2015 NBA Trade Deadline, Pt. 2: Sam Hinkie's Last Deadline
As a wise man posted on Twitter on February 28, "timeless things take time."
[This was supposed to be published at the end of February and followed by a brief hiatus {trip to Japan} when the trade schedule calmed down in March, but that hiatus ended up starting early due to factors outside of our control {death and illness, but not related to each other}. There are still a few trades left from the NBA trade deadline, which might be covered in a podcast. There are at least a few overdue NFL trades we need to cover in writing, but there’s a >50% chance that an MLB trade jumps the line to be published on its anniversary this Saturday.]
In many respects, Trades Ten Years Later has primarily been a Philadelphia 76ers blog throughout its existence. Until the arrival of the San Diego Padres’ A.J. Preller, 76ers President of Basketball Operations Sam Hinkie stood at the vanguard of trading, whether calculated on volume or associated incredulity. For a while, it seemed like Philadelphia would never stop losing and Hinkie would never stop making trades to acquire future draft picks, but this simply isn’t how the world works. Permanence is a myth with an expiration date that we expect will be far-off, even when it’s just around the corner.
This would be the last burst of transactions that Sam Hinkie would make as the leading voice on 76ers basketball decisions. The remainder of his tenure is comparatively quiet. Because he wasn’t given the chance to see his project through to completion, Sam Hinkie’s Process is mostly remembered for the teardown trades like these. This is the final album from a rock star who left us too soon.
February 19, 2015 (Deadline Day)
Philadelphia 76ers receive: JaVale McGee, Chukwudiebere Maduabum, 2016 1st-round pick (#26, Furkan Korkmaz selected)
Denver Nuggets receive: Theoretical Cenk Aykol, cash
We previewed this one before, mostly in the context of the draft pick, and we’ll unfold the story from that foundation. Denver acquired this first-round pick from Cleveland as part of an effort to deconstruct their roster, trading away center Timofey Mozgov at the tail end of his long-awaited breakout. Instead of using the pick to select a player, they were leveraging it to unload money owed to JaVale McGee after coming to the conclusion that his own long-awaited breakout would never arrive.
The Wizards drafted McGee 18th overall in 2008. As a prospect, evaluators spoke endlessly about McGee’s “crazy upside” and described him as “bursting with potential.” At the draft combine, he measured 6’11” without shoes, with 5.3% body fat and a 7’6” wingspan. His 32.5” vertical leap was better than any other center that year. In basketball, it’s helpful to be a jacked giant with long arms and the ability to jump three feet in the air. There were obviously a lot of positive qualities and things to like about JaVale McGee.
Prospects are typically discussed in complimentary language, so it can be helpful to focus on what specific compliments mean. Saying that somebody is “bursting with potential” is positive, but it’s something you only say about people who have yet to realize that potential. A player with “crazy upside” is exciting, but is currently bad enough that you can easily envision them getting much better. The language reflects the gap between what we see now and what we might see someday. If he’s already an excellent player, you just say “he’s an excellent player” and he probably gets drafted earlier than the 18th pick.
McGee showed flashes of that upside and potential during his early career with the Wizards, but in a manner that still caused people to call it “upside” and “potential.” He went to the dunk contest in 2011 and dunked three basketballs at once (slightly less impressive than it sounds, mostly because it sounds physically impossible). About one month later, McGee got off to a great start in a matchup with the Bulls, blocking four shots in the first quarter and three more in the second. Washington was 31 games behind Chicago in the standings, but only four points behind at halftime.
A couple of things happened in the third quarter to change the game state. The Bulls outscored the Wizards by 11 to take a commanding lead, but JaVale McGee also added three more blocks and four rebounds. This brought him to double digit blocks to go with 7 rebounds and 5 points. His 2-for-8 shooting and the team’s massive deficit indicates that this wasn’t exactly a great night for McGee, but he wasn’t about to let that stop him from making it a historical night. In the fourth quarter of a noncompetitive game, McGee went stat-hunting. He grabbed the necessary rebounds to reach a double-double, threw in two more gratuitous blocks, and then turned his attention to reaching 10 points and claiming a triple-double. With just under four minutes left in the game (and just under one minute left in this highlight video), McGee was fouled while dunking to set up a free throw that would give him the decisive tenth point. He missed it.
McGee proceeded to spend the rest of the game desperately seeking one more basket, even as his total lack of subtlety allowed the defense to key in on this pursuit. The panel reacting to the highlight video became increasingly distraught with the abysmal basketball on display, escalating to shrieks of disgust when McGee fumbles the ball out of bounds with 1:51 left in the game. “Come on, stop now, no, stop. Stop. This is a bad triple-double,” Kevin McHale declared with a mixture of contempt and anger. With 20 seconds left in the game and the Wizards trailing by 20, a loose ball emerged in the paint and ended up in McGee’s hands, allowing him to leap to the basket and dunk with reckless enthusiasm. He hung from the basket like a gold medal swimmer at the edge of a pool and received a technical foul for excessive celebration.
Final statline: 12 blocks, 12 rebounds, 11 points on 14 field goal attempts. A 98-79 defeat to Chicago that dropped the Wizards’ record thus far in 2011 to 8-26. In the aftermath, Wizards’ coach Flip Saunders expressed disappointment in McGee’s reaction, saying “What people remember, they won’t remember the blocked shots, the way he played. They’ll remember, down by 19, he dunked it, pounded his chest.”
