If you watched the Sixers collect their first road win of the season Saturday night in Phoenix, congratulations: you were witness to the bottoming-out of once-favored son/Sun Jeff Hornacek, whose coaching legs would be cut from under him twenty-four hours later. He’s close now to being an organizational redundancy, after individual venting sessions were scheduled Sunday between his players and their front office – apparently meant to uncover and record all grievances specifically against the coaching staff — and his two closest assistants were abruptly terminated, whose vacancies were filled by the promotion of two coaches wildly speculated to be in the running for the interim head coaching job if Hornacek is indeed fired during the season.
Pulling Hornacek down with their feeble, barely sentient death-grip into the muck with them were the now 2-30 Sixers, whose franchise is itself enduring administrative reshuffling. The NBA’s own top officials joined Sixers’ ownership in admonishing the team’s only recently-prized architect, Sam Hinkie, by essentially stripping him of all responsibility while allowing him for some reason to remain in the building of his delirious creation.
The precipitous downfalls of Hornacek and Hinkie were reflected in Saturday night’s conflagration – Phoenix, already playing shorthanded because its once-promising power forward was suspended for, in a moment of ominous disgruntlement, throwing a towel at Hornacek in their previous game, lost Eric Bledsoe in the first half to an injury that will likely keep him off the court until the All-Star break. Phoenix didn’t recover from that early groin-punch, could not find the modicum of resolve necessary to overcome a Sixers team that has so far this season been almost exclusively The Overcome. The Sixers celebrated their first road victory in nineteen tries like they’d won the NBA finals. The Suns responded to their loss by neutering their talented head coach. Both reactions were nauseating reminders of the dysfunctional core currently radiating from the leadership of both franchises.
The failure of Sam Hinkie in Philadelphia is much easier to chart and understand than Hornacek’s in Phoenix. In three consecutive seasons, Hinkie has constructed three of the least successful teams we’ve ever seen, in any sport, in the history of organized professional athletics. He’s lost, though, with a ‘plan’ – to fail on purpose, collect lottery picks, and rebuild from his own dumpster fire with the resulting young assets.
The foremost problem with this strategy has been that Hinkie has drafted abysmally – Nerlens Noel is working his way toward mediocrity; Michael Carter-Williams was a modest beacon of hope, so Hinkie traded him; KJ Mcdaniels and Jerami Grant wouldn’t see the floor on any other team; and Joel Embiid may never play in the NBA. Some of the failure resulting from these last three drafts is unplanned misfortune – see Embiid. But Hinkie is accountable for tying his team’s future to a strategy that can be so easily undermined by occasional bad luck. If Hinkie’s plan to rebuild the Sixers has been to use draft picks as assets, and he hasn’t seen any return of discernible value from those assets, then Hinkie has been an abject failure. The Sixers don’t look like a team filled with talented young stars ready to grow or be built from – they look like a haphazardly assembled conglomeration of people who aren’t close to ready to play professional basketball. They look like a D League team that stumbled drunkenly into the wrong gym. Hinkie’s ‘plan’ simply hasn’t worked, and the ticket-buying public has no basis to adhere his ongoing pleas to be patient for another year, and probably another, until the franchise has been willfully marched off a cliff.
Ironically, his downfall has followed the emergence of his greatest draft-day victory. Jahlil Okafor may be the best talent that Hinkie has drafted, and the sudden addition of this valuable piece to the roster has actually revealed the treacherous environment that Hinkie has created around him. It’s like finally striking gold and bringing the prized nugget home to a den of thieves – Okafor is in a franchise that by Hinkie’s construction is completely unable to nurture his growing talent, both on the court and off it. If you draft one of the most talented post players in three years but don’t have anyone who can throw him an entry pass, you’ve failed. If you’ve assembled a team of young players whose entire professional careers you’ve forced by purposeful, maniacal design to be filled with failure and frustration and you haven’t provided those players with any veteran leadership to teach them how handle that raw emotion, you’ve failed. The Sixers committed to stay Hinkie’s “course,” and that course led to the bottom of a volcano.
Hornacek’s sudden downward trajectory is more difficult to plot, primarily because he’s been classified during his brief coaching career as an overachiever. But the promise of 2013’s 48-win team has rotted to catastrophe, the source of which seems to be a grating relationship with his players – a lack of trust from veterans made volatile by Hornacek’s inconsistent rotations. Hornacek drove away Goran Dragic and Marcus Morris, and is doing the same to Markieff. To go along with the angst of the players that are still on the roster, there’s also among them a discernible dearth of talent. Brandon Knight and Eric Bledsoe comprise the most turnover-ridden backcourt in the NBA, Tyson Chandler has looked old for at least the last three seasons, the current extent of the aforementioned Markieff Morris’s professional career is to simply collect paychecks from the organization and then eviscerate it on television and in newspapers, and probably no one can name anyone else. Phoenix’s reasons for optimism this season were vague, and Hornacek is perhaps being punished for the high standard he set in his first two seasons as a head coach, but his franchise’s impatience is certain – another significant losing streak this season, another loss to the likes of Hinkie’s Sixers, and he’ll be gone.
After Saturday’s game, Hornacek and Hinkie are now sharing the same somnambulistic purgatory within their organizations as personnel decisions made around them are slowly rendering them obsolete. We can understand how both have landed in this sphere of obsolescence – harder to finger is why, given the grim certainty of their fates, they’ve been asked to stay around at all.
Parquet 