I just find this whole situation comical.



From the very start, the question about Hinkie's strategy was never about the tanking. It was always about the "and then what?" Tanking isn't hard. Putting together a roster that can't win isn't hard. Taking players with top 3 picks isn't hard. The hard part is taking all those assets and turning them into a team and then taking that team and turning it into a winner. When you talk about a "process", you can't just be talking about the first step. But that is all Sam Hinkie did.



And now, he leaves and in comes an old-school wheeler dealer who is very likely going to go out and spend a ton of money on free agents, fire Brett Brown and put in D'Antoni, and basically take the franchise in a completely different direction.



I really struggled to come up with an analogy....and here it is.



The Sixers decided they wanted to make the world's biggest maze of dominoes. They had made some before, but it seemed like their domino mazes were always not quite good enough. So they hired Sam Hinkie and he drew up this radical domino maze plan that pushed the limits of domino theory. People scoffed that dominoes don't fall the way he said they would and that he was in over his head. But he went ahead and did all the research, tested his theories, brought in some dominoes, didn't like them so he got different ones, and then finally he had it all together. He was finally at the point where people would be able to see that he had been right all along.



But then, for some reason, he decided that, as much as he loved all the planning that goes into developing a great domino maze, he really didn't feel like doing all the tedious work involved in actually setting up the dominoes. It just seemed so boring. So he just handed over all his dominoes and all his plans to the Sixers and said "here....do it yourself"



The Sixers didn't know what to with all of this stuff. They weren't really sure they wanted to do this anymore either. So they went out and hired Bryan Colangelo.



And Bryan Colangelo said "Fuck dominoes!"