In general, they remembered both of these dimensions of JaVale McGee, but the goofy stuff took precedence. The Wizards were still bad the next season, and McGee attracted ire when he completed a fastbreak dunk against Houston by throwing an alley-oop to himself:
Flip Saunders benched him immediately after this play and McGee was ripped in a Washington Post column, which induced his mom to give an interview to say that her son “is not a knucklehead” and was also “the future of the NBA,” an amazing testament to dichotomy. She also spoke favorably of a potential trade to avoid having her son get “institutionalized to losing.” This wish was granted in short order when McGee was sent to Denver at the 2012 trade deadline. His reputation was sufficiently established for fans to question this move for the Nuggets, but his talent remained sufficiently apparent for hopes to emerge that a more stable coaching staff could help McGee put it all together.
For a while, that seemed to be the case. McGee moved to the bench in Denver but still played heavy minutes on a playoff team. This “while” turned out to be “just long enough” – when McGee became a free agent that summer, Nuggets fans were happy to welcome him back on a new four year, $44 million contract. The mental lapses had been held in check and it started to seem like the Wizards “gave up too quickly on an excellent talent.” But even coming off a positive note, it was still apparent that this contract was a “high risk, high reward” proposition.
As McGee’s figure as an NBA character grew larger, he became a frequent feature on TNT’s “Shaqtin’ A Fool” segment, where Shaquille O’Neal would laugh at the on-court misfortunes of NBA players. Shaqtin’ A Fool was something of an equal opportunity bully in that any NBA player could be targeted for their foibles, but whether due to personal animus or McGee’s frequent foolishness, he ended up on Shaqtin’ A Fool more than any other player. After receiving his contract in Denver, McGee seemingly gained enough confidence to fire back while giving an interview to TNT. This escalated into a beef between the two that grew so pronounced that both player’s mothers got involved to calm things down. Given the popularity of TNT’s basketball programming and its importance to the basketball ecosystem, Shaq put a massive target on McGee’s head. This created something of a feedback loop, where any miscue from JaVale McGee would be treated as evidence of the larger foolishness phenomenon and attract outsized attention. This swung perception in a way that was fairly damning to McGee. Instead of a guy in his early-20s who could be a great player once he figured it out, he was turning into a guy in his late-20s who probably never would.
The Nuggets had already made the teamwide decision to turn the page in pursuit of a brighter tomorrow. They were a couple of weeks from firing coach Brian Shaw and replacing him with Michael Malone, but had a more immediate deadline to reshape their roster via trades. In some cases, like the earlier trade of Mozgov, this would result in future assets coming to Denver. In some cases, like when Javale McGee is owed $12 million next year, the goal was just to escape. And in this era of the NBA, it was hard to find an escape route that didn’t include a layover in Philadelphia.
It’s worth reiterating how the transactions we call “theoretical player trades” work. The NBA’s salary cap means that players like 2014-15 JaVale McGee can effectively be worse than valueless, with prohibitively bad play and a contractual obligation that prevents further roster upgrades. The 76ers of this era have no ambition to roster players who are valuable in the present day and need to spend more money to reach the NBA’s salary floor, so they’re happy to use their money on JaVale McGee if they can receive something with future value (like a first-round pick that eventually becomes Furkan Korkmaz, for instance). But Denver isn’t allowed to trade “JaVale McGee and a first-round pick for literally nothing,” whether for contract law or anti-bullying reasons. Instead, the bundle of valuable pick and anti-valuable player get sent away in exchange for “the draft rights to [theoretical player],” who typically will have been drafted several years ago and will not be coming to the NBA. According to RealGM, the Atlanta Hawks currently have the draft rights to a 60-year-old who was drafted in 1986 (six picks before Jeff Hornacek). They could trade these draft rights if they wanted to, and it would be really funny if they did.
This is our midpoint in Theoretical Cenk Aykol trades. We’ve written about two previously and there are two more remaining after this, both in 2017. Since he’s not actually an NBA player, the first thing that shows up on his Basketball-Reference overview page is the “Player News” section, which is (at time of screenshot) just our last Cenk Aykol post and will soon be populated with this one. I assume that I’m the only person who ever visits Cenk Aykol’s blank player page on Basketball-Reference and that this link will never result in any traffic to this post, but please reach out if you got here via Cenk Aykol’s blank Basketball-Reference page! Aykol has been coaching since 2021, but his draft rights are still technically held by the Phoenix Suns and there’s no reason why they couldn’t trade him again. Maybe this will just be a local midpoint of Cenk Aykol trades.
Chukwudiebere “Chu Chu” Maduabum was essentially theoretical at this point. Maduabum was drafted out of the D-League with the 59th overall pick in 2011, but had played in Qatar, Estonia, and most notably Mongolia, where he was named a 2014 All-Star and won a championship with the Ulaanbaatar Xac Broncos. The phrase “Return to Estonia” is a subheading on his Wikipedia that chronologically precedes this trade, and he never signed another contract in North America. Maduabum had very brief stints in Iceland and Finland in the latter half of 2015, then returned to Mongolia. Maduabum’s Wikipedia page states that his second Mongolian team was called “Gegeen Khangai Leader,” but a search for “Gegeen Khangai Leader basketball” returns Maduabum’s Wikipedia page as its first result. This is somewhat dubious, but does not stop me from believing their claim that he made his second Mongolian All-Star team while playing there.
