"The Recent History of the Philadelphia 76ers; or: The Basketball Gods are Real, and they are Angry; part 1: The Colangeli"
Bruno Dias Min the Skunk cohost.org
A follow-up to this post [https://cohost.org/bruno/post/2529287-the-ballad-of-sam-hi], of course.

In 2016, the private equity ghouls that owned the Philadelphia 76ers were angry and tired. Majority owner Josh Harris expected that owning a sports franchise would get him the kind of love and adoration that it had gotten other rich guys who bought sports franchises. Instead, he got indifference at best (as the pro-tanking segment of his fanbase praised and worshipped Sam Hinkie) and scorn at worse.

Meanwhile, everyone â agents, the media, the league itself as personified by recently-elevated NBA Commissioner Adam Silver â was breathing down his neck. All this tanking was bad for business, it was bad for optics.

But of course, Harris was a private equity ghoul. A craven and venal animal. So he didn't just fire Sam Hinkie. Instead, he hired a new 'chairman of basketball operations' and 'special advisor', allegedly to work alongside Hinkie (who remained General Manager). That man was Jerry Colangelo.

If Hinkie was a quasi-outsider who spoke the language of the private equity ghouls, then Colangelo was about the most traditional NBA executive you could find; a long-time executive and owner with the Phoenix Suns throughout the 80s and 90s, responsible for assembling the teams Charles Barkley played with in Arizona. He was born in 1939, literally coming out of retirement to 'fix' Hinkie's mess. This relationship quickly became untenable and Hinkie departed, leaving behind only a 13-page resignation letter/manifesto.

So the Sixers needed a new general manager. The man who ultimately succeeded Hinkie was uh, let me check, oh yeah, Bryan Colangelo. Yes, Jerry's son, an NBA executive who had spent a few years in between jobs after being fired as general manager of the Toronto Raptors (a story for another time, perhaps). Jerry went back into retirement after successfully installing his nepo baby as president of basketball operations and general manager for the team.

To recap the major Sixers moves ever since Hinkie took over:

 * In 2013 they drafted Michael Carter-Williams, a guard who won Rookie of the Year then promptly never developed into a good player, got traded out of the Sixers, and spent the last 10 years bouncing around between tanking teams stringing together an unremarkable journeyman career.
 * In 2014 they drafted seven players, thanks to Hinkie's absurd accumulation of second-round picks, but the key one was their own first-round pick: Joel Embiid, who would become very much The Guy in philadelphia. A bruising center with a rare combination of skills and size, he developed into one of the very best players in the league. Embiid was also injured when he was drafted, something that Hinkie was more than happy with as it meant that the team would continue being terrible and keep getting high picks.
 * In 2015 they drafted Jahlil Okafor, who amounted to very little and will never be heard from again.
 * In 2016, with the very first pick of the draft, in their first draft under Colangelo, they drafted Ben Simmons, who would also have been Hinkie's choice there as a consensus first pick. We'll get to him.

Now, Colangelo had a mandate to engineer a quick turnaround for the Sixers. He did not succeed in that. Embiid, who spent his first two years in the league injured, finally made his debut and he was just as good as advertised and it didn't matter because he was still ultimately a rookie, and the roster around him was awful. They won 28 games and got themselves another high pick. Colangelo didn't get that much heat for this â after all, they did improve on their historically bad record of 10 wins the preceding year, and the future was looking up with at least an exciting star on the team.

In the 2017 draft, Colangelo selected Markelle Fultz. We'll get to him.

The 2017-2018 season was the actual turnaround. The Sixers were suddenly one of the best teams in the league. Ben Simmons, who had missed his first season, was now on the court and playing great (with caveats; we'll get to him). Embiid had adopted 'the Process' as his nickname, publicly embracing the Sam Hinkie team-building strategy; this, no doubt, made Colangelo extremely mad. But you'd think that winning would fix everything right? The Sixers won 50 games that season. In two short years they went from 10 wins to 50 wins, through a mix of past draft picks finally paying off and Colangelo trading away assets to get them help. Brett Brown, their head coach who had languished through the worst of the tanking years, was proving capable of leading a real contender. Everything was looking up.

