PHILADELPHIA — I will not relitigate The Process. I will not relitigate The Process. I will not relitigate The Process.
Oh, hey there. Pay no attention to the mantra at the beginning. It’s for everyone’s own good. I’m not even going to talk about The Process. Then again, that’s what everyone starts out thinking.
The topic du jour is more Process-adjacent than anything. “Blowing it up” is how I’ve heard it referred to. It’s the offseason strategy of choice of a surprising number of Sixers fans. What does that mean? Well, it isn’t always clear. Probably because the clearer it gets, the dumber it sounds. The Cliffs Notes version goes something like this: 1) Say goodbye to James Harden. 2) Trade Joel Embiid. 3) Turn the page.
It’s a brilliant plan, one that can be completely derailed with two words:
Then what?
The response is usually a disdainful shrug. Which, it should be noted, is the preferred mode of communication of people who aren’t personally liable for the strategic decisions they are advocating. It’s also a tip-off that there is no good answer.
Blowing it up is not an option. It’s not even a thing. It’s just a new phrase designed to trick people into believing in an old idea. Except the people using it are also the ones being tricked. They’re tricking themselves, because most of them fancy themselves vehement opponents of what “blowing it up” actually is.
Tanking. That’s what it is.
Let me rephrase that.
“Tanking” and “blowing it up” are effectively the same thing. If someone contends otherwise, he is either a con man or an ignoramus. There is no magical world where an NBA team can trade away an MVP who is one of the top two players at his position on both ends of the court and walk away with a team that is anywhere close to as good. That’s not how the NBA works.
The only teams who would trade for someone like Joel Embiid are teams who are trying to pair him with another star of his caliber. The Sixers have been one of those teams for the last six years. The whole reason they’ve been unsuccessful is that it takes a very limited and thus rare set of circumstances for such a star to become available. That’s why the Jimmy Butler thing is such a disaster. They had their chance.
You can’t trade Joel Embiid without becoming a team whose best hope is that everything breaks right and it wins 40 games and then steals Game 1 of a first-round playoff series before getting housed twice at home. If you trade Embiid, the best-case scenario is that you somehow avoid the play-in tournament for a couple of years while simultaneously lucking into diamond-in-the-rough prospects who will eventually make the impact that Embiid did the moment he stepped on the court.
Careful what you wish for
Think about it. Who are you trading Embiid for? If you think the Sixers will never win a championship with him, wait until you see them try to do it with Tyrese Maxey and Tyler Herro as their two best players. The best-case scenario is something like what the Nets pulled in exchange for Kevin Durant: a couple of young players in Mikal Bridges and Cameron Johnson who can help you push for a playoff spot plus a few draft picks you can use to acquire the guy who can actually be the best player on a championship team. If you trade Embiid, you instantly become a team whose business model is predicated on hyping up its fan base for a season in which everyone knows it has no chance.
This is an obvious enough point that it isn’t even worth delving into. Anybody who argues otherwise simply does not understand the NBA. They are living in an NFL-centric world where the Eagles can trade Carson Wentz and get to the Super Bowl two years later with a guy they drafted in the second round. They’re living in a world where superstars like A.J. Brown want to play anywhere that is willing to pay them more than their old team was willing to pay them. It doesn’t work like that in the NBA.
In a good year, there are two guys in a draft class who end up as legitimate centerpieces. I’m talking about the kind of guy who instantly makes a team a conference semifinalist, regardless of supporting cast. In 2014, it was Embiid and Nikola Jokić. After that, you have a handful of guys who can (maybe) anchor a No. 8 seed but will never be the best player on a conference finalist: Zach LaVine, Marcus Smart, Aaron Gordon, Andrew Wiggins, Jordan Clarkson, Julius Randle, and Jerami Grant. None of those guys will ever be a primary or even No. 2 scorer on a championship team.
Most years, you don’t even get that. You get Devin Booker, some guys who aren’t actually good (Karl-Anthony Towns, D’Angelo Russell), some guys who are Game 7 third options or sixth men (Kristaps Porzingis, Bobby Portis), and then Montrezl Harrell, who has played the 12th-highest total of NBA minutes of anybody in the 2015 draft class. Go back and redraft the 2016 class. Jaylen Brown and Jamal Murray would go No. 1 and No. 2. After that, some combination of Pascal Siakam, Domantas Sabonis, Brandon Ingram, and Dejounte Murray. The next tier starts with Jakob Poetl and potentially even Ben Simmons.
Point is, the NBA only adds one or two potential difference-makers in a given year. And that’s a good year. Maybe 20 of them have joined the league since the Sixers drafted Embiid a decade ago. Any team who has one is looking to add and not subtract.
If the Sixers trade Embiid, their best chance at reaping commensurate value will be whatever draft pick they get the furthest into the future. If they get lucky, they can make things interesting and make people forget that they will lose in the first round. Their ceiling will be the Knicks.
Process this
There’s irony in all of this: A lot of the people who are currently sticking the electrodes on the C4 are those whose primary motivation is proving that the original Process was ill-conceived and ill-fated. More often than not, “Blow It Up!” is preceded by “The Process Was a Failure!”
The Process failed! We want The Process!
Process Derangement Syndrome is real. It looks like a horseshoe.
Look, the Process was a relic of a bygone era. Like the butter churn, or Carson Daly. Now is not the time or the place for any of it.
That wasn’t true a decade ago. A decade ago, the Sixers were drawing 16,000 per night in the six years before Sam Hinkie took charge. During the three years of The Process, attendance dropped to 14,000 per night. Over the last six years, the Sixers have averaged 20,000 fans per home game. In one year, they made back the total ticket sales they lost to The Process.
The Process did not “fail” by any good faith definition. Sure, it has failed to win a title. It failed to make the Sixers the perennial superteam they envisioned when they drafted Ben Simmons and Markelle Fultz at No. 1 overall in back-to-back years. Most of all, it failed to prove the party line that Hinkie’s disciples adopted as an article of faith. Turns out, tanking for superstars wasn’t the only way to contend for a title. You can find centerpiece stars outside of the top 10 (Warriors, Bucks, Nuggets, etc). The Process was sold as a lack of options. That wasn’t the case.
But none of those failures constitutes a Failure with a capital F. When people label The Process a Failure, the implication is that the Sixers would be better off had they gone another route. Is that really what Josh Harris thinks when he opens up the portfolio? The sellouts, the home playoff games, the new arena? Things look a lot different than they do in Washington or Orlando right now.
Those are the things that matter.
They are also the reason why The Process can’t happen again.