If you’re paying close attention, you’ll note that Maduabum doesn’t really serve a purpose in this trade. Cenk Aykol is here because there needs to be something going from Philadelphia to Denver. When Cenk Aykol was traded the first time, it was a one-for-one swap of him and Antawn Jamison. But when Cenk Aykol went to Philadelphia, he was traded along with the expensive player in exchange for another theoretical player. This reveals that the 76ers’ policy of asset-hoarding extended even to wholly intangible draft rights. They simply can’t give up [named trade placeholder] unless they get back [differently-named trade placeholder,] sorry. If you vigorously maintain this particular position, you will always win, because sometimes you’ll be the only team willing to take on JaVale McGee’s contract and your counterparty will not care about this nearly as much as you do.
Maduabum signed his first contract in Japan in September of 2016 with the Kagoshima Rebise. He happened to sign with the team during a season where they reportedly went four months without paying anyone, but going to Japan still made a world of difference for Maduabum. He seemingly discovered the long-awaited home league that seems to evade so many basketball players that don’t last in the NBA. As the temporary lack of paychecks would suggest, there’s still been instability since then, with Maduabum playing for seven different teams in the last eight years, but all seven have been in the same country. It turns out that Japan’s recently-relaunched B.League has more teams than I would’ve guessed. The first tier has 24 teams, divided into three geographic divisions. The second tier has 14 teams divided into two divisions, including three of the first four teams that Maduabum played for. The official site’s standings don’t include a third tier, but there is one, and Maduabum’s three most recent teams all play in that division. [He’s started all 36 games for Veertien Mie this season, but the team’s 6-30 record is the second-worst in the division. They’ve got games on February 22 and 23 against the 4-34 team in last place, which promises to be the worst game that Japanese professional basketball can offer. Good luck, Chu Chu!]
I’m leaving those sentences intact from the initial draft and providing the “at time of press” update that Veertien Mie is now 6-40 and in last place of the third division. They haven’t won a game since February 2nd. Maduabum has continued playing in every game.
Oh, JaVale McGee? As expected, the 76ers were not interested in keeping McGee around; the worst team in basketball let him go after just six games. This was ostensibly to his benefit, as it came ahead of the deadline that would allow McGee to sign with another team for the playoffs. That wasn’t how McGee saw things. “I don’t want to get bought out. That’s not a positive thing,” McGee said. “When you think about it, you don’t get all of your money when you get bought out,” he clarified, making a point that shouldn’t have required that much thought, “so it doesn’t make sense why someone would want to get bought out unless they are older and they want to go to a contender or something.”
McGee did not sign with another team until he joined the Mavericks in the offseason. Since he was already making $12 million from Philadelphia in the last year of his Nuggets contract, he played for the minimum in Dallas. He was injured and limited that year. In the summer of 2016, McGee decided that, in fact, he was older and did want to go to a contender or something. He signed with the Golden State Warriors on a minimum contract, which proved to be brilliant from a PR perspective. The one-time reviled knucklehead found it surprisingly easy to contribute to a winning team as a teammate of Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, and Kevin Durant. He won his first championship, then stuck around for another year and won his second.
The narrative began to shift around the now 30-year-old McGee. He signed with the Lakers on a one-year deal for 2018-19 at a price slightly higher than the minimum, then played more than he had in the past seven seasons. He came back the next season for $4 million, started 68 games, and won his third championship. There are only 83 guys in NBA history who can say they’ve won three (or more) championships, and JaVale McGee is one of them. Without much warning, his NBA profile had flipped on its axis. Instead of a talented young player who may never contribute to winning, McGee was a seasoned veteran with more championship experience than all but a few dozen guys.
We’ll be able to revisit this second act more fully someday, as it led to a resurgence of trade interest in JaVale McGee after an era of one-year free agent deals. He was flipped in November of 2020 and March of 2021, then signed a surprisingly lucrative three-year contract with Dallas in 2022 that positioned him to start at center. Unfortunately, the only thing that seems to be consistently true in the career of JaVale McGee is that teams should not sign him to a long-term contract under any circumstances. The deal went so poorly for the Mavericks that they waived and stretched his contract the very next summer, reducing the annual salary cap hit to spread it over more years. The result is that the Mavericks now owe McGee $2,208,856 in each season through 2027-28. Meanwhile, McGee is four games into his chapter with Vaqueros de Bayamon of Puerto Rico’s BSN. He led the team with 31 points in his first game and the Vaqueros are off to a 3-1 start.
Philadelphia 76ers receive: Isaiah Canaan, 2015 2nd-round pick (#37, Richaun Holmes selected)
Houston Rockets receive: K.J. McDaniels
In the last ten years, second-round picks have become more significant in the NBA marketplace. Once laughed off as valueless trifles, second-rounders have become a worthwhile piece of currency. Part of that is because the best player in the world was taken with the 41st pick in the 2014 draft. But part of it is that the 76ers, through brute force, showed the league that gold could still be found in the second round of the rush, even if it required more sifting than most were comfortable with.
