Reminds me of the old Simmons contention that there are really only 5-7 competent (or better) GMs in the NBA at any given time.
Dunno how long ago he said that, but I think that number would be higher now. There's so much more money in the sport than there was ~20 years ago that front offices have more money to invest in quality management and analytics. I know an executive who was brought in to the senior staff of a team a couple of decades ago and he left after ~18 months. When I asked why he said the people in management weren't that smart, the pay was mediocre for his role, they didn't have a lot of data/analytics/evidence of anything to work with, and the way they made decisions was stupid: all in all it was a bad place to work if you wanted to put together a career running successful business(es).
Some teams are probably still like that, but a lot have changed.
Gotta judge The Process by 5 years ago, not its shattered remains today. If Simmons wasn't a flake or they made less stupid decisions, they might've actually been a contendah.
Yeah, I'm in this camp. I would hate it if a team I rooted for went this route, but The Process was wildly successful at achieving it's stated goals
The Colangelo/Brand era was then a complete disaster, especially when it came to roster construction...
- Choosing to keep Ben Simmons and Tobias Harris over Jimmy Butler
- Signing Al Horford because you thought you could play him next to Embiid
- Thinking Embiid and Simmons could complement each other on offense when neither could shoot away from the rim
- Trading for Josh Richardson (whose biggest weakness was outside shooting) because you thought he'd help your spacing
- Etc.
- Etc.
These weren't bad luck. Bad luck is more like: injury and age come faster than they might have and now Kemba Walker is more or less done as a net-positive in NBA playoff games. The 76ers did a ton of moves that made little basketball sense at the time.
Without even getting to the ridiculousness on Twitter, the Elton Brand years were a train wreck.
Lawyers have that concept they call the "Theory of the case". I don't know what the 76ers theory of the case was for how you construct an NBA championship team, but in the Venn diagram it was somewhere in the overlapping circles of insane, stupid, and wrong.
Edit: Sorry, I was thinking of the Colangelos and my brain grabbed a different name. Updated
