Looking Or Swinging, It's Still Strike Three For The Sixers
Tomorrow, the Sixers will wake up dead.
Adam Aaronson, whose legal name is Sixers Adam (@SixersAdam on Twitter), covers the Sixers for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez. He has been legally banned from covering the team in person, and when that ban was set to be lifted, Covid-19 struck. He believes cantaloupe is the best food in existence, and is brought to you by the Official Realtor of The Process, Adam Ksebe.
Well, there’s not much left to say. The Sixers are down 3-0 in the first round, once again wholly overmatched by the Boston Celtics when the lights are at their brightest. And while they deserve credit for turning in a high-effort performance in Game Three, this remains a series in which the Celtics have played harder, played better, coached better and schemed better. This has been a thorough masterclass in what a great NBA organization looks like, provided to an almost historically incompetent organization -- one that is yet again desperately searching for answers.
I’ve never written an obituary, but this is starting to feel like one.
You’ve heard this from me before: the Sixers are a completely inept organization, filled with people from the very top to the very bottom with people who are incapable of performing their jobs at anything close to a satisfactory level.
The Sixers are obviously in desperate need of an entire makeover. From sweeping changes to the front office and coaching staff to yet another major roster overhaul, every changeable aspect of this dumpster fire called a basketball team needs to be changed. What we’re looking at right now is not even close to being enough.
But here’s the thing about the NBA: you don’t just get to throw shit at the wall and see what sticks forever. And they’ll never admit it, but the Sixers have already missed their window. This is over. After three years of Sam Hinkie’s brilliant accumulation of assets and a few years of terrible management masked by the fruits of Hinkie’s labor coming to life, we have reached the point where a simple fact is sticking out like a sore thumb: the Sixers are screwed. Stick a fork in them, and not just for this season, but for years to come. The Philadelphia 76ers are a disastrous embarrassment of a team that needs to see everyone involved with the construction of the basketball team and its development to pack their bags.
The most obvious, cut-and-dry thing at hand here is the culpability of the front office. Ownership can’t be fired, so the front office contains the biggest heads that can roll. This is the group that has sunk the Sixers from the most asset-rich team in the NBA, full of promise, to the unmitigated disaster sitting before us today.
When Bryan Colangelo inherited authority over Sixers basketball operations from his father, the Sixers had a bevy of young players with major potential, valuable draft picks and significant financial flexibility. He then effectively sat on his hands for two years, never taking a risk, and in turn never adding a piece who would become a critical part of the team’s future after drafting Ben Simmons in 2016. The team began to flourish thanks to Hinkie’s efforts, and Bryan Colangelo skated along getting undue props like he has for his entire career, all because of his last name.
But while Embiid, Simmons and co. showed signs that they could be the core of a future champion and perennial contender, their lives were made harder and harder. Assets were being squandered like it was nobody’s business. Corners were cut. Nerlens Noel was traded for a fake first-round pick. The Sixers had to pay to get rid of Jahlil Okafor, once a hot commodity in the trade market. They wasted money on retreads like Gerald Henderson, Sergio Rodriguez and Jerryd Bayless. They traded a first-round pick to take Anzejs freaking Pasecniks.
Sixers ownership was enamored with Colangelo’s front office, so much that when the GM forced them to fire him with a hilarious scandal that you are surely aware of, and ownership now could pick almost anyone they wanted to run the team, they went with… Elton Brand. More accurately, they went with Elton Brand, Alex Rucker, Ned Cohen, and Marc Eversley. The Sixers mandated that any GM they were to hire needed to keep Colangelo’s entire group in place. This was obviously an absurd request; any GM wants to hire their own people below them -- especially when the one in place had already spent years setting the team back. This was really the dagger blow.
The front office shifted their M.O. in the following months. Once frustratingly conservsative, they became recklessly aggressive. And, well, we all know how that turned out. They have almost $300 million on the books for Tobias Harris and Al Horford, and are without Robert Covington and Dario Saric.
There is no honor in striking out swinging versus striking out looking. At the end of the day, strike three and you’re out. The Sixers just went down on strikes for good.