The 76ers had a boatload of picks in the 2014 NBA Draft, but it didn’t necessarily feel that way entering the season. After some maneuvering, they ended up with two first-rounders who would not play any minutes for the 2014-15 team. That left them with “only” draft picks 32, 39, 47, 52, and 54, though the players selected at 47 and 54 were traded on draft night and replaced by the players drafted at 58 and 60, the latter of whom was immediately traded away for cash. The guy drafted at 52 stayed in Europe for several more seasons. It’s easy to think about the players in front of you when you’re ranked as the 32nd, 39th, or 58th best incoming rookie by the collective NBA brain trust, but those numbers are actually among the smallest we have in the grand scheme of things.
The 2014 2nd-round picks who came to Philadelphia joined a team with few entrenched contributors blocking them from playing time. The only two players who seemed to already be part of the long-term core were the 6th and 11th picks from the 2013 Draft, Nerlens Noel and Michael Carter-Williams. Carter-Williams was the reigning Rookie of the Year, while Noel was set to be a rookie after missing his entire first year with a torn ACL. They still needed at least three more players, even more in the likely event that they planned on making any substitutions this season.
It was a bad roster for winning games, but a good one for building a résumé. Robert Covington went undrafted in 2013 and only got 34 NBA minutes with the Rockets that season, but played nearly 2,000 for the 2014-15 76ers while demonstrating that he was an ace three-point shooter. 39th pick Jerami Grant received votes for the All-Rookie team as he set the foundation for an NBA career that’s seen him develop into something of a franchise player. Covington made $90 million as an NBA player and Grant will more than double that by the end of his current contract. Maybe their talent would’ve been enough to shine through on any teams, but the glow was highly visible against the backdrop of a bombed-out Philadelphia roster.
K.J. McDaniels was in an interesting position. As the 32nd pick, he didn’t seem to have much leverage entering the NBA. The 76ers knew this and attempted to sign McDaniels to a contract structure that they had used on several other second-round roster fillers — two years guaranteed at a slightly-better-than-minimum salary, followed by two more non-guaranteed years at minimum salary. The typical contract for a second-round pick only included one non-guaranteed year (after two years of minimum salaries), so Philadelphia’s approach offered a little extra present money in hopes of seizing an extra ultracheap year of control. Players with tenuous NBA futures were willing to accept the higher cash guarantee of this structure in exchange for limiting some upside in future seasons. Jerami Grant signed this form of contract, and when he turned out to be a hit, the deal had enough surplus value for the 76ers to receive a first-round pick when they traded him to Oklahoma City at the start of the fourth year. As we just discussed, Grant is probably going to make more than $200 million in his NBA career, so I doubt he’s sweating that he only made $3.4 million in the first four years.
K.J. McDaniels saw things differently. As the 32nd pick, he actually had some of the best prospect pedigree on these particular 76ers. He had a reasonable expectation of substantial playing time in 2014-15. Why would he lock up his next four years at a near-minimum rate when he could very well be the best player on the team? Instead of signing a four-year rookie contract, McDaniels signed his league-mandated one-year offer sheet at a non-guaranteed minimum salary, positioning him to earn just $507,336 (if Philadelphia didn’t cut him first). In exchange for taking this risk, he could become a restricted free agent the next season and ascertain his value on a more open market.
This was a worthwhile gamble. McDaniels immediately stepped into the 76ers rotation, playing nearly 20 minutes in his first game on the roster. By the beginning of December, his role had increased enough for him to play more than 30 minutes in a loss to the Spurs. Of course, Philadelphia had lost every single game up to this point and was now 0-17 to start the year, but that was hardly K.J. McDaniels’ fault. During this 17-game losing streak, McDaniels had six games with a positive plus/minus, suggesting that the 76ers might have stumbled into a win if they could have McDaniels on the court for more minutes. In Philadelphia’s next game against the hapless Timberwolves, whose abject misery we discussed in our most recent post, McDaniels played a career-high 35:47 off the bench and blocked four shots in a win that boosted Philadelphia’s record to 1-17. When the calendar turned to 2015, McDaniels started 13 of the first 14 games of the year and seemed like a second-round hit.
There’s a universe where this is just a fun story. A player who all 30 NBA teams passed on (let’s pretend they all had first-round picks) finds an opportunity on a league-worst franchise and uses those game reps to prove himself as a worthy NBA player. Even if you haven’t seen this particular sports movie, you could probably nail a rough draft for the script. We might have gotten to read a few more chapters of this story if K.J. McDaniels had signed the Philly Special contract for second-rounders (Is that name taken? It wasn’t in 2015).
Sam Hinkie was writing a different book, one that featured more equations and alchemy than individually charming narratives. K.J. McDaniels was a rookie and a young player, but the result of his contract negotiation meant that he was objectively not a “future asset” as far as the team was concerned. Philadelphia had used up half the time that they had with K.J. McDaniels, unless they wanted to pay for his services in free agency. There was absolutely no indication that the 76ers wanted to pay for anybody’s services in free agency, let alone a recent second-round pick. Why would they pay a recent second-round pick? There were going to be plenty more second-round picks joining this team in the coming years.
