Jahlil Okafor was always Sam Hinkie’s backup plan
When the Philadelphia 76ers invested the third pick in the 2015 NBA draft on Jahlil Okafor, it was always as an insurance policy for Joel Embiid’s foot.
On December 7th, 2017 the Philadelphia 76ers finally freed Jah.
It’s been no secret to anyone who’s even casually paying attention to the Sixers over the last two seasons that the new general manager Bryan Colangelo has been looking to move on from the third pick in the 2015 NBA draft, but finding the right package has always been difficult.
No team in the league was interested in moving a lottery pick for a player who’d only appeared in two games this season, and when the team declined Okafor’s fourth-year option, it seemed like only a matter of time before the team moved on from the former Duke Blue Devil.
And after months of campaigning from Okafor and his agent, the 76ers finally granted him his wish.
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Okafor was traded to the Brooklyn Nets along with Nik Stauskas and a 2019 second-round pick for eighth-year big man Trevor Booker. While many fans, pundits and sports writers alike questioned why the team would be so desperate to move on from a Top-3 talent for such a minuscule return, for the 76ers it was always part of the plan.
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In his incredibly through 13-page letter of resignation, former GM, and process pioneer Sam Hinkie highlighted just how bright the future was for the 76ers, and described exactly why the team selected Okafor so high right after selecting Joel Embiid and Nerlens Noel in back-to-back drafts. Taking the best player available was always considered paramount to the team’s future success, but if Embiid, a player who at that point was still almost a year away from making his NBA debut, had been able to showcase his astronomical potential against live bullets, it’s incredibly unlikely that the team would have selected Okafor at all.
While passing on players like Kristaps Porzingis, Justise Winslow or recent Sixer-killer Devin Booker has been a hard pill to swallow, at the time of Okafor’s selection, Embiid’s emergence as a generational talent was anything but guaranteed. For better or for worse, Hinkie and company believed that it was essential to find a young, scoring big man who could draw double teams, and free up outside shooters.And thankfully for Sixers fans, Embiid has become that player.
When healthy, Embiid has been an absolute revelation as an outside scorer, inside scorer, and as a defender, and is quickly becoming one of the leagues most entertaining players both on and off the court. And because of that, Okafor became expendable.
Next: Philadelphia 76ers: Trevor Booker is a big baller
Even though the 76ers didn’t pull off a magic trade to swap their newly vegan center for another young, ultra-talented player like say, Devin Booker, it was always a tough ask to convince another team to trade an ascending asset for another team’s fourth-string center. In Trevor Booker, the 76ers have added another passionate, hard-working forward to a roster in desperate need of some extra grit, and unlike Okafor, Booker may actually see the court.