Despite carrying a ‘win now’ mandate, a hefty pile of draft picks, and a pair of “executive of the year” awards, there are several reasons to maintain a jaundiced view of the Sixers’ prospects under new GM Bryan Colangelo.
The current roster is really really bad
Philadelphia is carrying an almost unprecedented stockpile of draft picks. However, this team’s present roster is bad to an almost equally unprecedented degree.
This creates two problems for the team. First of all, not all teams are willing to trade a quality rotation player primarily for draft picks and the Sixers have almost nothing else to offer. Secondly, they have so many glaring deficiencies at every position from point guard to power forward that they likely need to obtain at least three NBA caliber starters in the off-season just to compete for a bottom tier playoff spot.
Their assets aren’t that valuable in this off-season
More than any other year, this year just about every team in the NBA thinks that they can get better through free agency.
And this year’s draft is not highly regarded.
The combination of a draft perceived as being weak and widespread optimism about free agency is not a good one for a team that is long on draft picks and short on talent. It seems unlikely that any team is going to pull the plug and trade even high caliber rotation players for picks before seeing how free agency turns out, and that means that the Sixers will have to use all their 2016 picks themselves, trade them for picks in later drafts, or trade them for likely lower caliber players than they would have preferred.
It certainly seems unlikely that a team is going to put a superstar on the market before the draft if they believe they have a shot at landing another superstar a few weeks later in free agency.
You need more than talent to win consistently in the NBA
You need continuity. Auerbach and the Celtics, Jerry Buss and Jerry West and the Lakers, Pop and Buford in San Antonio, Carlisle and Cuban in Dallas.
Right now, the Sixers have neither continuity nor have they set themselves up for continuity by putting in place the ‘seven seconds or less’ duo from a decade ago in Phoenix. This is a quick and easy fix of the sort that “stuck in the middle” teams are forever making. Does anyone believe that D’Antoni is a long-term solution in the [assistant] coach’s seat? Does anyone in the Sixers front office or on their coaching staff seem likely to stick around and provide useful contributions and a steadying hand going forward?
You need more than draft picks to win consistently in the NBA
Minnesota is going to be in the lottery this summer. For the twelfth consecutive year. Sacramento is going to be in the lottery this year. For the tenth consecutive year.
There is not a switch in a locker room or a front office that can be flipped between ‘suck’ and ‘don’t suck’. Losing breeds bad habits and corrodes good ones. A coach and front office that have grown inured to losing cannot easily switch to the mindset required to win games. As Stevens is fond of pointing out, “winning is hard.” If you get used to losing, it’s pretty hard to motivate yourself to care about winning. Losing is easier. And that goes from the ballboys all the way up to the team president. It’s always going to be easier to lose. You don’t have to outwork anybody to lose.
It’s an open question how long it will take a retread GM and a retread coach (assuming that D’Antoni gets the nod from old friend Colangelo) to change the culture of a historically awful team.
Is Bryan Colangelo even a good GM?
Bryan Colangelo’s track record over his final seven seasons in the NBA–all at Toronto–is not spectacular. This raises the question of how well Colangelo will navigate the current NBA environment, regardless of how well he did at Phoenix a dozen years ago.
At best, Colangelo and his staff were an uneven judge of overseas talent, and only two of his ten draft picks (including number one overall Andrea Bargnani) produced rotation players (DeRozan and Valančiūnas). That’s not a great percentage, when you appreciate that the Raptors had picks 1, 9, 13, 5 and 8 during his tenure.
Marry in haste, repent at leisure
There is absolutely no conceivable reason for Philadelphia to rush into this replacement process, yet we are assured that the contract details are all but finalized.
This is not how good teams operate!
You have a team executive rushing to sign his son to a multi-year contract, based on a resume that stopped being good almost a decade ago. And both father and son are enamored of an aging “assistant” coach who has a “system” and who has refused in the past to adapt his “system” to the abilities of his players.
The Sixers are basically going all-in on the Colangelo experiment for no clearly discernible reason. Again, there is no reason whatsoever for the Sixers to rush into this. Their team is awful. Absolutely completely and totally awful. They have plenty of time to do this right.
Why they are rushing straight from Hinkie to Colangelo is unfathomable.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it
The Sixers are repeating the same mistake they made with Sam Hinkie.
And, without being intentionally ironic, it really is about the process.
Bryan Colangelo is now the third GM hired by Josh Harris in under four years. In fairness, Harris did hold interviews when he hired Tony DiLeo in 2012. But he didn’t hold interviews when he fired DiLeo a year later–he just grabbed the next guy available.
You might luck into a good hire by making snap decisions based off of ‘hunches’ and ‘gut feelings’, but you’re not going to make good hires consistently with that process.
As long as Harris is making hiring and firing decisions more or less on whims, the Sixers will have neither long-term stability nor long-term success.
So while it’s not impossible that the Sixers will stumble into a few good years, it seems difficult to imagine a scenario where they will be able to sustain success.
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