Once the decision is made to embrace The Process, there’s really no further decision about what to do with K.J. McDaniels on an expiring contract. The 76ers sent away the guy they had just selected with the 32nd pick and got back high 2nd-rounders on either side of the 2014 Draft. Isaiah Canaan was drafted 34th overall in 2013 and had blossomed into a worthwhile backup on a contending Houston Rockets squad, even as his playing time was limited by a strong guard rotation ahead of him. The 2015 pick originally belonged to Denver and would eventually land at #37, where the 76ers used it to select Richaun Holmes. This trade was generally seen as favorable for the Rockets, since McDaniels had a more proven skillset and athleticism that lent itself to obvious upside (uh oh, there’s that word again). It was unlikely that the allegedly 6’0” Isaiah Canaan would become the caliber of shot-blocker that the 6’6” McDaniels had been in the early days of his NBA career.
A funny thing happened when the two players swapped environments. Isaiah Canaan showed up to a roster devoid of NBA talent and started the first nine games he played in Philadelphia. He only played 22 games as a 76er that season, but still exceeded his minute total with the Rockets by 200. Meanwhile, K.J. McDaniels went from being a big fish in a small pond (or a puddle on the sidewalk) to a small fish in the ocean. He played 33 minutes for the Rockets after the trade, about three fewer minutes than he played in that one victory over the Timberwolves. Despite the limited playing time, the Rockets saw McDaniels as a part of their future and were willing to give him a three-year, $10 million contract that summer to keep it that way.
Houston was mistaken; McDaniels played sparingly for a season and a half before they flipped the remainder of his contract to a Process-oriented Brooklyn Nets team at the 2017 trade deadline. 63% of McDaniels’ NBA minutes were played in his half-season with the 76ers.
Isaiah Canaan was still under contract for one more year, which means that Philadelphia could squeeze more mileage out of him. Canaan started 77 games in his six-year NBA career and played 4,799 minutes; 66% of those starts and 53% of those minutes came in his season-and-a-half with the 76ers. They got three years of solid production from Richaun Holmes and, in an eventual post-Hinkie era, flipped him to Phoenix before the final year of his contract. The 76ers were briefly thwarted in their attempt to extract value from a second-round pick by K.J. McDaniels’ fierce negotiating, but still turned that setback into two different second-round picks who played more than 5,000 combined minutes in a 76ers uniform.
From Philadelphia’s perspective, was this a good trade? Was it a good use of a draft pick? It feels impossible to answer these questions with just a “yes” or a “no.” In the one season that Isaiah Canaan and Richaun Holmes played together, the 76ers went 10-72. Canaan walked as a free agent and Holmes was traded for $1 million in cash. In theory, these are decidedly better outcomes than paying K.J. McDaniels, but the promise of The Process was supposed to be a sacrifice of enjoyable basketball in the present (2015) in exchange for championship-caliber success down the road (today, or ideally much sooner). If you’re just getting the better of swaps of second-round picks because you’re more willing to put fringe-NBA players on a basketball court, you might win the Trades Ten Years Later writeup, but did you win by your own standards?
Come to think of it, was it even the right call for K.J. McDaniels to bet on himself? He correctly believed that he could post a strong season in Philadelphia and made substantially more money in the first three years of his career than anybody else from his second round. But by preventing himself from being exploited by the 76ers, he set up a possibility of being traded and effectively demoted himself from a starter to a deep bench player. Maybe if he had stayed in Philadelphia for a few more seasons, he could’ve built on his game and become a reliable long-term NBA contributor. Or maybe the holes in his game would’ve been exposed and he’d end his NBA career with substantially less earnings.
McDaniels and Canaan both began their still-ongoing international basketball careers in 2019. Canaan went to Europe, playing for UNICS Kazan in Russia prior to the invasion of Ukraine. Since then, he’s played for familiar European teams like Galatasaray in Turkey, Olympiacos in Greece, and currently Crvena zvezda in Serbia. McDaniels went to Asia, where he’s played for teams in the Philippines, Taiwan, and currently Indonesia, where he was recently named an All-Star and won a championship playing for Pelita Jaya.
Milwaukee Bucks receive: Michael Carter-Williams (from PHI); Tyler Ennis and Miles Plumlee (from PHO)
Phoenix Suns receive: Brandon Knight and Kendall Marshall (from MIL)
Philadelphia 76ers receive: 2018 1st-round pick (#10, Mikal Bridges selected) (from PHO)
This trade is why K.J. McDaniels probably should not beat himself up about what could have been in Philadelphia.
The 2014-15 76ers were working to find building blocks of their future teams and could count up to four when the season began. Nerlens Noel was ready to go after missing the first season after his 2013 draft. 3rd overall pick Joel Embiid got surgery on his foot a week before the draft and would follow in Noel’s footsteps by missing his first NBA season. 12th overall pick Dario Saric signed a contract in Europe a week before the draft and was set to spend two years playing in Turkey. 76ers fans who wanted to get a glimpse of the future instead of focusing on the miserable present didn’t have many players they could actually watch.
