Jayson Tatum is young (25, which is easy to remember because we can remember him being 19), and he is really, really good.
Now.
Let’s talk about the Process.
Obviously, I’m a big fan of Sam Hinkie and the Process. It was ugly, it was a joke, it was also indisputably the best way to give the 76ers a chance to win an NBA championship at that point in time. Games are played within rules. It wasn’t Sam Hinkie’s fault that the NBA’s rules reward building a brutally bad basketball team. The Process was brilliantly simple. It very nearly worked.
Jahlil Okafor didn’t ultimately work out either, but it’s the 2016 and 2017 NBA Drafts which presumably sting the worst today in Philadelphia, the 2016 and 2017 NBA Drafts where Ben Simmons and Markelle Fultz each went 1st overall, to Philly, and Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum each went 3rd overall, to Boston. I’m far from the only person making the connection that two players Philadelphia had a great chance to draft are the two best players on the team that just eliminated them in what may go down as the dying ember of the most ambitious end-to-end tank effort in American sports history.
What went wrong with the Process isn’t an inherent flaw in the Process. If the key to winning in the NBA is developing elite homegrown talent, it’s hard to argue for a better design than amassing high draft picks. What went wrong also isn’t as simple as picking the wrong players or drawing poorly in the lottery. For starters, there was that trade involved, Bryan Colangelo sending the pick that became Tatum to the Celtics in exchange for the pick that became Fultz. Could differences in lottery balls and scouting reports have helped? Yes. But the Sixers didn’t do anything many people called ‘dumb’ at the time. There was some debate in 2016 over whether Simmons or Brandon Ingram was the best choice, but Colangelo—recently installed by the NBA in Hinkie’s place—didn’t make an unconventional decision going with Simmons. Reactions were largely positive regarding the Fultz trade the next year. Fultz and Simmons were expected to work well together, and when combined with Joel Embiid, the trio drew comparisons to Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and James Harden together in Oklahoma City.
What went wrong with the Process is some combination of *the* two things. It’s a combination of 1) the players the Sixers happened to draft and 2) what the Sixers did with the players they happened to draft.
We will never know how Simmons or Fultz would have performed in the NBA were they swapped with, say, Brown and Tatum, or with Ingram and Lonzo Ball, or with another combination of top picks those two years. Neither Simmons’s nor Fultz’s nor even Okafor’s was a totally lost career—Okafor and Simmons each started their career strong, Fultz has been putting things back together of late in Orlando—and Ball is another example of how things can go quickly awry, on the verge right now of missing his second consecutive full season. But while counterfactuals are definitionally unknown, it’s safe to say that there was at least some bad luck with Okafor, Simmons, and Fultz. Half of the six players selected in the top threes of the 2016 and 2017 NBA Drafts are currently among the NBA’s best thirty or forty players right now. The other half are not among the best hundred. The lottery aspect of talent acquisition doesn’t stop with the lottery.
At the same time, though, surely the Sixers had some responsibility for the player development not working out. Okafor ran into discipline issues in the second month of his first pro season, then ultimately left Philadelphia on the heels of the ‘Find a New Slant’ burner scandal. Responsibility for 19-year-olds’ discipline is traditionally assigned, in part, to franchises, and the burner scandal was not an act of God. Fultz? Fultz was definitely injured, but could the saga his shoulder became have been avoided with different management? Simmons, meanwhile, took one of the sharpest turns from promise to punching bag in NBA history for someone not an immediate draft bust. Maybe the same situation would have played out in Boston or Los Angeles, but it was so specific a disintegration that it’s fair to ask how Philadelphia could have organizationally diverted the runaway truck to a gravel ramp before it blew through the championship hopes of two separate franchises in the Eastern Conference.
This is the thing about homegrown championship rosters, and it’s the thing about them in almost any sport: Talent acquisition is straightforward. Player development is not. There’s art and there’s science to the first, of course, drafting and signing the best players isn’t as simple as reading The Ringer’s Big Board. But the basic idea behind acquiring great basketball players, or great baseball players, or great hockey or football players in America is simple: Lose a lot of games in a short span of time. It’s what comes next that’s hard. It’s what comes after the Process. It’s the gardening of that talent.
The Process did its job. It got the Sixers four straight top-four lottery positions and four straight top-three picks. It got the Sixers a future MVP, a Rookie of the Year, an All-Rookie First Teamer, and Markelle Fultz. But the Process’s job was only the first part of the ultimate job. The ultimate job is turning that talent into something that can, with the right collection of coaching and other personnel moves, repeatedly get close enough to titles to ultimately break through. Through mistake or misfortune, that’s the front on which the Process failed. It got the pieces. It never built the house.
Realignment Buzz Resumes
With graduation ceremonies signaling the beginning of academic summer, conference realignment is jumping back into the speculatory spotlight, Ross Dellenger publishing a report this morning on the latest in the Power Five and Brett McMurphy checking in this afternoon.
