Philadelphia 76ers: NBA Draft Lottery reform validates Sam Hinkie

While the NBA decides to create parity in the NBA Draft Lottery, former Philadelphia 76ers general manager Sam Hinkie gets the last laugh.

Trust the Process. It’s a three letter phrase. Some consider it a mantra to live by. Fans of the Philadelphia 76ers adopted it as their own little thing. It became an inside joke of sorts. On the other hand, you have people who detested this saying and considered it as a sort of cancer to the NBA. That, my friends, is the dichotomy of former Sixers general manager Sam Hinkie.

Now, it’s no secret that for years the Philadelphia 76ers lacked a sense of direction. After years of competing in the NBA’s purgatory, where teams either miss the playoffs or get swept by the top dogs, Sixers’ ownership had enough. They wanted out of this. *enter Sam Hinkie*

Hinkie’s sole job in this entire operation was to rebuild the Sixers. Now, how might he do this? Well, most teams will go to free agency and spend big money on marginal talents or simply trade for said talents. The Sixers practiced this with relative failure. For years, the team’s best player post-Allen Iverson was Andre Iguodala, who most saw as a solid contributor on a contender. He certainly was not a number one option. But, given Philadelphia circumstances, he had to be that guy.

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Although, it’s not to say that the Sixers NEVER looked to bring in younger talent. They drafted the likes of Jrue Holiday and Evan Turner, who both contributed fairly well. The problem? While they both could start on most teams, Holiday and Turner couldn’t take the Sixers beyond a seventh or eighth seed in the Eastern Conference. Anyway, before I get too off-topic, the Sixers knew they couldn’t win with this formula, and thus brought in Sam Hinkie.

Hinkie learned under the tutelage of current Houston Rockets’ Daryl Morey. He’s a big proponent of analytics and trying to optimize your chances of winning. In the NBA, however, unless you tried to create a Miami Heat super team of sorts, you were basically stuck in the mud. Now, you have outliers like the San Antonio Spurs, but even they had the star power that they acquired in the draft. So, anyone with this knowledge could understand where Hinkie was coming from.

@samhinkie tanking is solved
— Daryl Morey 🗽🏀 (@dmorey) September 28, 2017

As a result, Sam Hinkie took advantage of the system the NBA built. Before the reform, the NBA gave the worst team a 25.0 percent chance to win the lottery, followed by a 19.9 and 15.6 percent chance, respectively. Hinkie understood this, and strategically built a roster that was destined to fail. Obviously, the players did not intentionally lose. On the contrary, these players were fighting for their jobs, either in Philadelphia or elsewhere. But, of course, because the team appeared to be openly endorsing this behavior, the NBA stepped in to try and counteract it. As a result, Hinkie resigned from his position on the team.

Now, over a year after Sam Hinkie left, the NBA has established new NBA Draft Lottery reform. This is meant to lower the incentive for teams to tank. For a more comprehensive look at the new lottery numbers, Zach Lowe of ESPN took a look at how everything will pan out. Essentially, the three worst teams in the NBA all have a 14.0 percent chance at winning the NBA Draft Lottery. This will likely reduce the incentive for teams to “tank”, so to speak. Teams can be bad on their own and still have a shot at the number one overall pick. This will all go into effect in 2019.

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If this tells us anything, it’s that Sam Hinkie’s legacy will always live on. Not just in the Philadelphia 76ers, but across the NBA. He exposed how unbalanced the system was and took advantage of it. The Sixers now reaped the fruits of this labor in having cap space to sign free agents like J.J. Redick, as well as their own draft picks in Ben Simmons, Joel Embiid, and Dario Saric. Oh, and had Hinkie not acquired the many assets that he did, the Sixers would not have been able to trade up to draft Markelle Fultz. At the end of the day, Hinkie did a lot for the Sixers, the fans of Philadelphia, and the NBA. His plan single-handly brought reform to the NBA. Whether you like him or not, Hinkie’s vision will always have its place in the history books. In Hinkie We Trust.