The only surefire guy who could serve as a solace to Philadelphia was Michael Carter-Williams, who, like all athletes with a hyphenated last name, was generally referred to by just his initials. MCW showed up to a 76ers team that had begun their brazen embrace of losing, with a wins over/under line of 16.5 entering the 2013-14 season. He was a starter for the first game of his career, which unfairly pitted the 76ers against two-time reigning champion LeBron James and his Miami Heat. This was the season opener for Philadelphia, but the Heat had already played a game and beaten a regularly competitive Bulls team by 12 points. Their preseason wins over/under line was 61.5, a figure that the 76ers would only approach if someone made a typo.
The very first thing Michael Carter-Williams did on an NBA basketball court was record a steal and take it the other way for a fastbreak dunk, giving his team a 2-0 lead. In short order, he threw an assist to Spencer Hawes, then made a three-pointer, then recorded another steal, then tossed another assist to Hawes. He did all of this before the Heat scored. The lead was suddenly 15-0 in favor of Philadelphia after 210 seconds of game action. What? The next Heat possession ended with another MCW steal, and there were four more Spencer Hawes points to make it 19-0 before the Heat scored their first basket. Huh?
In the lower scoring environment of 11.5 years ago, a 19-0 lead was pretty insurmountable. Even with the talent gap that surely existed between these teams, those 19 points still counted. As if to prove the point, the first quarter ended with a 33-14 scoreline that maintained the 19-point deficit. Instead of just beating the 76ers, a task that every other NBA team could accomplish with ease, the Heat had to beat them by 20 points. And they only had 3 quarters to do so. Since the start of 2010, teams were 56-5 when they led by 19 at the end of the first quarter.
But the teams that led by 19 were probably a lot better. It took Miami one quarter to cut the deficit down to two. The Heat regained the lead with 8:33 to play in the third quarter and were up by nine with one quarter to play after Ray Allen drained a halfcourt buzzer beater. The 19-0 lead was a fun Twitter moment, but obviously fleeting, and the 28-point margin in the other direction was more representative of truth. The best team in basketball is always going to beat the worst team in basketball given a large enough sample, and sometimes the chasm is so wide that one game is large enough.
Sometimes. But sometimes it’s too small.
The deficit narrowed as the fourth quarter continued, with the Heat’s future Hall of Famers struggling to keep pace with the 76ers’ future Trades Ten Years Later subjects. Carter-Williams checked into the game with 8:02 left in the fourth quarter and his team trailing by three points. In those final eight minutes, he made a difference all over the court with two steals, two assists, three rebounds, and three points. The 76ers clawed back and maintained a lead, kicking off an alleged season of tanking with a 114-110 win over the back-to-back champions.
Michael Carter-Williams recorded 22 points, 12 assists, 7 rebounds, and 9 steals, with the latter number setting a record for a player in their first NBA game. The previous first-game record for steals was 6, and nobody else in the 21st century has more than 5. Nobody else in the 21st century has reached 12 assists in their first game, either. No rookie in recent memory has had a first game quite like this. It was going to be a long year in Philadelphia, followed by several more long years, but MCW had produced compelling evidence that he was the type of guy 76ers fans had reason to root for. Before eventually winning Rookie of the Year, Carter-Williams was named Eastern Conference Player of the Week for the first week of his career, something that no rookie since Shaq had done. The team was only 18-52 in the games he played, but a much worse 1-11 in games he missed.
Carter-Williams underwent shoulder surgery early in his first offseason and had a delayed start to the 2014-15 season. He returned from injury with a Player’s Tribune article called “Don’t Talk to Me About Tanking,” where he defended the competitiveness of his teammates despite the lack of organizational interest in winning. The piece cuts to the core dilemma of embracing The Process — it’s impossible to align everybody’s incentives when the goal is anything except winning games in the present day. The front office and ownership can get on board, and they might convince a coach to give playing time to unproven players, but nobody can stop those players from trying their absolute hardest to play better and win games. As MCW succinctly explained via rhetorical question, “grown men are going to go out and purposely mail it in for a one-in-four shot at drafting somebody who might someday take their job? Nope.”
This article featured some extremely cursory shots fired at ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, which Smith responded to in a “bizarre radio rant” that included highlights like “If these guys want to come at me, let them do it at their own peril. It will be a mistake.” The harsh words prompted Jason McIntyre to note that “this may have been the first time I’ve ever heard a media member levy threats on a millionaire athlete said media member is supposed to be ‘covering.’” It would not be the last time.
The thing is, The Process was never really about “tanking.” It’s an easy shorthand to say that the Philadelphia 76ers were “trying to lose games” or at least “not trying to win,” but that was never literally true. The goal was to direct present-day roster construction towards the ultimate destination of building a championship-caliber team a few years down the road. A “Rookie of the Year” sounds like somebody who will be part of that team in the future, but it’s a label that we’ve called “especially pernicious” in the past. All it really means is that you were the best player among a smaller subset of players for that season – any other connotations that get applied are strictly optional. In fact, a player who wins Rookie of the Year is guaranteed to never win that award again, so one could cynically argue that the best time to trade some Rookies of the Year is immediately after they’ve won it.
