Free Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion by Andy Glockner Page B

didn’t stop other people from talking about the 76ers, and those people had very strong opinions on what the team was doing.
    After replacing Tony DiLeo in the aftermath of the 76ers’ disastrous trade for Los Angeles Lakers center Andrew Bynum, whonever played a game for Philadelphia thanks to injury, Hinkie’s first major move came during the 2013 NBA Draft, when he traded All-Star point guard Jrue Holiday to the New Orleans Hornets (now Pelicans) in exchange for that year’s No. 6 overall pick (Nerlens Noel) and a 2014 first-rounder. While Noel may have fit Hinkie’s vision of the kind of prospect he wanted to rebuild the team with, the University of Kentucky big man also had additional “value” to the 76ers because he had torn the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee late in his only college season and subsequently slid down some draft boards because he wouldn’t be available to play in the 2013–14 season. That kind of delay was music to the 76ers’ ears. Not only did they nab an undervalued talent (and collected an additional first-rounder for the following season for their trouble), but Noel’s absence helped ensure that Philadelphia would be very bad in 2013–14, which likely would push its own first-round pick higher in the 2014 draft.
    In that draft, the 76ers doubled down on this gambit, using the No. 3 overall pick on Kansas center Joel Embiid, who had foot and back issues in college and was, like Noel, at risk for missing a large piece of his first pro season. Philadelphia also spun a deal with Orlando with the pick it received from New Orleans, netting an additional second-round pick (more on this aspect of the strategy shortly), and an extra first-rounder down the road. With the twelfth overall pick, the 76ers then took Dario Saric, a two-time European youth player of the year who was not eligible to come to the NBA for two more seasons because of his professional contract in Spain.
    So, over Hinkie’s first two drafts, the 76ers used three of their four lottery selections on players who couldn’t play immediately, two of whom were carrying significant injury risk. All three of those players were downgraded by other teams because of those concerns, but they made them more valuable to Philadelphia, which (a) thought the players had star potential; and (b) wanted to continue to be bad for the short term, in order to rack up even more high lottery picks.
    This was the case again in 2014–15, when the 76ers went 18–64, with a start of the season that was so horrible (they went 0–17 before winning a game) that it launched a number of things:
            •     The team itself had head coach Brett Brown regularly meet season ticket holders in pregame forums to take direct questions about the franchise’s plan. (I walked in on one of these before a November 2014 gameagainst the Chicago Bulls.)
            •     The NBA brought in team management in December to answer questions about the so-called “tanking” strategy and the integrity of the 76ers’ overall rebuilding plan.
            •     Most notably, the NBA also brought to a vote potential changes in the draft lottery system to disincentivize losing as a way of helping a team improve its chances at a top pick.
    That vote, somewhat surprisingly based on sentiments described in pre-vote media reports, fell six yesses short of the required three-quarters needed to flatten out the draft lottery odds. That was, in part, because some teams felt changing rules that quickly midstream would be unjust when there were trades already on the books that included draft pick swaps as far out as 2020, and in part because some understood there was a method behind Hinkie’s madness and that Philadelphia was operating within the rules, even if some found the 76ers’ methods distasteful.
    “I think, in essence, the owners were concerned about unintended consequences,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said after the results of