joel Embiid and (especially) Ben Simmons have never reached their full potential. If that happens once or twice, it’s bad luck. If it happens over and over and over again for a decade, it’s a sign you are not putting your players in position to succeed.
This tension between players and the front office is as old as sports. Really, the guy who got it right is Michael Jordan in The Last Dance:
“We know that the team is much bigger than the 15 players. Those guys who work in the front office, they were good people, but the most important part of the process is the players.”
This seems like it should be obvious, but The Process treated the players as almost afterthoughts, assuming the talent they possessed would lead automatically to championships.
The flip side of the ideology was fan acceptance. The number of Sixer fans who chanted Trust The Process and sang the praises of Sam Hinkie for years after his firing made clear just completely fans have bought into this cult of the GM. Fans are supposed to root for their team to win. But the ideology that gave rise to The Process has so dominated sports fandom that now fans now identify with their team’s front office more than with the team’s players. Now fans seem more concerned with saving the owners’ money than with winning games. That Philadelphia fans — known to be so harsh that they once booed Santa Claus — were so patient with The Process shows just how bad this ideology has gotten.
Finally, I think there’s also a lesson here about losing. The ideology behind The Process treats losing as almost a rite of passage. In order for a team to be good, it must first be bad. This is how you acquire draft picks and therefore talent and therefore future success. There is something almost moralistic about it, the way teams and their fans have to go through tanking seasons like a hairshirt that cleanses them of their sins before they are ready for the forgiveness of losing. This has become such an accepted way of thinking that even fans now openly ROOT for tanking (or “rebuilding”) so as to expedite their moral redemption.
The weird thing is that it’s just not true. Almost no dynasty, in the NBA or other professional sports, has been built on tanking. Even most one-off champions are not built this way. Because, and here’s the crazy thing, losing is bad. Losing is not a shortcut to winning; it’s just failing to win. That teams have somehow convinced fans to accept losing as a necessary precondition to winning is some crazy trick that owners now use to justify low payrolls. But we ought to reject it. You play to win the game. The results matter, not just the process…