Sam Hinkie was interested in making this argument. Rumors that Philadelphia would consider trading MCW began almost immediately after he was named Rookie of the Year, much to the dismay of a not-yet-numb 76ers fanbase. When the draft came and went without the 76ers picking up a new point guard, speculation quieted and Carter-Williams resumed his starting role. But he resumed this starting role on a league-worst team and did little to soothe concerns around his potential as a shooter. As the three-point shot became increasingly important, a guard who only made 25% of his attempts started to look like a dinosaur.
It’s a shame that the other four players involved in this trade are getting ignored until 5,500 words into an entirely 76ers-themed post. All of these guys were first-round picks in recent drafts and they all have fun things we could discuss, whether it’s Miles Plumlee having a way worse NBA career than his brother (but a way better NBA career than his other brother), Kendall Marshall being traded for the pick that would eventually be used to select Tyler Ennis before getting traded for him again, or Brandon Knight’s ongoing contract negotiations with Milwaukee that precipitated this trade. There’s even great behind-the-scenes coverage of how this trade went down. And yet, we’re going to bypass all further discussion of the other four players to focus on the transaction strictly from Philadelphia’s perspective. Sorry guys, we’ll give you your due at your next trade (the four players mentioned in this paragraph get traded a cumulative nine more times in their career after this, all at least once).
In a post-trade meeting with the media, Hinkie claimed that teams had called to trade for Carter-Williams from the moment of his electric debut against the Heat but that the 76ers “rejected offer after offer over the last year or more. But something came along,” Hinkie continued, “that was really, really interesting and really scarce.”
“It’s that pick from the Lakers. Those picks do not move around very much. It is almost impossibly hard to get your hands on a pick that at least has the chance to be a high lottery pick. Because of that, that made us consider it. In the end it made us decide that it was the right thing to do to move our program forward.”
The Lakers had traded this pick to Phoenix to acquire Steve Nash back in 2012. Back then, they had missed the playoffs once in 18 years and won five championships in the same period. Trading a first-round pick didn’t seem scary. Now it was 2015, the Lakers were plummeting through the waxing phase of the worst period in franchise history, and the bill was due. The pick was top-five protected in the 2015 draft, top-three protected in each of 2016 and 2017, and then unprotected in 2018. These light protections gave Philadelphia a pretty substantial opportunity to end up with two high lottery picks in an upcoming draft, particularly since their own pick could be expected to take one of the top-three slots that would otherwise protect the Lakers pick. Two picks in or around the top five could be precisely the jet fuel the 76ers needed to launch into true championship contention.
It’s the sort of thing that really only makes sense on paper. The perception was that Philadelphia had given up on MCW too quickly, choosing to cut bait on a promising player with flaws rather than focusing on his development. The organization had drafted Carter-Williams with the 11th pick in the last draft and watched him outplay that status — why were they trading away one of their few promising players for yet another draft pick? These grumbles reportedly extended to coach Brett Brown, who lost one of the few quality basketball players in his rotation, and team president Scott O’Neil, who lost one of the only 76ers that anybody had heard of for marketing purposes.
The dismay also extended to Michael Carter-Williams, who tweeted “I can’t lie I’m shocked.” When he reflected on the trade in May of 2024, he maintained that it was “a genuine shock,” particularly since he “had been a part of high-level conversations about the future of the team, and it never involved me being traded to Milwaukee.” Nevertheless, many thought that Carter-Williams would thrive under the tutelage of Milwaukee head coach and known point guard Jason Kidd. As MCW tells it, “at first, everything was going well… the next year, everything changed.” The pressure to live up to the Rookie of the Year status, the trade to Milwaukee, and the demanding expectations of a coach who was also a Hall of Fame point guard induced a strain of toxic perfectionism into Carter-Williams’ game. A hip injury ended his season early and started a cycle where he bounced from team to team, compounding the negative mindset and leading MCW to something of a rock bottom.
Fortunately, his May 2024 story is written from the perspective of somebody who has already rebounded. After two months away from basketball, Carter-Williams signed a 10-day contract with the Orlando Magic in March of 2019. This turned into another 10-day contract, which turned into a full-season contract, and before you knew it, the year was 2023 and Michael Carter-Williams was still on the Magic, becoming a valued veteran presence and popular player among fans. He retired in 2024 after a brief stint in the G League and is now working with Donnie Wahlberg to bring a WNBA expansion team to Boston, a story that I very much look forward to following in subsequent posts.
There’s a multitude of ways that the 76ers got this transaction right and also wrong. At the simplest level, the analysis of Michael Carter-Williams was correct; MCW never turned into a championship-caliber point guard and had peaked as a contributor by the time he was traded. The analysis of the Lakers’ pick was also correct; the team was bad and their pick landed at #2 in the 2015 Draft. Unfortunately, this fell within the top-5 protection, so the pick rolled over to the next year. This wasn’t surprising at the time of the trade and could even be considered advantageous, since the pick was only top-3 protected in the following seasons.
Sam Hinkie got the analysis wrong because this straw may have broken the back of his personal camel. After making no attempt to build a winning present-day roster in the summer of 2015 and losing 18 games to start the next season, basketball lifer Jerry Colangelo was hired as chairman of basketball operations in a move that signaled an end to “Hinkie’s days of absolute power.” At the end of the season, Hinkie resigned amid rumors that Jerry’s son Bryan Colangelo would be hired to a front office role and in recognition of the reality that he would not be permitted to effectively pursue his vision. His resignation came in the form of a 13-page letter to 76ers ownership, which stated in part “there has been much criticism of our approach. There will be more. A competitive league like the NBA necessitates a zig while our competitors comfortably zag. We often chose not to defend ourselves against much of the criticism, largely in an effort to stay true to the ideal of having the longest view in the room.”
