Hinkie Wants to Run It Back

By Sean Kennedy (@PhillyFastBreak)

In Hinkie we trust? If you don’t consider yourself a person of faith, but you’re a Sixers fan, it’s time to reclassify yourself in that regard. We the people are blindly following GM Sam Hinkie as he guides us through the deserts of basketball ineptitude. I can only hope the promised land waits for us down the road.

The Sixers continue to hold fast to their philosophy of asset accumulation, building up the ammunition to make that run at a franchise game-changer when the time is right. Apparently, they determined that Andrew Wiggins was not that guy, as, despite numerous rumors flying around, they seemingly had no interest in trading up to the first overall pick.

As it turns out, Philadelphia never made a run at Cleveland’s No. 1 overall pick, league sources tell Yahoo.

— Adrian Wojnarowski (@WojYahooNBA) June 27, 2014

Give up multiple valuable assets just to move up a couple spots? Uh uh, Hinkie don’t play that. It seems like Joel Embiid was their target all along, as the team already had the promotional material out there in the middle of the night following the draft.

Just saw #Sixers Joel Embiid #TogetherWeBuild billboard with big photo of Embiid on PA Turnpike.

— Tom Moore (@tmoore76ers) June 27, 2014

Here’s the good news: for the second straight draft, the Sixers landed the player widely considered to be the best talent in the draft. The flip side is that the player in question is once again unlikely to suit up for the team the entire following season. Fans will have another long season of tanking to look forward to before the team winds up back in the upper portion of the lottery again next season. Call up Denzel Washington because we have a serious case of deja vu on our hands.

The Sixers’ next selection continued along those lines as they worked out a deal with Orlando to swap the 10th and 12th picks, getting their own future first-round pick back from the Dwight Howard/Andrew Bynum trade, and a 2nd-rounder next year in the process. Then, the team grabbed Dario Saric, the Croatian big man who just signed with a squad in Turkey and won’t be over in the NBA for at least the next two years.

First off, great job by the Sixers getting a future first-rounder just to move down two spots and still draft the player the team wanted. This deal was classic Hinkie and shows he’s an extremely skilled manager of resources. Still, a team that won 19 games a season ago had two picks in the top 10 and neither is likely to take the court next season. I love the big-picture thinking but I’m only human and at some point, I’d like to see this long-term rebuild start taking effect with actual quality NBA basketball.

The second round, naturally, saw the Sixers take a slew of high-upside guys. At 32, they grabbed K.J. McDaniels out of Clemson, an uber-athletic wing who led the ACC in blocks as a small forward. With the 39th pipe, the Sixers kept their Syracuse pipeline open, taking Jerami Grant, who can fill in as the poor man’s Thad Young when he leaves after this season, at the latest. The team continued to Hinkie around with the 47th selection, sending Russ Smith to New Orleans for Pierre Jackson, a guy the team sent out as the 42nd pick last year as part of the Jrue Holiday / Nerlens Noel deal. After playing college ball at Baylor, Jackson was in the D-League last year, and is very athletic but stands at just 5’10”.

The team’s first selection in the fifties went to Vasilije Micic out of Serbia, a talented point guard who apparently is many years away from coming over from Europe. Good move getting a talented guy to stash overseas here, the team can only have so many first and second-year guys fighting for roster spots this season. Finally, the team traded Nemanja Dangubic at 54 to San Antonio for picks 58 and 60. With 58, the Sixers drafted Jordan McRae, a shooting guard out of Tennessee who will team with Jackson to give the Sixers 2(!) average outside shooters out of this draft class. Pick 60 was sent to Brooklyn, apparently for cash, I suppose because Hinkie wanted to get one more trade in before the night was over.

What are your thoughts on the draft? The moves are all well thought out with a long-term vision clearly in mind, but do you feel that’s worth it for another painful season to watch on the court? Or are you just going to hibernate until 2016 and hopefully marvel at the young contender the Sixers have put on the floor? At the very least, the days of Sixers management being boring are long gone.