But, like other nepo babies before him and since, Bryan was a resentful, envious, and insecure babyman. Above all he held obsessive grudges against two men: Masai Ujiri (his successor on the Raptors), and Sam Hinkie (his predecessor on the Sixers).

Both grudges were about the same thing: an executive getting credit for the results of decisions made during his predecessor's tenure. Colangelo felt he was in the right in both instances, which I think is illustrative of his character. Now, he was pretty good at keeping all this to himself.

Except, as some sports journalists learned in 2018, he actually was operating five anonymous Twitter accounts that he used to basically argue with his haters. The details of how these accounts were found out are exactly what you'd expect: They followed the same suggestive list of accounts (Sixers media, Raptors media, the collegiate basketball team Colangelo's son played in), replied to the same people with the same tone. Their recovery email address matched his wife's email address. Colangelo would eventually admit that they were burners who were caping for him on twitter, but he'd claim that they were operated by his wife.

He posted about how Sam Hinkie was an idiot. He posted about how Embiid had a bad attitude and should be traded, and this was now Ben Simmons' team (this idea will become hilarious very soon). He posted about how Masai Ujiri was an overrated fraud taking credit for another man's (his) hard work. Most infamously he argued that his propensity for wearing really high popped collars on his dress shirts was normal and cool.

> That is a normal collar. Move on, find a new slant.

The whole thing ended up being predictably exposed [https://www.theringer.com/nba/2018/5/29/17406750/bryan-colangelo-philadelphia-76ers-twitter-joel-embiid-anonymous-markelle-fultz], which was not survivable for Colangelo, who was swiftly ejected from his job. The Sixers found a new general manager in Elton Brand, who had only a couple years earlier suited up for them as a player on one of those terrible tanking teams.

But the Colangelo Saga is really just the appetizer. It's a story of venality, nepotism, and incompetence. But sure, it doesn't really evidence anything about the wrath of the basketball gods. To look into that we have to look at the curious cases of two once-promising young players. We'll get to them in another post.
https://cohost.org/static/7ec6f0f3aef87d734f9b.png
Bruno Dias on cohost
A follow-up to this post, of course.

In 2016, the private equity ghouls that owned the Philadelphia 76ers were angry and tired. Majority owner Josh Harris expected that owning a sports franchise would get him the kind of love and adoration that it had gotten other rich guys who bought sports franchises. Instead, he got indifference at best (as the pro-tanking segment of his fanbase praised and worshipped Sam Hinkie) and scorn at worse.

Meanwhile, everyone â agents, the media, the league itself as personified by recently-elevated NBA Commissioner Adam Silver â was breathing down his neck. All this tanking was bad for business, it was bad for optics.

But of course, Harris was a private equity ghoul. A craven and venal animal. So he didn't just fire Sam Hinkie. Instead, he hired a new 'chairman of basketball operations' and 'special advisor', allegedly to work alongside Hinkie (who remained General Manager). That man was Jerry Colangelo.

If Hinkie was a quasi-outsider who spoke the language of the private equity ghouls, then Colangelo was about the most traditional NBA executive you could find; a long-time executive and owner with the Phoenix Suns throughout the 80s and 90s, responsible for assembling the teams Charles Barkley played with in Arizona. He was born in 1939, literally coming out of retirement to 'fix' Hinkie's mess. This relationship quickly became untenable and Hinkie departed, leaving behind only a 13-page resignation letter/manifesto.

So the Sixers needed a new general manager. The man who ultimately succeeded Hinkie was uh, let me check, oh yeah, Bryan Colangelo. Yes, Jerry's son, an NBA executive who had spent a few years in between jobs after being fired as general manager of the Toronto Raptors (a story for another time, perhaps). Jerry went back into retirement after successfully installing his nepo baby as president of basketball operations and general manager for the team.