The hazard of having the longest view in the room is that your vision might outlive your mortal body. Trading MCW for a lottery pick might have been a good trade for the Philadelphia 76ers, the corporate person with no soul and real claims to championships from 1955 and 1967. It was not a great trade for Sam Hinkie, since it arguably cost him his job and the opportunity to win championships himself. Even if those are over-assumptions, he certainly missed out on the joy of using the potential lottery pick he coveted so dearly.
Like always, there’s also luck involved. The 76ers entered their first post-Hinkie draft lottery in 2016 with control of the draft picks from the team with the second-worst (Lakers) and worst (76ers) records in basketball. The lottery resulted in no movement, meaning the Lakers kept their #2 pick and the 76ers’ right to take it rolled over to next year. Los Angeles and Philadelphia had the 3rd- and 4th-best odds in the 2017 lottery. If Philadelphia could just jump Los Angeles in the lottery, they would have pick #3 and pick #4. When it was revealed that Sacramento, who the 76ers had a right to swap first-round picks with, had jumped to the top four, it seemed like Philadelphia could have a true haul. Instead, the Lakers jumped to #2, the Kings ended up at #3, and the 76ers landed at #5, where they immediately swapped with the Kings as a sad consolation prize. The Lakers pick rolled over to the next draft for a third straight year.
It’s worth noting that, whether via lottery luck or disastrous trade, the 76ers ended up with the #1 overall pick in each of the 2016 and 2017 drafts. They used these picks on Ben Simmons and Markelle Fultz. A second bite at the apple would have been welcome.
The pick was unprotected in 2018, so Philadelphia was definitely going to claim it, but the problem is that three consecutive #2 picks was enough for the Lakers to become substantially less terrible. They finished with the 10th-worst record in the league and ended up with the 10th overall pick. After all the excitement over this pick’s potential to end up in the high lottery, which had been slightly too correct, it ended up one slot earlier and five years later than the pick that had been used to select Michael Carter-Williams. The pick conveyed so late that Sam Hinkie’s replacement had already resigned after an infamous investigation into his alleged use of burner Twitter accounts. Nobody would have defended this trade if it were presented as “Michael Carter-Williams for the #10 pick in the 2018 Draft,” even if Sam Hinkie might still have made it.
Well, the haters would’ve been wrong. The 76ers used the #10 pick to select Mikal Bridges, picking up a polished college champion who could immediately contribute to a team that was now a young contender coming off a 52-win season. This pick completely validated this trade’s logic and resulted in a win for the 76ers that was many years in the making.
Or, it would have done all that, if not for the fact that they immediately flipped Bridges to Phoenix in exchange for #16 pick Zhaire Smith and a 2021 first-rounder (subsequently traded). Smith’s career was derailed after a rookie year foot fracture followed by an allergic reaction to sesame, a brutal one-two punch that resulted in him playing just 143 minutes in his NBA career (so far – he’s only 25 and is still kicking around in the G League). Bridges had cleared that minute total by November 4 of his rookie season and become one of the NBA’s most prominent ironmen, presumably just to rub salt in the wound of Philadelphia fans suffering through constantly injury-prone rosters. He got traded for Kevin Durant two years ago and for roughly a billion first-round picks last summer, both trades that Sam Hinkie might’ve enjoyed making in a past life.
Mikal Bridges played against the 76ers last night, leading the Knicks in minutes on the way to a double-digit victory. This was Philadelphia’s ninth straight loss, dropping their record in their last 30 games to 3-27. The season started with the team contending for a championship, but those dreams were quickly abandoned and replaced with ambitions to retain a top-six protected first-round pick. When taken together with the teams hoping to draft Duke star Cooper Flagg first overall, a tremendous amount of NBA discourse during the past month has been about the teams who are clearly doing what they can to limit their chances of victory. The NBA has expanded its postseason to include two additional “play-in” teams in each conference since the Sam Hinkie Era, but several teams still prefer to race for the bottom rather than fight for the #10 seed in their conference.
It’s a lot harder to take the longer view in the moment than it is when you’re writing about things that happened ten years ago, particularly when you’re the only one who can see the horizon. Everyone has grudgingly accepted that Sam Hinkie was right, even though he got pushed out of the front office and his partially-built team ended up as a consistent playoff disappointment and nobody really likes what this strategy has done to the watchability of the NBA. The intelligence centers of the sport have embraced his teachings, even if the man behind them has moved on. After a 2018 “consulting gig” with the Denver Broncos that may have just been a single meeting about analytics, Hinkie launched 87 Capital, which is described in the third-person on its web site as “a technology investor that backs smart people building wonderful internet businesses” but seems to be his personal vehicle. Hinkie is sporadically active on Twitter, and his most recent post from February 28 starts with the reminder “timeless things take time.” I guess he knew it would be a while before I finished this post — sorry for the wait, Sam!
lol I love this lmao