The 76ers Play the Waiting Game

The NBA's Eastern Conference is undergoing a sea change in the wake of LeBron James's decision to leave Miami for Cleveland. A series of high-profile player moves have turned conference on its head—there's no real favorite as of yet in the race to make it to the Finals and lose to the Spurs. Welcome to the Inscrutable East, our offseason rundown of the teams that matter.

Stare at the horizon, and imagine what's just beyond it. Not something boring like "more water" or "the next state over." Let your desires inform what your mind's eye sees. Think of attractive people, beautiful buildings, maybe a 21-story dog wearing a fireman's hat. Now, think about what you're imagining coming over the horizon and into view, your dreams crawling toward you slowly, as if you're pulling them in with an invisible rope. I forgot to mention: You're sitting in a recliner made out of shit for this thought experiment. You are also unemployed.

These are your 2014-15 Philadelphia 76ers. They're going to be terrific, in theory, three-to-six years from now, but at present, they're a scourge and a bore. Sixers fans could be forgiven for feeling a bit hoodwinked when, on draft night, GM Sam Hinkie worked his suck-magic to select two promising prospects -- Joel Embiid and Dario Šari? -- who will likely combine to play less than 20 games in the NBA this season. (Šari? is staying put in Turkey for the foreseeable future, and Embiid's got a stress fracture in his foot.) These guys have been pegged by experts to eventually become good-to-great players, but their contributions to this year's Sixers figure to be something between zilch and technically not nothing.

This means another season of Michael Carter-Williams trying to score 30 points a game because somebody has to take the shots and poor, put-upon MCW might be one of the only NBA-caliber players on the roster. Thad Young is probably a much more determined professional than I am, but if I were him, I'd go on a backpacking tour of Europe until the Sixers decided to trade me for, like, two second-rounders and the rights to some anonymous Slovenian stretch four. ("I'm just going to immerse myself in various cultures and think about whether I even like basketball anymore," says the Thad Young who lives inside my head.)

It's not as if the Sixers are the first team ever to be poorly constructed on purpose, but Hinkie has the distinction of being utterly shameless about it. The 2011-12 Cavaliers, for instance, had no interest in winning games, but had the dignity to employ professionals like Antawn Jamison, Anderson Varejao, and Ramon Sessions alongside then-rookie Kyrie Irving. The tanking-for-Duncan 1996-97 Celtics had Eric Williams, David Wesley, Rick Fox, and young Antoine Walker. The general rule is that it's permissible to be awful, but you're expected to keep up some bit of pretense that you're trying to compete. Hinkie doesn't see any point in doing that. He'll run a team composed mostly of D-Leaguers out there if it increases his lottery odds.

This isn't good or bad—though surely, some season ticket holders have a take on it that'll burn through the sole of your shoe—but in focusing so narrowly on the endgame—championship in contention in 2020, or whatever—Hinkie conceives of his team more as a barely-formed idea than as a group of people who are trying to win, or at least have some modicum of fun playing and coaching a sport. The incarnation of the Sixers that Hinkie gives a damn about hasn't arrived yet, and they won't appear over the horizon for at least another year or two. In the Praise Daryl Morey era of GMs, this is called smart management, and shoot, perhaps it is. But it's worth remarking upon, not what's coming, but what is. The recliner of shit, I mean. The conventional wisdom goes that it's a small price to pay for future greatness, but man, right now, it reeks.

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