To recap the major Sixers moves ever since Hinkie took over:

In 2013 they drafted Michael Carter-Williams, a guard who won Rookie of the Year then promptly never developed into a good player, got traded out of the Sixers, and spent the last 10 years bouncing around between tanking teams stringing together an unremarkable journeyman career.

In 2014 they drafted seven players, thanks to Hinkie's absurd accumulation of second-round picks, but the key one was their own first-round pick: Joel Embiid, who would become very much The Guy in philadelphia. A bruising center with a rare combination of skills and size, he developed into one of the very best players in the league. Embiid was also injured when he was drafted, something that Hinkie was more than happy with as it meant that the team would continue being terrible and keep getting high picks.

In 2015 they drafted Jahlil Okafor, who amounted to very little and will never be heard from again.

In 2016, with the very first pick of the draft, in their first draft under Colangelo, they drafted Ben Simmons, who would also have been Hinkie's choice there as a consensus first pick. We'll get to him.

Now, Colangelo had a mandate to engineer a quick turnaround for the Sixers. He did not succeed in that. Embiid, who spent his first two years in the league injured, finally made his debut and he was just as good as advertised and it didn't matter because he was still ultimately a rookie, and the roster around him was awful. They won 28 games and got themselves another high pick. Colangelo didn't get that much heat for this â after all, they did improve on their historically bad record of 10 wins the preceding year, and the future was looking up with at least an exciting star on the team.

In the 2017 draft, Colangelo selected Markelle Fultz. We'll get to him.

The 2017-2018 season was the actual turnaround. The Sixers were suddenly one of the best teams in the league. Ben Simmons, who had missed his first season, was now on the court and playing great (with caveats; we'll get to him). Embiid had adopted 'the Process' as his nickname, publicly embracing the Sam Hinkie team-building strategy; this, no doubt, made Colangelo extremely mad. But you'd think that winning would fix everything right? The Sixers won 50 games that season. In two short years they went from 10 wins to 50 wins, through a mix of past draft picks finally paying off and Colangelo trading away assets to get them help. Brett Brown, their head coach who had languished through the worst of the tanking years, was proving capable of leading a real contender. Everything was looking up.

But, like other nepo babies before him and since, Bryan was a resentful, envious, and insecure babyman. Above all he held obsessive grudges against two men: Masai Ujiri (his successor on the Raptors), and Sam Hinkie (his predecessor on the Sixers).

Both grudges were about the same thing: an executive getting credit for the results of decisions made during his predecessor's tenure. Colangelo felt he was in the right in both instances, which I think is illustrative of his character. Now, he was pretty good at keeping all this to himself.

Except, as some sports journalists learned in 2018, he actually was operating five anonymous Twitter accounts that he used to basically argue with his haters. The details of how these accounts were found out are exactly what you'd expect: They followed the same suggestive list of accounts (Sixers media, Raptors media, the collegiate basketball team Colangelo's son played in), replied to the same people with the same tone. Their recovery email address matched his wife's email address. Colangelo would eventually admit that they were burners who were caping for him on twitter, but he'd claim that they were operated by his wife.

He posted about how Sam Hinkie was an idiot. He posted about how Embiid had a bad attitude and should be traded, and this was now Ben Simmons' team (this idea will become hilarious very soon). He posted about how Masai Ujiri was an overrated fraud taking credit for another man's (his) hard work. Most infamously he argued that his propensity for wearing really high popped collars on his dress shirts was normal and cool.

That is a normal collar. Move on, find a new slant.

The whole thing ended up being predictably exposed, which was not survivable for Colangelo, who was swiftly ejected from his job. The Sixers found a new general manager in Elton Brand, who had only a couple years earlier suited up for them as a player on one of those terrible tanking teams.

But the Colangelo Saga is really just the appetizer. It's a story of venality, nepotism, and incompetence. But sure, it doesn't really evidence anything about the wrath of the basketball gods. To look into that we have to look at the curious cases of two once-promising young players. We'll get to them in another post.