Philadelphia 76ers: Is the tanking plan working?
By John Bauman
While no team would come straight out and admit it, teams have always tanked, consciously or not, in the NBA. The rewards, say a top-5 draft pick, of being really lousy in a single season can be very enticing to teams, especially teams in small markets where the draft is the only avenue to finding a superstar talent. However, one team is stretching the limits of tanking farther than any other team before them.
The Philadelphia 76ers team marketing slogan last season was “Together We Build.” Basically, “We’re tanking, and we know it, but hey! Come watch us play anyway! We have Thaddeus Young!”
The 76ers have enacted a radical, roundabout plan to get their team to again be atop the NBA landscape. They don’t care about winning the championship next season like the other 29 teams in the league do. The Sixers are content waiting for the championship window to reopen for the team in, say, 2016. or 2017. And the years leading up to those are going to get ugly.
After starting off the 2013-14 NBA season with a 3-0 record, the Sixers bumbled to a .203 winning percentage for the rest of the season. That poor overall record of 19-63 sent the Sixers to the top of the lottery, where they selected Joel Embiid with the third overall pick. The problem is, Embiid won’t be playing next season due to an injury. But have no fear, Sixers fans! The 10th pick in the draft, acquired via a trade with the New Orleans Pelicans, would surely go to improving the short term prospects of the team, right? Nope. The Sixers turned that pick into Dario Saric, a talented forward who will be staying in Europe for a few years before coming over to play in Philly. Two picks, two punts on chances to improve the short-term roster.
It was the same story in free agency. The Sixers are sitting on a mountain of cap space, around 30 million dollars. That would have been more than enough to throw big offer sheets at mid-tier free agents like Luol Deng, Lance Stephenson, Pau Gasol and others. But the Sixers stood pat on free agency, like a kid who would rather count and swim in all his tokens at an arcade rather than cash them in for a prize.
But the 76ers front office, lead by forward-thinking GM Sam Hinkie, wouldn’t have it any other way. That mountain of cap space? It could be a useful asset come the trade deadline, when the Sixers could eat a massive salary, like the albatross expiring deal under the name of Amare Stoudemire, in exchange for a pick or two. In the Sixers mind, there is no point in tying up that cap space in players now, even if it means not hitting the NBA’s mandatory salary cap floor. (For not hitting the floor, which is set up at 90% of the salary cap, the Sixers must split the extra money among all its current players.)
All of this sounds really bad. Using draft picks on prospects that won’t play right away, not using cap space on new players and aggressively tanking results in an ugly on the floor product and goes against the integrity of basketball blah blah blah. Yes, its bad now, but the million dollar question is- Will it work? When its all said and done, will the Sixers be holding up the Larry O’Brien trophy in a June some number of years in the future? Or will all this extra tanking effort go to naught?
To start, let’s look at what the Sixers are assembling as pieces of their roster of the future.
PG: Michael Carter-Williams
SG: Tony Wroten, James Anderson
SF: Jerami Grant, K.J. McDaniels
PF: Dario Saric
C: Nerlens Noel, Joel Embiid, Henry Sims
Carter-Williams, Saric, Noel and Embiid are all pretty solid franchise cornerstones to build around. Embiid was regarded as the most talented player in a really deep 2014 draft class. He probably would have gone number one overall if not for his injury that will keep him on the bench for most if not all of his rookie season. The 76ers have also smartly kept all their draft picks, and could tank their way into drafting the services of a few more franchise players like Kelly Oubre, a 6-foot-7 small forward heading to Kansas this fall. Having all those talented, young players on rookie contracts will create a really fascinating team in 2016 and beyond. Noel could develop into a borderline All-Star, along with Carter-Williams. Embiid could be the next Hakeem Olajuwon, but he could be the next Greg Oden as well. All those “coulds” add up to a team brimming with potential. The issue will be guiding the players to reach it among difficult circumstances.
Example 1a for the potential issues that will arise with attempting to develop all these young players is Michael Carter-Williams. MCW won NBA Rookie of the Year averaging 16.7 points, 6.3 assists and 6.2 rebounds per game. But multiple red flags appeared in Carter-Williams’s game as the season went on and the losses piled up for Philadelphia. He shot 37.7% from the field and 21.2% from three point land in March. He struggled mightily with turnovers, averaging 4.6 per game in November and 6.3 per game in Feburary. His shot selection was poor and he developed some bad habits that will have to be erased when the team puts winning as its first priority again.
The overall situation that Philly is dealing with isn’t the same that a fellow tanking team, the Houston Astros, is facing. The Astros’s top prospects like Carlos Correa aren’t subjected to struggling up at the major league club. The MLB team can be bad while the prospects can grow and develop in small towns in Single and Double and Triple A. That’s not the case in the NBA. Every growing pain that MCW has is shown on League Pass to the few die-hard NBA fans watching and every error could find itself on Sportscenter’s Not Top 10 the next day.
Carter-Williams was good but not perfect last season. The same growing pains will be realized with Noel this season and Embiid the next when he comes along. But as ugly as it is now, the process of multi-season tanking looks pretty darn good on paper. Philly will have five or six top tier NBA talents in 2015, all on rookie deals. If two or three develop into top-20 NBA stars, the 76ers could end up looking like the Thunder have the last few years. Also, Philly will have a fair amount of cap room to sign players when the time comes to flip the switch from perennial losers to perennial title contender.
It will be a process. The tanking won’t stop next 76ers season, and maybe not even the season after that. But after the prospects come together- Saric from Europe, Noel and Embiid from injury, and after the Sixers draft still a few more, they are going to be pretty darn good.