Hawks Top Sixers as Hinkie Makes a Move

By Sean Kennedy (@PhillyFastBreak)

We’ll get to the main news of the night in a bit, but first, let’s discuss the on-court action as the Hawks won their 8th-straight game in easily dispatching the Sixers. As expected, Philly struggled to stay with the vast array of shooters the Hawks threw at them. Atlanta had open shot after open shot from behind the arc, and the only reason the Sixers were able to remain at arms-length for the majority of the game is that the Hawks missed an unusual number of those wide-open looks (they finished 10-30 from three).

Of course, one man doesn’t miss those looks and that’s the NBA leader in three-point percentage Kyle Korver. The former heartthrob of Philadelphia’s female fan population went 5-7 from behind the arc, as the Sixers tried out their ‘let’s leave the best three-point shooter in the league alone’ strategy to ill effect. Any time the Sixers threatened to actually make a game of things, Korver would work his way open off a screen or find some open space following an offensive rebound, and boom, easy triple. He ended the game tied for a game-high with 17 points.

With Robert Covington crashing back down to earth (3-11 from the field) and K.J. McDaniels mired in a long shooting slump of his own (5-29 from three over the last 5 games), the Sixers offense could not get anything going. Michael Carter-Williams had his worst game since Tony Wroten went out due to injury, barely missing a triple-double with 8 points, 10 rebounds, and 9 assists, but committing a ghastly 9 turnovers. Those giveaways were mainly just bone-headed mistakes (letting Jeff Teague tip the ball away from behind him, leaving his feet to make a pass and throwing the ball away when no one was open). The Sixers don’t have anywhere near the offensive firepower to make up for those type of errors against a good team.

Alexey Shved returned to action, and was not shy about jumping right back into the swing of things, to put it mildly. He attempted 8 field goals and had three trips to the foul line in just 16 minutes of action, jacking up threes with reckless abandon. There was one sequence where Shved took 5 consecutive shots for the Sixers in a 2-minute span (he made one). Brett Brown then yanked him for Hollis Thompson. It’s nice to have you back Alexey, but you need to make like Larry David and curb your enthusiasm.

It wasn’t the most energetic night from the announcing team, as Marc Zumoff was apparently battling laryngitis (although we did get an in-depth discussion from he and Malik on Newton’s laws of motion, never change guys). Luckily, a huge distraction from that and the overall poor play from the Sixers came courtesy of a Woj bomb early in the second half.

76er will acquire Nets’ Andrei Kirilenko, a 2020 second rounder, right to swap 2018 seconds and cash for Brandon Davies, sources tell Yahoo.

— Adrian Wojnarowski (@WojYahooNBA) December 11, 2014

That’s right, Sam Hinkie traded Brandon Davies in the middle of the game. Davies was just sitting on the end of the bench the rest of the contest with a smile on his face, not knowing his NBA days are numbered (I’m assuming Brooklyn will release him upon arrival, but that’s just conjecture). On a day Ruben Amaro, Jr. was actually completing deals for the Phillies, you just knew Hinkie was itching to make a trade of his own happen. The actual game against the Hawks took a side seat for a while as the entire Sixers community scrambled to find out the full details of the transaction.

From Brooklyn’s perspective, the Nets will save close to $12M in luxury tax money by getting Kirilenko off the books, as they begin to scramble out of the financial sinkhole their initial spending splurge placed them in when owner Mikhail Prokhorov first bought the team. AK-47 hasn’t been with the Nets recently for personal reasons, and it’s expected the Sixers will grant him his release so he can move on to a contender. Not too long after, it came out that Jorge Gutierrez would also be coming over in the deal; if you’re wondering who Gutierrez is, I wrote a paragraph about over the summer when Team USA played Mexico in the FIBA World Cup.

The other Mexican player with NBA ties is guard Jorge Gutierrez. After playing his college ball at Cal, the former Golden Bear bounced around internationally and the NBA D-league for a couple seasons. Then, Gutierrez signed two ten-day contracts with the Brooklyn Nets last season, appearing in 15 games including 2 starts. His play earned him a contract with the Nets at just under $900k for the upcoming season. He averaged 9.6 points per game in the group stage, doing most of his damage driving to the hoop without much of a perimeter game.

Gutierrez has a non-guaranteed contract, and is expected to be released along with Kirilenko. The Sixers will have to release another player for logistical purposes to complete the deal (with two players coming onto the roster and only Brandon Davies leaving). Malcolm Lee would seem to be the most likely candidate.

All in all, another great deal along the margins by Sam Hinkie. Granted, we’ll have a different US president by the time we see the benefits, but picking up a 2nd-rounder and a potentially valuable swap right (remember, the Sixers are expected to be good by 2018, hard to wrap your head around, I know) just to help a team get out of luxury tax hell is a good day’s work. Brandon Davies always tried hard and I appreciated his fight for loose balls and willingness to take a charge, but he was never an NBA-caliber player. As the Sixers begin to creep back toward respectability, it’s only fitting that the man who has more or less been their avatar for tanking sees the door.