Yaron Weitzman - Tanking to the Top: The Philadelphia 76ers and the Most Audacious Process in the History of Professional Sports

T he architect of The Process had no interest in talking to me about, well, The Process. Im perfectly comfortable with everyone drawing their own conclusions, Sam Hinkie told me one evening. This was the second time wed spoken over the phone. Both conversations could be best described as frivolous. I dont have any interest or willingness to quote-unquote shape a legacy, Hinkie said. Im not built that way. Its just not what I want to do.

That was back in the fall of 2018, before Hinkie ceased answering nearly every one of my texts, which, of course, was his right. This was also before he began instructing friends, family, and even employees at alma maters to decline interviews with me. Also his right, and something hed done with countless reporters before me. But frustrating nonetheless.

An example: One morning last September I called a childhood friend of his named Duane Lovett.

Id love to talk, Lovett told me. Call me at two this afternoon.

When the time arrived later that day, my call went to voicemail. I texted Lovett. He responded that he was going to have to pass on that talk. I laughed and messaged Hinkie. Ill say this, I wrote, I admire your relentless informing of people from your life to not speak with me. I added a smiley face at the end because Im a serious journalist.

You should admire the depth of our relationships, Hinkie responded.

I, however, still had a book to write, a story to tell. I still needed to illustrate who Sam Hinkie is as a person. I still needed to explain what he sought to accomplish during his two-plus years as the president of basketball operations for the National Basketball Associations Philadelphia 76ers. Theres the obvious and simple answerwinning a championshipbut it seemed to me that there must be more to it, or at least more to him. Few leaders in the history of sports have ever so willingly and aggressively sacrificed the present in order to chase a better future. Hinkie wasnt the first to try taking advantage of the warped incentive system found in most professional sports in which bad teams are rewarded with good draft picks, but he did take this plan to a new extreme and in doing so drove the basketball world mad. Hinkie triggered a culture war. To some fans, he and his plandubbed by others The Process, as in Trust The Process, an homage to Hinkies belief in focusing on process over resultswas the closest thing to religion theyd ever experienced. To others, he was the NBAs Bernie Madoff. He angered agents, annoyed that one of the thirty teams capable of paying their clients had essentially removed itself from the marketplace, and irritated competitors, many of whom felt Hinkie was violating the first rule of professional sports, summarized so perfectly years earlier by former New York Jets head coach Herm Edwards:

You play to win the game.

If he were to talk about his own legacy, Im guessing Hinkie would counter that he was playing to win the game, but that the only game he cared about winning was the championship. Still, there was so much more I wanted to know, so much I was curious about, so much I felt I still needed to learn, and so you can imagine my excitement when, a few weeks after the quip about his deep relationships, I discovered the name of a person who I believed could provide me a more substantive answer.

In April 2016, Hinkie officially resigned from his position with the Sixers. Five months earlier, at the behest of the NBA, the team had hired Jerry Colangelo as a special adviser. Colangelo had spent nearly fifty years as an NBA executive. He was as powerful and respected as anyone within the basketball world and not a person interested in letting others dictate. Hinkie understood exactly what his arrival meant.

Hinkie resigned, and did so via letter. But this wasnt just another resignation letter. Addressed to the Sixers equity partnersand quickly leaked to the mediait went on for thirteen pages. It featured a bullet point about a flightless bird from New Zealand called the moa. It had subsections paying homage to famous investors like Charlie Munger. It quoted Abraham Lincoln twice. That neither Lincoln quote was actually spoken by Lincoln is beside the point. (Hey, who among us hasnt been duped by the Internet?) More important, it offered an in-depth look into the mind of its author.

Science is about predictions, Hinkie wrote at one point. A couple sentences later he quoted a man named Tim Urban, who, Hinkie said, will soon be recognized as one of tomorrows polymaths. Then, in parenthesis, came a piece of advice. Like many of you, Hinkie wrote to the Sixers ownership group, he lives in New YorkId recommend meeting him for coffee sometime.

This suggestion may not have been addressed to me, but I figured why not take Hinkies advice? After all, I too live in New York. Also, and more to the point, Hinkie and Urban had clearly engaged in rigorous scientific and philosophical conversations. Urban, it seemed, was a man who could provide some of the answers I was desperately searching for.

But first I had to figure out who the hell Tim Urban was.

I cued up Google and discovered that Urban was the thirty-something-year-old author of a long-form blog called Wait But Why. One of his essays, titled How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You), was more than fifteen thousand words and featured friendly-looking graphs and charts. Another fourteen-thousand-word entry was about cryonics and why they make sense. The posts were littered with references to Urbans relationship with Elon Musk.