The Philadelphia 76ers had a dream season: 52 wins, a playoff series victory, an All-NBA nod for Joel Embiid, and a Rookie of the Year Award for Ben Simmons. Then, the Bryan Colangelo Twitter scandal happened. Everything’s been weird ever since.
The Sixers mostly struck out in free agency. While Philadelphia kept the vital J.J. Redick on a reasonable 1-year deal and landed Wilson Chandler in a Nuggets salary cap dump, and also made a really smart draft trade that helps the long-term outlook, hopes were higher. The Sixers had a cap space window to chase a whale like LeBron James or Paul George. It didn’t work out. The Sixers had the best collection of assets to make a play for Kawhi Leonard. It didn’t work out.
Would the results have been different had Bryan Colangelo not parted ways with the franchise before the NBA Draft because of the Twitter scandal? It’s impossible to say. Would the results have been different had the Sixers quickly hired a new general manager instead of elevating coach Brett Brownto an interim role? It’s impossible to say. But we can make an educated guess: nothing would have landed LeBron or George, but perhaps another lead voice would have been willing to break up the team a little bit to nab Kawhi.
What’s done is done. The Sixers are still among the most promising franchises in the league, right there with the Boston Celtics. Beyond the stars Philadelphia has in Embiid and Simmons, there are solid players like Redick, Robert Covington, and Dario Saric, and intriguing youngsters like Markelle Fultz and Zhaire Smith, plus premium draft assets. The Sixers won’t be the Eastern Conference favorites for the 2018-19 season, but they also aren’t far off. They could be bound for the NBA Finalsthis season despite having a really young core.
This makes it all the more confounding that the Sixers are having trouble recruiting a new general manager to replace Colangelo. ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reports the franchise is looking at two options: hiring someone who isn’t currently a GM or maintaining the status quo for the 2018-19 season (but not beyond).
Meanwhile, the folks in the front office who aren’t Brett Brown have been given promotions. But they aren’t running the team. Got it?
It’s all a pretty strange situation. Sixers franchise managing partner Josh Harris made a play to hire Sam Hinkie’s mentor away from the Rockets to no avail, and Woj’s report hints that Philadelphia tried to lure other high-end current GMs. Harris says he doesn’t “want to feel forced into compromising” in selecting a candidate in apparently explaining why the Sixers haven’t just hired the best candidate they can draw, but he’s already compromised by turning his focus away from elite current GMs to non-current GMs and non-traditional candidates.
His fallback plan, should this unicorn assistant GM who checks all the boxes fail to materialize, is also a compromise. He is compromising all over the place while insisting that by not hiring anyone, he’s refusing to compromise. It’s enough to make your eyes involuntarily roll.
What Harris gets right is that he knows Brown can’t be the permanent general manager in addition to serving as coach. That arrangement no longer works in the NBA. Brown appears to be insistent on this fact, too, which shows some remarkable self-awareness, something other coaches could use.
The question, then, becomes why the Sixers don’t just promote Marc Eversley or Ned Cohen in the front office to that lead role and elevate Brown to a Popovichian position of team president to ensure he maintains a front office voice if not veto power? Going into a critical season with big names potentially landing on the trade block and a huge opportunity to pounce into the lead spot in a ruffled East without an empowered, full-time head of the front office seems unwise.
There’s also the issue of whether Eversley (who interviewed for the GM position in Charlotte this summer) or Cohen (a former NBA executive who is often touted as a future GM) is truly the lead front office voice behind Brown. Is this a team of rivals without a Lincoln to sort it out? Are the Sixers stalling because they don’t want to promote one over the other and lead to a front office break-up? What’s that all about?
This front office set-up can do what it needs to do until there’s a big inflection point. Whittling the roster to 15 and getting two-way contracts done and deciding whether to assign Zhaire Smith to the G League — this front office can do all of that. But who’s the empowered, informed voice when it comes to Embiid’s workload? When it comes to Markelle Fultz’s health status? When it comes to in-season trade talks?
There are reasonable concerns that limited partners in the Sixers ownership group have voices in the front office. That’s a huge potential problem given that the official leader of the front office (Brown) will be busy coaching the team, as he says, 80-100 hours a week and the practical leader of the front office (Eversley or Cohen) doesn’t really have the title to pull rank over rogue rich meddlers. Meanwhile, the managing partner who could set everyone straight and keep everyone in their lanes (Harris) usually isn’t around.
So we have an absentee managing partner, meddling limited partners, a head coach moonlighting as an interim GM, a decentralized front office pecking order, and a power vacuum. Oh, and the prior GM’s dad is technically still in the mix, serving as a senior advisor to ownership through December. It’s not guaranteed dysfunction, but it’s a recipe for it.
Given what preceded this situation — a complete violation of trust and public self-immolation by the prior general manager, Colangelo — it’s hard to imagine this wacky set-up inspiring much faith from the players or the fandom. It could all work out until it doesn’t, and then it’s too late.
The Sixers are playing with fire. The solution? Either promote Eversley or Cohen to head of the front office, or just complete the hero’s arc we’ve all been waiting for and restore Sam Hinkie to power. At least you know he won’t get caught with his Twitter fingers out. He’ll be too busy writing 13-page letters to whom it may concern.