There’s nothing earthshaking in what either of Dellenger and McMurphy shared, but a few interesting notes, the majority from Dellenger, the identities of the seven ACC schools from McMurphy:
- There’s a soft deadline of July 1st for Pac-12 expansion, because after that the Mountain West’s exit fee for San Diego State triples if the Pac-12 wants the Aztecs immediately upon UCLA and USC’s departure.
- Seven ACC schools—Florida State, Miami, Clemson, North Carolina, NC State, Virginia, and Virginia Tech—have banded together to explore whether the league’s TV rights deal is as locked in as it’s perceived to be. The TV rights deal is the piece holding those 14 schools prisoner, for better (Wake Forest, Boston College) and worse (those seven), so the direct meaning of this is that these seven are trying to find a loophole which lets them out of a bad contract, but the indirect meaning is that these seven are operating in some sort of partnership. More on this in a minute.
- Lots of names were thrown out as potential Big 12 targets, with UConn notably among them. Gonzaga was not mentioned, which doesn’t mean it isn’t on the table but is noteworthy because of how possible their addition to the league briefly seemed.
Ok.
The ACC schools.
There’s not a lot to make of this, if there’s anything to make of it at all. Parties who signed a bad contract are looking for a way out of that bad contract? I should hope that they are. Schools who’d benefit from unequal revenue sharing are starting to work together and excluding those who wouldn’t? That makes a lot of sense.
What we’re really getting out of seven ACC schools working together on this is the identities of the seven ACC schools in question. The report draws a line. It doesn’t mean these are the top-revenue schools in the ACC, necessarily (universities align for multiple reasons, including geography and academics and sociology) but it establishes a separation between these seven and the other seven (Duke, Syracuse, Louisville, Pitt, Wake Forest, Boston College, and Georgia Tech). The seven working together feature two pairs of in-state public partners, one pair of connected in-state rivals, and the most successful football program in the conference over the last decade (and more). It’s a reasonable list, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that Louisville isn’t making enough money to hang. It might mean that, but it would also make sense that these seven just don’t operate as closely with Louisville. There are a lot of cultural and institutional differences there.
What the alleged partnership does mean is that these seven see themselves as driving the bus, and whether they do or do not, they’ve got half the conference in their group, so they kind of do so long as they can keep everyone aboard. This alleged partnership might be overblown in its description, or it might be temporary and toothless, but it also could be the start of a group that sees itself as a valuable entity willing to work as a unit. It’s something to watch. Would blowing up the entire league and approaching five other schools across the country to form a new conference constitute finding a loophole?
In the broader picture, it’s hard not to like the Big 12’s position in the temporary sense. The ACC has a whale of a contract, tied up in its own tail as it tries to figure out how the hell it stuck itself with Boston College. The Pac-12’s choices are between 1) sticking together with or without San Diego State and SMU for a short-term run, its biggest brands hoping they’re worth it for the Big Ten in six years, and 2) breaking up. The Big 12 is presently rather stable, as far as these things go, and it’s actively targeting four power conference schools—Arizona, Arizona State, Utah, and Colorado—with the clear possibility of tacking on more should the courtship succeed. It’s also the most flexible, geographically and in terms of its membership. The Pac-12 doesn’t look capable of adding Gonzaga right now due to the trajectory of its vitality. The ACC doesn’t look capable because it’s so rigid in its contract status. The Big 12 could add Gonzaga and Creighton tomorrow and there would be less shock than when USC and UCLA jumped to the Big Ten.
It’s still hard to see a long-term world where the Pac-12 exists in anything close to its current form, and it’s still easy to see the Big 12 gobbling up school after school, fighting the SEC and Big Ten’s quality advantage with quantity. A 26-school league with 24 football teams spread everywhere from Seattle to Connecticut to Orlando to Arizona? It’s possible, and it sounds hideous until you think of something like two 12-team leagues within the conference, at which point it starts to hold its own again. A Big 12/ACC mashup even sounds feasible in the long term, a basic agreement among the power schools outside of the Big Ten and SEC to operate as one big soup filling in the cracks around the two more traditional power leagues.
At the moment, my personal best guess in the immediate term is still that someone from the Pac-12 jumps ship and joins the Big 12 rather than swallow the Pac-12’s upcoming media deal. I don’t think the deal gets across the finish line, for the simple reason that it hasn’t gotten there yet. Decision time will come, and you have to think someone in that league will prefer the longer-term stability the Big 12 offers. Once they do, the bag’s open, and the league should fall apart unless it maneuvers a league-wide merger with the Big 12, which would be a great option for Oregon State and Washington State.
That said, it’s very possible the Pac-12 will choose to stick together for the short-term run. It would be simpler, and it’s probably the preference of Oregon and Washington, who might assume (and might rightfully assume) that the Big 12 option will still be on the table when the deal expires, should Big Ten membership still not have materialized. Guesses on my part, but everybody is guessing. Realignment does not happen on a trading floor.
Either way, we have another soft deadline to look forward to: By July 1st, the Pac-12 should make some sort of decision about San Diego State, at the very least. The archduke is en route. Oregon State better hope he wore a helmet.
