2019-2020 Sixers Season/Offseason

[xogfog]

Except Embiid loved Butler and JJ.

[zambonir]

Yes, Embiid did. Ben clearly did not, and vice-versa. And Brown couldn't handle it, which is actually understandable given the selfless team culture he came out of (a culture that also couldn't accomodate Kawhi). The Heat (and Riley) are a very different story.

Jimmy would have had to be less selfish too to play with Ben, which probably wasn't going to happen. In the short-term, you can't blame him - "I should have the ball, I'm the one who is gonna shoot or draw defense to me in space" - but in the long term things either would have had to evolve or one of them would have been gone. And one of them is.

[xogfog]

I'm not even sure Ben loves basketball, let alone his teammates. Butler is a guy you can trust to take a big shot late in the game, even in his short stint with the Sixers he proved that and look at how he has willed this Miami team to win.. Ben is absent in those situations and Joel gets triple teamed in the post because of it. Having Butler would not have impeded Ben's game, if anything, it might have forced Ben to grow his game.

[bigegypt0417]

it's so weird how Simmons is perceived by philly fans and how the rest of the country see him...a 3rd team all NBA that can play almost every position and made the all defensive team.

Simmons is not a fiery guy...that doesn't mean he doesn't love the game.

[nycphils]

I wonder what we would have to add to the deal to trade Tobias Harris for Otto Porter Jr? Would be purely to get out from under the contract.

I sort of think that the way to go is to send assets with Horford and Harris to get their contracts off the books and try to fill in around Embiid and Simmons so that we can truly contend not in the coming year but the one after that. I’d certainly deal this year’s 1st rounder to do that trade for Porter Jr - Porter’s contract is up after the coming season. Horford and assets (Richardson? Future 1st round pick plus?) to Sacramento for Hield would be a good idea too if Sac was interested.

Could do worse than build around Embiid, Simmons, Thybulle and Shake with a max slot to use (I believe).

[xogfog]

Because we see him every day, the rest of the country just sees the Sportscenter highlights...

[zambonir]

Ben's great. He's also not a finished product. And he's not a superstar or a champion which is the standard we're looking for here. Jimmy Butler wasn't either until now (maybe). LeBron wasn't either once upon a time.

But Ben also, yes, might be too nice. Most of the truly great athletes are somewhere between obsessive-compulsive and sociopathic. They don't have lives. They don't have fun. They just want to practice and win. LeBron seems to have some balance. Kobe and Jordan didn't when they were playing. I think Ben works perfectly hard but he's not inhumanly focused or driven. And Brown obviously wasn't the guy who might be able to find that in him.

I think it all really still comes back to Ben and Joel not being a perfect fit positionally or stylistically. It's only because of that that Ben and other players aren't a perfect fit. If Ben was Jimmy Butler's center (along with an actual point guard) they'd be the makings a very good team.

[xogfog]

Ben only isn't a fit with Joel is because he simply won't take his game outside, that is his fault not because you have a dominant center. Ben gets almost all of his points at the basket, making Joel have to shoot jumpers, it's completely backward, Joel should be in the paint either scoring or passing out to Ben for wide open jumpers... You just can't build a team around a player who doesn't shoot.

[zambonir]

Well, it's still kind of chicken/egg. But it's also the Sixers putting all their chips on size as the league moved in another direction. We want Ben to be something he's not and I think he's ultimately the younger better player even with those shortcomings. So if you blew it up and could actually figure out a way to do it, I think a team with Ben and a star shooter/shot creator would do better than a team with Embiid and a star shooter/shot creator (and you could keep Horford in the former scenario, though probably not as a starter per se). The question is is there another way to do it without blowing it up and mortgaging even more of the future (i.e. getting out from either the Horford or Harris contracts).

The fact that they moved Harris off his best position and just pretended he could be replace some of Butler and Reddick's attributes has been less than ideal too.

[bigegypt0417]

But Ben also, yes, might be too nice. Most of the truly great athletes are somewhere between obsessive-compulsive and sociopathic. They don't have lives. They don't have fun. They just want to practice and win. LeBron seems to have some balance. Kobe and Jordan didn't when they were playing. I think Ben works perfectly hard but he's not inhumanly focused or driven. And Brown obviously wasn't the guy who might be able to find that in him.

