It’s January of 2017, TJ McConnell has just hit a game-winning, buzzer-beating jump shot over Carmelo Anthony and Kristaps Porzingis. This game then sparked an 8-4 run by the Sixers that the process faithful will always hold in a special place.

To this day, this 3-week stretch was the happiest I have ever been to call myself a Sixers fan. Now you’re probably wondering why a slightly better than mediocre stretch in the middle of a 28-54 season is so important. It was the first time in more than 4 years that the Sixers had been anything other than the laughing-stock of the league. We finally had the fun, young, and promising team to surround our 2 hopeful stars, Embiid and Simmons, that we had been yearning for. 

The Sixers are now yet again the laughing-stock of the league. The front office of this organization managed to turn an incredible amount of young, valuable, assets into a squad that is full of overpaid players who can’t play together at all. 

In this article, I am going to go over three major events that led the Sixers to the dire situation in which they find themselves.

At the time of the 2017 draft, the process was finally starting to show results. The Sixers had their two stars in Embiid and Simmons, and a phenomenal supporting cast, led by TJ McConnell, Dario Saric, Robert Covington, and Marco Bellinelli. They were just missing that one player to tie everything together, to complete the process. Markelle Fultz was supposed to be that player.

Markelle Fultz represented everything that the Sixers needed to tie their team together. In college, he was a combo guard that can score from anywhere on the court, make plays, and play defense. A player of this caliber is extremely hard to find, and at the time of the draft, ‘Kelle was the consensus #1 pick, and was supposed to fit right in to Philly.

Then he forgot how to shoot.

Markelle missed nearly his entire rookie campaign due to an injury in his shoulder that i’m not entirely convinced was ever a real thing. Markelle still had all the other facets of his game that everyone was drooling over in college. He was still making crazy athletic plays, wowing the crowd with no look passes and high flying dunks, but the one thing that he needed to do more than anything else to help the Sixers become a successful squad, to shoot the damn ball, he was inept. 

At the time of the draft, Markelle was the clear choice for Philly, but in retrospect, if the Sixers had selected Jayson Tatum, Donovan Mitchell, Lauri Markkanen, or even Malik Monk, the team would be in an entirely different position than they are today. The Sixers ended up dumping Markelle Fultz to Orlando for a package surrounding James Ennis and Jonathan Simmons. Ennis was a solid role player, however, Simmons was an uncoordinated athletic freak who to this day is still learning how to dribble. 

For the next cause of the demise of the process, we have to go back to 2016 and the creator of the Process itself, Sam Hinkie. Hinkie was the analytical mastermind behind the process. He became the general manager of the Sixers after a disappointing 2013 season in which the Sixers were the epitome of mediocrity. His job was the job that every general manager has, to bring a championship to their city. Hinkie just went about it in a way that no one had ever thought to do before. And the NBA hated it. He started to lose on purpose, trade all of his talent, all to accumulate as many assets as physically possible.

The NBA was terrified of this idea working. The NBA needs teams meddling in mediocrity in order to keep the parity of the league. If the Sixers extreme tanking and asset acquiring worked, then why would any team ever settle to be mediocre. Teams would either tank, or compete for a championship. If more and more teams started to tank, then the NBA would lose millions of dollars in ticket sales, merchandise, and many other things. The Sixers still managed to remain in the black financially during these deep process years, but that is only because of how the City of Philadelphia welcomed this new, foreign philosophy. 

In 2016, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver appointed Jerry Colangelo as the Sixers Chairman of Basketball Operations. Jerry Colangelo is an executive of USA Basketball, and was the perfect candidate to push Hinkie out of the league for good, as Colangelo’s son, Bryan, could easily swoop in and take Hinkie’s job, which he did.

Hinkie resigned with a week left in the 2016 season, with a hefty, 13 page letter explaining why he left and how he was pushed out by the NBA. Bryan Colangelo and his oversized collars took over as GM, and his negative impact was felt nearly immediately. How his tenure as the Sixers’ GM ended summarizes how it went as a whole. He was dismissed after it was discovered that he had multiple burner Twitter accounts on which he relentlessly criticized his own players and staff.

I can still see the ball bouncing on the rim. If Kahwi Leonard had shot the ball a centimeter off in almost any direction, then the Sixers most likely would have won the championship last year. Well it didn’t. The ball bounced 4 times on the rim before dropping, and that will never change, no matter how many times I rewatch it on Youtube. 

Even though the shot went in and the Sixers lost the series, we were still in a phenomenal position. The core of that team is still young, and we were a centimeter away from making the NBA Finals. What could possibly go wrong?

Well for starters, letting your only non big-man who can create a shot for both himself and others walk for nothing *cough cough Jimmy Buckets*. Then singing a decent player or number 4 option to a maximum contract. Now this wasn’t enough, we had to let our best shooter and one of the best shooters in NBA history walk for nothing as well. And on top of that, we signed an ancient Al Horford, who cares more about being called a glue guy, than being an actual glue guy.

These were the 3 main offseason moves that the Sixers made, and they were all in good faith, Jimmy is known to be hard to coach, JJ was supposed to take a discount because we overpaid him at first, and Big Al is still a phenomenal team defender. But you can’t just get a bunch of good individual basketball players who don’t compliment each other at all and just expect them to win a championship. And it feels like that’s exactly what the Sixers have been doing since Hinkie left. 

I do miss the excitement of going to Sixers games for $10 and watching Sergio Rodriguez hoist up threes, or watching TJ McConnell full court press the opposing PG when down by 30 in the middle of the third quarter. It was fun to be a Sixers fan then. It was fascinating to watch Hinkie field out a team of G-League talent and watching them run with the big boys. And it was even more amazing that some of that G-League talent turned out to be legitimate NBA players.

The process brought the NBA world TJ McConnell, Robert Covington, Justin Holiday, all of whom would not be in the league if not for the process years. However, the Sixers are now gunning for a championship. Even though we failed miserably this year and got swept in the first round, it is far from over. I’m sure we will have a completely new roster and organization by opening tip next season, but I do know one thing, being a Philly sports fan is never boring.