This may end up being the biggest issue with Simmons...the true greats have high standards and require those around them to have the same. He's still only 24 so there is a long way to go before we know...

[VoteForKalas]

The 76'ers didn't deal with Hinkie...the NBA did.

The NBA may have given Harris the knife, but Harris thrust it in between Hinkie's ribs and twisted hard. They also mocked and stopped following Hinkie's process which has led us back into the wilderness

[zambonir]

Certainly Harris was under no obligation to let the league office tell him how to run his team. Let alone help him pick the guy to run it.

I dont know that we'd be in a better shape with Hinkie at this point, some of the problems the team has now still stem from his decisions, plus he had obviously alienated other GMs and agents. But it would have been nice to find out, and couldn't have been worse.

Harris has yet to make a single good move as owner other than hiring Hinkie. Don't forget he botched it all before that too. Andrew Bynum was in this era!

[Philsmania]

Honestly, Hinkie's drafting wasn't all that hot (see Noel, Okafor). Are any of his assets whom we traded away really missed? It seems like the most-missed one is Butler who was acquired for his assets. Embiid and Simmons strike me as his only draft homeruns. And, as much as some may want to poh-poh the media and the feelings of the fans, a GM has to be able to sell his plan to the public (by way of the media) and Hinkie was terrible doing that.

[phillychuck]

Hinkie had three flaws--he pissed off other GMs, he pissed off agents, and he didn't handle public relations with the fans or the league well. these are serious flaws.

However, in strategically building a franchise he had no peer. We will never know if he could have converted those assets into a winning team, just as we will probably never know for sure whether or not Okafor was his pick or Harris's.

I'd take him back in a second over most of the dreck that would be available to step in for Brand.

[zambonir]

Noel wasn't a bad pick. Even Okafor wasn't terrible though it seems they failed on the character part of scouting with that one. The problem was more that, due to a combination of slightly bad luck (not drafting higher in most of the tank years) and choosing the BPA regardless of position, they wound up with so many square pegs, and then between Hinkie's bad relationships with other teams and the subsequent front office mess they couldn't get any trade return either.

Okafor would probably look real nice on this team right now as a back-up, given all the money you'd also have to spend w/ no Horford.

Of course they also had a bit of good luck with Joel dropping to them, but then again, they probably wanted Wiggins themselves at the time.

The real fun "what-if" to ponder is, would Hinkie have wanted Fultz? That's still really the original sin of this era, as neither the Butler nor the Harris trades happen if he'd been a star (or even, perhaps, if we'd just taken Tatum, though I don't think we would have gotten him anyway).

[nycphils]

I think Hinke almost certainly would NOT have wanted to trade an asset like a high #1 pick to move from #3 to #1. His philosophy was that scouting is so hard that what you need is the most swings. The Celtics would have been forced to take Tatum #1. Hinke would have taken either D’Aaron Fox or Jonathan Isaac and the world would look much better for the Sixers right now, but I’m a Hinke fan.

Of course, the 2019 Sac pick that was dealt didn’t turn out to be much (#14), even if you assume having it means the Sixers don’t have to trade up do get Thybulle, since Carsten Edwards doesn’t look like much of a player at the moment.

[phillychuck]

I still think the Fultz pick was the right pick at the time. Just really horrible luck that he never became (or has yet to become) the player he looked like in college. He was the perfect fit for this team, a point guard who would be a comfortable shooter off-ball for when Simmons is running the offense. In some alternate universe he is the Finals MVP and the Sixers are trying for a three-peat.

[LegoDoom]

FWIW, Fultz had a bad FT% in college. There were red flags that he might not have been as good as a shooter as his college 3P% suggested. I didn't like the trade then and obviously don't like it now. I also don't like that he was traded so soon for nothing.

[zambonir]

Fultz as a pick wasn't bad in and of itself, it's just that the gap between him and another player didn't necessarily justify giving up assets to get him. Especially when the two teams ahead of us weren't going to take him. So we either got bluffed by Ainge or had to outbid another team.

I don't blame the Sixers for trading him, I blame the Sixers, and probably Fultz too, for an atmosphere that made it impossible not to trade him. But they also had to trade him to do the Harris deal, which, well...

[Dirk41]

Also think Donovan Mitchell would have been a very Hinkie pick